Happy Poetry Day

It’s National Poetry Day here in NZ.

Celebrate! Write a poem. Read a poem by an NZ author. Read a poem by a non-NZ author. Just get into the poetry spirit because I think poetry doesn’t really get enough credit and is either considered to be teen expression of their emo-ness or haughty lit snobs who like to have noone understand them.

It’s not like that. Seriously. Poetry is simply language having a chance to be beautiful. Words are delicious and poetry lets them be so without getting caught up in all that prose baggage of plot and characterisation blahblahblah.

So, I’m gonna post the last poem I wrote here. I didn’t write it today; today is Hubby’s birthday so I’m not going to have time for writing, I have to go make a cheescake. I’ve never made a cheesecake before. Things could become disastrous in this household, or very messy anyway.

~

US

I lie here,
icicle stiff
until you slide in beside me
wrap your arms around me
melting, soothing,
until my knees bend
and back curls;
when you are
here beside me
anything is possible
and I can
become the S
in US

~

I never said it was a good poem

Things are Finally Clicking

First of all, a big thank you to all those who came by and read my blogfest entry. I didn’t get to read as many as I wanted but I thoroughly enjoyed those that I did. I still hope to read more.

My writing has moved in leaps and bounds. I think my muse has left me behind actually; I’m still trying to write scene one, while she’s exploring what happens around climax time. That’s cool. I don’t want to rock the boat on this one ’cause her loyalty is pretty shaky at the moment.

So, what am I working on? Things stalled pretty quick with Forbidden Knowledge. Still not sure why, but hey, we’ll come back to that one. In my efforts to procrastinate I opened Holly Lisle’s Create a Plot Clinic. I bought it years ago and I never really got into it. This time, however, things clicked. I realised why the piece I was working on last NaNo stalled, what it needs, and how to fulfill that need.

I’m not sure I’ve ever discussed this piece on my blog, so here’s a basic rundown. It’s literary fiction exploring truth, deceit and perceptions. My MC is Evie. She’s got a drug addict history that she’s trying to escape and hide from all her new acquaintances. Things surface (at a very inopportune time of course) and… I don’t know yet, but things will get messy, I am sure. The story is most likely going to be from a variety of POVs of other major characters.

This story is very much character driven. I have near 50k written, most of which is irrelevant now that I know what the point is, but these words helped me get to know my characters so it’s not a waste.

It’s great having this story back on track. I love working on it and my characters are just delicious. I’m still debating whether I should use first person or third person perspective. Most of what I have is in first, but I’m not convinced it’s right. But it’s a pretty minor issue for me, what matters is that my muse and I are on the same page now, and we’ll get this story finished (eventually).

So back to writing. I hope your writing’s going awesome too

“My Best Advice to New Writers” Blogfest: Punctuation

I’ve finally caved to the lure of the blogfest. I thought this one was a good place to start because I don’t have to put myself on the line really.

My Best Advice to New Writers Blogfest is run by Peevesh Penman. Pop on over and read other people’s posts.

So, advice to new writers, or all writers really, because I think it’s an important thing to remember.

Use your punctuation.

I had an amazing poetry lecturer, Bryan Walpert, who put it something like this: Writers have very little to work with. We have words, which come with their denotations and connotations. We have structure: how we choose to lay these words on the page. And we have punctuation.

Some people believe poetry is awesome because you don’t have to use punctuation. There was a girl in one of my classes that wrote a prose style poem with no capital letters despite there being sentences, names, etc that would ordinarily require them. Upon enquiry it turned out she didn’t do it for a purpose, she did it because she didn’t like capital letters. Needless to say, it was bloody hard to read.

This kind of mindset is detrimental to your craft, and not just for poetry. I was told by a different lecturer, about prose fiction, don’t use semi-colons, they draw attention to themselves. That’s just dumb. It’s punctuation; if it’s used right noone even notices it, and if you do notice every semi-colon I must assume it is because it’s unfamiliar punctuation to you.

So, my advice, get cosy with punctuation: get to know semi-colons and colons; become buddies with the dash, em-dash, ellipses, parentheses, square brackets; go for BFFs with full-stops (periods), commas and apostrophes.

Don’t be afraid of punctuation. Yes, it’s very powerful, but it also just wants to be your friend.

If you know when you should or could use punctuation then you can intentionally misuse it for effect. I’ve seen it well done, and have written an essay on Patricia Grace’s “Mirrors” in which I concluded (with evidence) that you could twist grammer rules to great effect if you knew what you were doing.

If you don’t know the rules, well… lets just say you are limiting your audience to those who also don’t know them.

Please don’t count the ways I’ve misused puncutation accidently in this post, I haven’t really proofed it. Ahh, the irony.

Unexpectedly Extensive Thoughts on Immunisations

This is quite a controversial topic, so just keep in mind that these are my opinions and I have the right to have them and you have the right to have your own.

I took Jake to get his 3 month immunisations today. A few weeks late because it took me a few weeks to make the phone call to book him in, and it didn’t help that the first time I finally made the call they stuck me on hold for longer than I was prepared to wait. It is hard to make an appointment to go and inflict pain on your child.

So why do it? I believe one of my friends isn’t, and there’s people in my online group intentionally putting it off until they believe their child is ready. With us there wasn’t even a conversation about it except for whether we were willing to pay to get the TB immunisation as well, but we weren’t, and if it wasn’t free perhaps we wouldn’t do it at all, but that’s an issue for a me in an alternate universe to contend with, not this me.

I read once (I can’t remember where) a compelling arguement that you are not only immunising for your child’s sake, but also for your community’s sake. If everyone was immunised then the threat would be eradicated, or something like that. But of course, when you’re inflicting this on someone that can’t understand what’s happening, can’t voice an opinion, and can’t see how a little pain now could protect them from greater pain or even death in the future, then you start questioning why you’re doing this and is it really the right decision.

My personal experiences with immunisations: I remember we got them at school, I don’t remember the pain. I remember I got the tetanus shot when I managed to hack my hand with a tomahawk, but again I don’t remember the pain part. So I don’t believe I’m harming Jake mentally by having him immunised.

When I was nineteen there was a big fuss over meningitis, and vaccinations became free for under 20s so I was nudged to go get it. Three injections were required. I thought, hey, it’s free, why not? The first shot near paralysed my left arm from pain, and I was working in a job that needed two hands. I couldn’t bring myself to get the other two injections; I had to work, and I didn’t see it as a real enough risk.

When I was in my third trimester I was offered the swine flu vaccination. Despite the real possible threat to my baby I weighed up the options and got it because it had the potential to protect him without him directly taking the pain. Not to mention I hate getting the flu, and if I can protect myself from a big one for free that’s gotta be good right. It didn’t really hurt that much either, though I couldn’t know the pain factor for the decision making part. And I believe it paid off. Hubby was really crook, Jake and I didn’t get it; I believe he had swine flu.

Of course there’s the miniscule risk that it could all go very badly. My cousin’s ex-flatmate is in a wheelchair because things went terribly wrong. But I believe there is greater risk in not getting them.

And then there is the people that opt to not get their children immunised (because it’s not mandatory here in NZ). Are they letting the whole country down? Some say they are, but I don’t believe so. If everyone was immunised then noone would get the illnesses and we would slip into a false sense of security: we’d come to believe the illnesses didn’t exist anymore. Odds are the immunisations stop being government funded. Then we’d get epidemics, or even pandemics, of old illnesses rather than new ones.

In NZ it would happen quickly. It happened in Palmy a few years back. Someone at Boys High contracted TB, suddenly the whole city was at risk, after all, if Boys High has it, so does Girls High, and it’s all two degrees of separation in NZ so really there was a potential of an epidemic. I was informed that TB wasn’t a major issue in NZ and so it’s not a government funded immunisation, but seriously, we have a possum problem, thus we have a TB problem (no offense Aussies, we love the possums that are in their own country )

And so immunisations come and go. The meningitis one they were pushing is now not included in general immunisations, but this year whooping cough is a predicted epidemic so it’s included. And around it goes. Basically, there needs to be people getting sick to make the government fork out the money to protect the population. Yes, I feel for the children that don’t get immunised and then get sick, but sadly it’s for the greater good.

More than that though, I feel for the nurses who have to stick needles in screaming babies. I only have to deal with Jake screaming, they have to do it all the time, they’re the ones inflicting the pain and every time they must also have that same fear we do: What if something goes wrong?

Preparation For The End Being Nigh

For those of you who don’t know, August is all about finishing. Over at KiwiWriters the End is Nigh challenge is to finish at least one thing during the month. Doesn’t sound particularly hard, right?

Well, I’ve never managed to win yet. I’m all for this year being the first but I’m trying not to put too much pressure on myself. I’m fairly sure the only reason I signed up is because I was having a moment of insanity.

I have an immense collection of things that need finishing, so I’ll have to pick one, get back in touch with it, and make a plan to take me through to the point where I can say it’s finished, and then actually finish it.

That is all. Did I make is sound easy? You should join the madness

Taking Time Out To Appreciate My Life

I know we all know that hospitals are full of the sick, and that there’s people dying from everything you can imagine and everything you can’t every day.

But it’s not until one woman’s baby girl is in a coma that I pause and think, hang on a minute, look at all I have. It doesn’t seem like much most days, but actually, it’s a lot.

I have the love of a wonderful man; the kind of love you read about, write about, watch movies about and long for. I have a gorgeous boy who is healthy and happy and too smart for his own good. He sleeps amazing at night, and ok during the day. Sure, we still have issues when it comes to feeding time, but he will grow out of them (I hope).

And while I’m not particularly mentally stable, and I’ve been depressed for so long that I don’t even know if I have the capability to be happy, I am getting help and getting better and slowly accepting that if the drugs work I will probably be taking them for the rest of my life. I am physically healthy, and haven’t had a cold or flu since winter last year (wasn’t sick at all except morning sickness the whole time I was pregnant). I’m not super fit, but I’m not an unhealthy weight.

I also have somewhere warm to live, drinkable water that flows straight from a tap in the next room, enough to eat, and while it feels like never enough we do have enough money to cover everything we need and a few things we don’t.

I have friends and family that love me, and I know that if I ever ask for help people will be there for me. I also have the tools I need to do what I love to do, that is, write, read, knit and drink tea.

Take a moment out of your hectic life in which you probably take all you have for granted and just appreciate the little things you have. It only takes an instant for it to all be stripped away.

Big hugs for all the wonderful mums out there, especially the ones with sick little ones. xoxo

Nothing Wrong With Genre Fiction

I’ve mentioned the writing paper I did and the issues it created several times before. One of the things drilled into us was that genre fiction (from speculative fiction through to romance and all genres in between) was, very basically, what inept writers write. I stopped dabbling with fantasy and a lot of my work got shelved as I started this new, ‘literary fiction’, trend.

While my SoCNoC attempt was more fantasy-ish, I couldn’t settle into it. I still don’t know what the wall I’ve hit is, but I’ll overcome it in time. It may just be where my head’s at.

I spent some time reading a YA fantasy novel by WritersBlockNZ and gave her a heap of feedback, and that made me think about my old friend, Forbidden Knowledge. I haven’t touched it in forever, or even thought about it really, but I opened it up today and read some of the first chapter.

It needs a lot of work, but it’s not complete rubbish and I feel more comfortable working on this. When I write fantasy I feel like I’m torn between what I want to write and what I should write. It’s taken me this long to face what I’ve really known all along, write what you like.

I’ve always read fantasy. I love it. I love YA fantasy and Sherryl Jordan is on my favourite authors list. Time to stop suppressing this desire to write fantasy, shelve the guilt I feel for doing so, and go back to Forbidden Knowledge to fill in the gaps, and get it to a point where I can say, “I’ve written a novel”. That’s more impressive than, “I’ve been writing some literary fiction”, which is generally responded with “oh, what’s literary fiction?”

Excuses?

It’s in our nature, I think, to make excuses. I could easily compile a list of why I haven’t been writing: I’ve been really busy; Jake absorbs so much of my time; I’ve got other pressing matters to attend to; I’m not in a good place at the moment. And they are all very real issues that provide a barrier between my writing and me. But the only person I’m really making excuses to is myself, they’re necessary to ease the guilt of not making time to sit and put words to paper.

At some point we have to stop making excuses. Writing is something I do purely for pleasure, and purely for myself. So I only have to ask myself one question: “Do I want to write?” The answer is “Yes!”. And the response to such an affirmative is: “Well, stop mucking around and sit and write.”

It’s simple. I’m a writer, so I’m going to go write.

Reassessing Goals

There was a time (year before last) that I could crank out several thousand words in a day. Winning NaNo and SoCNoC was an very achievable goal. Then ’09 hit, and since then things have been pretty awry in the world of my writing.

Due to the creative writing paper I did in semester 1 last year I am no longer able to just slap anything into the story with the knowledge that it can be edited out on the next pass. The class also destroyed any confidence I had as a writer. That’s been something I’ve been working on remedying ever since, but it’s a long slow process and most days I look at my writing and think it’s all just crap, why do I bother?

The mistake I made in that class is that I stopped writing for me. It stopped being about the sheer pleasure of crafting words into sentences, and sentences into a story with characters I love. What it comes down to is that while you can dedicate a story to someone else, the one person you have to write it for in the first place is yourself.

And this is why I think my poetry is now better than my prose. I’ve always written poetry for myself. I don’t care if others don’t get it, don’t read it or think once they have read it, ‘if this was on paper I would now burn it’. So I get more pleasure out of writing poetry now, which is odd, becauase a year ago I was still in the position of ‘I’m not a poet, I can’t write poetry, I’m not going to waste my time trying’.

I’m determined to get back to being able to write prose solely for my own pleasure. I’ve accepted that I won’t win HalfNoC again this year, I just don’t have the luxury of pouring everything I have into the story for the next week. Jake, afterall, does need feeding. But I am resetting my goal of writing 1k a day, so I will have 15k on Memoirs of an Assassin by the end of the month.

Then I can examine what I have and decide whether it’s novel material or novella, or whether I can compress it into a short story.

I have posted a few poems over on my new Words page. If you want the password just shoot me an email. redfox4239 at hotmail dot com. I hope to put an extract of my WIP up there in the next week as well, and maybe some short stories, although I’m not sure I have anything that I wouldn’t want to give a thorough edit first.

In homelife news, I’m pretty sure Dale has swine flu. He’s been really really crook, not just man flu crook, but neither Jake nor I have caught it. If it’s swine flu that makes sense because I got immunised while I was pregnant.

Quickie Post

Jake’s waking, so just a quick update.

Writing has stalled for now. Nothing yesterday and only a poem today with no more planned (even that wasn’t planned). It’s not the story that’s stalled, just no time to do it. I’m trying not to get frustrated. My MC has officially had a sex change it’s working heaps better with a male MC. I’m really enjoying toying with reality vs. perspective. It’s fun .

We spent the whole day out yesterday. We had our ante-natal class reunion. Of about 20 couples at the class only 4 couples turned up. But we should get a good mums group out of it . I planned to get some writing done last night but mother in law turned up. She’s coming over again today (they’re only in Chch every few weeks, so she doesn’t get to see Jake very often). It’s good though. We get along pretty well.

Right, off to feed my darling.