Whittaker Contest, Fort Edmonton

I am currently taking part in the Whittaker Contest, which is on the Write Idea forum: www.helenwhittaker.net/phpBB2 The forum also has a variety of less intensive writing challenges and places to share work, and seems to support a nice community of writers. So far the only thing I've participated in other than the Whittaker is the 'Word of the Day Haiku,' but I've got a feeling I'll be wanting to keep checking in with this group. I told the story 'The Fate of the Children of Lir' at our annual storytelling concert in Sherwood Park, and will be reprising it for the Fort Edmonton Storytelling Festival at the beginning of September. (Details at www.talesstorytelling.com .) I'll be in a set with Laura O'Connor and MaryAnn Lippiatt, who will also be sharing their stories from our concert. It seems a bit of a shame we can't put the whole concert into a set; it was a great afternoon. Our TALES Strathcona tellers just keep getting better! For some reason Blogger is taking out all my paragraph breaks today, hence everything run in together in this post.

Fall Update Part 2

I had a great time at Pure Speculation, which I attended on the Friday night and Saturday. Many of my fellow Cultists were there, including Barb Geiger who now lives in southern Alberta, and who graciously agreed to give me some feedback on the horses in the book* I'm working on.

(*Speaking of the book, I wrote the first draft of it as my NaNoWriMo project last year, but this year I am not signing up for NaNo because I want to keep working on it rather than shifting gears to a new project for a month. I am getting really hopeful that this will be the second novel I finally finish!)

I had a chance to catch up with some non-cult friends as well, and my brother Ian. I don't see that much of him these days, but he is arguably even geekier than me*, and was there covering the convention for the http://www.anime-alberta.org/ website.

(*My husband told me, after outscoring me on a geekiness quiz, that the problem was that some of the geeky things I was interested in were just too far out in left field to have made it onto the questionaire, while he was unfairly marked up for computer knowledge that he only had because of his job.)

The panels were very interesting, although I think I am becoming something of a dinosaur before my time because I kept wishing panelists would just talk to me instead of fussing around with multimedia. At least Judith Graves, an up-and-coming writer of paranormal young adult fiction, thought to bring speakers. My hearing is good enough for general purposes, but understanding a clip played across the room on somebody's laptop is way beyond me. I was impressed with the GoH, Tanya Huff, and think I will be checking out one of her books soon. (She did not bring any multimedia stuff. At least not that I saw.)

Speaking of books, I added a couple books to my LibraryThing page last week. One was Tolkein's Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, which I enjoyed a great deal. I have always felt a bit disconnected with Norse myths and legends, but this book really managed to get me excited about them. I especially enjoyed all the background material. As a storyteller, I have often gone through the process of putting together a version of a story that I find satisfying, and it was fascinating to see how Tolkein had done the same thing. His great knowledge of and appreciation for the source material was obvious, and contagious.

I also added Dance of Knives, which I labelled at the time as 'currently reading.' Luckily, I don't have to update that yet because I have started reading it a second time. It is one of those books where you discover further in that what was going on back at the start wasn't quite what you thought. I also found that my sense of time in the book seemed to be distorted by the fact that I read the first third or so over several days, and the remainder in about a day and a half. It was not a confusing book, but definitely complex, and I enjoyed it so much that I have been thinking about the story a great deal and really wanting it straight in my head. I already flipped back to re-read a couple sections, and finally just decided to take it from the top.

The book has a common element with the one I am working on*: a character that has been isolated from physical contact with others. The characters are otherwise completely different, and the isolation is for completely different reasons, but the portrayal of her character has certainly made me think a bit about how I am handling my own.

(*There you go. I'm actually talking about my writing on my 'writer's blog.' Must be getting braver!)

Fall Update

I have a bit of time before heading over to Pure Speculation, and thought I would quickly post a bit about other things going on right now.

I will be telling nasty, awful, scary stories at Spooktacular again this year, on the 29th and 30th. I don't have any new stories, but am looking forward to spending a couple evenings with Marie Anne and the other tellers. I'm not sure who will be there exactly, but I am hoping David Haas will be back. His renditions of Ambrose Bierce stories last year were fascinating. And of course it would be great to see Jennie Frost too.

My husband, kids, and I took a trip down to Calgary about a week ago and visited Sentry Box. They do still have my book in stock, and I really appreciate their support! I bought two books there. One was The Stars as Seen from this Particular Angle of Night, which is an anthology of speculative poetry that I haven't finished reading yet, but am very much enjoying. The other was Dance of Knives by Donna McMahon, which I have finished, and which I thought was wonderful. I will be reading the second book in the series as soon as I get my hands on a copy. (Too bad Sentry Box is three hours away. . .)

I wrote a little article on homeschooling for the SHiNE (Society for the Homeschooled Network of Edmonton; no the 'i' doesn't stand for anything) newsletter, but used Jennifer Kennedy for my byline since I meet these people socially and want them to put a face to the name. It is a very dull article really, about scheduling in different subjects, but I figured it could be classed as writing news.

Time to be on my way. I'll try to post something about Pure Spec soon.

Story in Neo-Opsis

My science fiction story 'Touching Down' is in the current issue (#19) of Neo-opsis magazine. I've almost finished reading my contributor copy, and am enjoying the stories and Karl Johanson's quirky articles.

To find out more about this Canadian sf magazine check out:
www.neo-opsis.ca

Druids Review

Several months ago, I reported on the Edmonton launch of Druids by Barbara Galler-Smith and Josh Langston, and promised a review. I don't really like to write reviews, though, and have been procrastinating. Meanwhile, the book has attracted quite a bit of attention, and now has made the short list for the Aurora award for Canadian speculative fiction. You can find out more about this award, and vote if you wish, at: http://www.prix-aurora-awards.ca

We don't really know a lot about the ancient Celts, and fantasy novels set in Celtic worlds are often based more on fairy tales than history. Druids, however, does not present us with a misty world of heroes and wizards, but a believeable mosaic of ancient tribes, unaware of the upheaval which their culture will soon suffer from the growing ambitions of Imperial Rome. The druids of the story are the keepers of knowledge within this culture: healers, priests, and judges. Most of the things which they do are things that might really have been done, and the problems which they face are primarily realistic ones. When magical elements are encountered, they are elusive: prophetic dreams, and a queer transformation called woad-sleep which they employ but do not truly understand.

There is a sense of eerie mystery about these parts of the story, and it is clear that the characters take a risk when they trust in such mysteries, even as they take risks in choosing what people to trust. This book alone spans about twenty years and a considerable area of western Europe, and the scope of the series as a whole seems destined to be an epic one. But so far the action is not dominated by historical events so much as by the personal choices made by the characters. As the story progresses, it is not just the tide of history which catches up with them, but the consequences of their own mistakes, particularly misplaced trust. At the end of the book, it is not yet clear what the final consequences of their magical experiments will be.

Altogether, Druids is a complex and dramatic tale, which leaves the reader with a sense that there is still much to be revealed. For those interested in the world of the ancient Celts, it strikes a nice balance, reconstructing a world based on history rather than myth, but not becoming so prosaic as to lose the sense of mystery that makes that world so fascinating in the first place.

Quick Update: WIP, Spam, and Story Concert.

I should have known better than to make a point out of not posting in November. Lo and behold, I promptly did not post in January either, despite not having any very good excuse. I have been doing quite a bit of writing though, and am still working on that NaNoWriMo novel, which now is genuinely over 50,000 words, since that last un-chapter has been cut out and new material added. (This is the WIP part from the title. The acronym, particularly when mentioned in conjunction with the Cult of Pain Writer's Group, might suggest something racy, but in fact it only stands for Work in Progress.)

I have been having a lot of trouble with spam on this blog. I have just finished deleting the most egregious examples, and have now set the comments so that anybody wishing to post will have to type in the letters from one of those wobbly code things. If that doesn't work, I may end up disallowing anonymous comments (which seem to be pretty much synonymous with spam). I have a certain prejudice against that, as I don't want to exclude people who don't want to sign up with Google. That is a large part of my reason for not joining more exclusive things like facebook.

My storytelling group will be having a concert for World Storytelling Day, on March 21st. Our theme is 'Journeys through Light and Shadow.' It will take place at the Strathcona County Library from 2-4pm, and there will be a break for refreshments. Donations to the library will be collected. The concert will mainly be intended for adults; children can attend, but those under about age 10 are likely to find it a bit tedious.

No-vember

Tasha Tudor's book, A Time to Keep, has the following quote to introduce the month of November:

No fruit, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, November!
-Thomas Hood

And this year November has meant no blog posts from me as well. Why? In one word, NaNoWriMo.

Okay, maybe that isn't exactly a word. It's an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month, which is an online program where you sign up to try to write 50,000 words in a month. You get a page with a nifty graph showing you how far you are falling behind the necessary daily word count, and a page where you can keep track of how far your Writing Buddies have gone. You can also post things about your novel, and there are a bunch of discussion forums and events, but I've never actually found time for all that.

Now, the usual advice that is given for people trying NaNoWriMo is not to worry about whether your writing is good or bad, just write, write, write, as fast as you can go. I tried that the first two years I signed up for NaNoWriMo, and it totally did not work for me. I should have known better. One of the few things I learned from the one fiction writing course I took in University (by my own observation of the other students) was that there are some writers who tend to write too copiously and need to cut, and some writers who tend to write too briefly and need to pad. And I am very much the second type of writer. If I just sit down and write without any going back or editing, that just means I am lucky if I have used half as many words as I'm going for before I get to the end of the plot.

My third attempt at NaNoWriMo did get to 50,000 words, but could only very loosely be called a novel. I managed to get a novella out of it afterward, which was less than 20,000 of the 50,000. The other 30,000 included a lot of alternate scenes and background material and things like that, that weren't really part of the actual narrative.

This year, my plan was to come up with an idea with so much plot elements in it that I would have to use 50,000 words to get through it all. I actually reused some ideas from my first two NaNoWriMo attempts, though not any of the exact same incidents or charactors, together with a whole mash of bits and pieces from ideas for novels and short stories that have never quite managed to get written. And it actually all fell in together really well. It was like these were all really meant to be part of one story, I just had not realized it yet.

So I got writing, and found that I was really pretty excited about the story. I liked it enough that I couldn't just leave inconsistencies in it, or not go back and make little changes when I thought of them. So I did. I also found that a good way to keep myself from charging ahead too quickly was to regularly stop and go back to work on earlier parts of the story. When I was down to the last chapter I even went back and read through the whole thing, managing to add a couple hundred words a chapter as I went.

By the end of the month, though, I was starting to get a bit burnt out. Finally on November 29th, having got to the end of my plot and put in every change I had managed to think of so far, I just didn't feel I was up to getting in the 3,000 words that I needed by the following night. So I decided to just write an extra chapter of whatever silly stuff came into my head about my charactors' further adventures in life after the main story. I thought it might be fun, and perhaps I'd even come up with something I could use elsewhere.

I did manage to get the 3,000 words done in a little over two hours. I'm sorry to say that it wasn't all that much fun, and there was absolutely nothing in it that I have any intention of ever looking at again. But it did get me to 50,000 words, so I could finally take a break. I have not done any more writing on the novel since then, but have come up with some more ideas. I found last month that when I was stuck in my writing, the answer to my problem tended to come to me when I was not writing, not when I was at the keyboard stressing over how to come up with another thousand words that day. Breaks are important. Of course, it is also important not to let a break grow by procrastination into simply not getting a thing done. So I'm going to try and get back in there soon, and get my 47,000 words up to the length I think this book really needs to be.

If I don't post again very soon, maybe that will be what I'm up to.