My partner and I discussing the true meaning of Vaffeldagen, aka Waffle Day, aka March 25th:
Me: Vaffeldagen isn’t about the waffles. It’s about the friends we can’t see because of the pandemic.
Partner: The real friends are the waffles you made along the way.
Rereading some of my scenes in Stars Fall Out lead me to develop the theory that I gave one of my secondary-world characters coronavirus.
When you Google “goat injuries” for book reasons because you need to get a guy out of an animal pasture so his wife can talk to her would-be-lover about some perjury they’re going to commit…
…and then a week later you still have six browser tabs dedicated to goat injuries, even though you decided not to go all plot devicey like that.
That’s writer life.
Self-preservation determines that I wouldn’t take the last step to walk off a cliff, and I won’t hit the call button either.
I’ve long suspected that heavy use of passive voice indicates a passive person.
I’ve had so many times when I’ve pointed out passive voice to people who’ve asked me to look over something and had them respond, “It just sounds more natural that way.”
If one finds it difficult to conceive of taking action, of course passive voice will sound more natural.
Back in November, I set myself the goal of either finishing Stars Fall Out or writing 25 scenes. I did my 25 scenes, but my planned ending has taken many more words than I anticipated. Now, at the beginning of March, I think I’m at a point where I can say I have a month of work left. This time, I’m basing that on the rate at which I’ve been finishing scenes since November, and that I can much more accurately count how many I have left. Here’s a recent excerpt:
“Can’t you make another one?’
“Do you have any idea of the intricacies of creating that particular item?”
In fact, I did not. For all the reading I’d done, for all the notes I’d found scattered in his various places of work, I still had found nothing that explained how his vials worked.
What I had found instead was his attempt at a book of aphorisms—his answer to the widespread popularity he was certain his magic would enjoy. Everyone would look to him not only as the creator of a new magical discipline, but as a fount of wisdom in all areas. It combined abstractions about shadowmantic theory—long paragraphs as winding and impenetrable as a hedge maze—with advice on sleep, diet, and the raising of children. Rise with the sun. Meat only on Athuday. He’d even written rules of etiquette for how to treat oneiromancers once his own magic supplanted theirs: treat them with the bemused kindness one would show an elder, but the distant wariness one would show a strange dog.
“You’ve yet to teach me how the vials work,” I said at last.
Gluten-free expensive + Girl Scout cookie expensive = probably the most I’ve ever spent on cookies as an adult, even though I only got one box.
I am consoled by the fact that they have toffee bits, and won’t kill my digestion.
Here is a metaphor for my general level of competence at day-to-day life skills: a soggy pile of deflated wet towels.
If you’re thinking, “That makes no sense because towels don’t inflate or deflate, unless I’ve been using towels wrong this whole time,” my response is: “exactly.”
If you’re female and doing a traditionally masculine job, every time you prove your competence, you’re punching out of the box you’ve been put in.
If you’re female and doing a traditionally feminine job, every time you prove your competence, you’re proving how well you fit in the box.
Both situations come with different but complementary senses of unease. Hurt your knuckles punching out, or hurt your head trying to stand in too small a space.
If someone has one of those “Protected by such-and-such” security system signs on their lawn, but the sign uses Comic Sans, is that code for “Haha, we don’t even lock our doors?”
More than a decade and a half has passed since I graduated high school, and I still find myself rehashing all the areas that my formal education failed me. Sometimes these realizations come in the …
I’ve aimed to structure Stars Fall Out as a slow-burning story where everything explodes at the end. I’m still on the first draft, so it’s hard to say whether or not I’ve succeeded on the slow burn. But I’ve definitely reached the exploding part: in the past week alone I’ve written an arrest, an interrogation, a confrontation between two points of a love triangle, and finally, a jail break.
I caught him by the wrist a little over halfway up to the planetarium. High enough up the tower that we had cleared the buildings around us, and we stood before windows bursting with sky and lazy sunlight.
“We’re alone now,” I said. “Can you tell me what this is? Why did you break me out?”
“Break you out? That was an elegant feat of clerical sleight-of-hand.”
“Noted. Why did you do it?”
“Because you had a smart idea some weeks ago, but no way to execute it properly.” He must have noted absolute incomprehension in my expression because he continued on, “The magic test, Tyatavar. Why did you retake it?”
