Category: <span>Microblog</span>

Category: Microblog

Short updates as opposed to full-length blog posts.

Here’s one of the last parts of Stars Fall Out that I wrote in November. I didn’t finish my ending, as I had hoped, but I did complete 25 scenes, which was my other goal. This deals with the mechanics of a magic vial that’s one of the most important magical advances in hundreds of years and that the main character steals and essentially uses as an addictive escape from her own life.

This time, as it fizzed and hissed and transformed the water, I focused. Just as I brought my mind back under this bridge when I needed to come home, so did I send it out. I flung my thoughts out to the farthest reaches of the empire, to farther places than that, even. I thought of mountains too tall to exist here, plants too exotic, bridges too magnificent. I thought of maps unrolled before me, not Pinuar’s maps of the city, but maps that stopped for no road and went on and on.

I took my sip of water, and I imagined it pulling me to all those places.

Then I waded in, and wished one last time for the water to whisk me out of my trap.

When I came up again, a miniature wooden statue of She-the-Sailor stared me down from on top of a nearby dock piled with weathered rope. Once, I had come across a She-the-Sailor statue in a far-off place. Nothing about this tightly-packed clutter of ramshackle seaside cottages hinted at far-off places. Nothing about the chill or the salt tang in the air hinted of far-off places either.

I’d been breathing them in all day. All week. All month.

My entire life.

aside Fiction | Microblog | Uncategorized

I stood writing at Dunkin Donuts, and in the corner they had one of those morning shows with bubbly hosts and banter and talk about celebrities.

Then the male host announced, “I took my cat’s litter to work instead of my lunch.”

I don’t know if it was a joke or if they were talking about embarrassing moments.

But a guy sitting at a nearby table was nodding along like, “Yeah, I do that all the time. PREACH.”

aside Microblog

For more of my Stars Fall Out research, I started looking up historical forms of birth control for something I can bend to fit my story. This is not that thing:

During the 16th century, Canadians began using the combination of beaver testicles with moonshine. They ground the beaver balls to fine powder and then added very strong alcohol to the mixture. People would then drink this, with the alcohol helping to forget that they were drinking beaver testicles.

15 of the Craziest Birth Control Methods from Ancient Times

I’m the lightest lightweight ever, and it would take an entire jug of wine for me to forget I was drinking beaver testicles. This is because no amount of alcohol would make me forget drinking beaver testicles; you’d need to straight up smack me over the head with the wine jug and concuss me for me to forget that.

aside Microblog

While editing an upcoming post, I learned “curriculum” can be pluralized as either “curriculums” or “curricula.”

I chose to use “curricula” because
A. It makes me sound smarter.
B. It brings to mind an eight-legged monster with a pile of textbooks for a thorax.

Yeah. Mostly the last one.

aside Microblog

There’s plenty of positive messaging out there about facing your fears, getting out of your comfort zone, and not letting your anxiety rule your life.

What no one talks about is how long things take when you have anxiety, or how, when you realize how long they take, you end up cutting other things out of your life to accommodate them.

aside Microblog

I got a cool but annoying sign that I’m on track with giving my characters distinct voices in Stars Fall Out.

I pasted a chunk of text from a scene in one character’s point-of-view to another character and changed the pronouns where needed.

And it didn’t work at all. Incompatible. Wrong operating system.

It threw things off so much, I couldn’t even segue into the dialogue that I’d already written.

That last part was annoying.

aside Microblog

Stars Fall Out takes place in a small coastal city dominated by the most prominent university in the northern provinces. The city is under occupation by a vast empire with extensive resources, including people with magical abilities. The catalyst for the bulk of the book’s events is the creation of a new form of magic by one of the university’s professors.

This snippet comes from a scene in which Tirsan ends up listening to that professor’s conspiracy theories. While the professor doesn’t convince him to join him, he does end up being the last straw for Tirsan, who soon writes to his grandfather and asks for a change in the terms that will allow him to inherit land only after he’s finished his studies and found a wife.

Tirsan shrugged, and edged down the street a bit again.

Ghordaa only came closer. “If we come into our own magic, finally, that’s one less way they have to control us. But now, my creation is missing. Even my pencils are missing!”

“Your—you think he took your pencils?”

“Yes! Even those! But it makes sense. How am I supposed to do work of the mind without proper tools?”

aside Fiction | Microblog

I’ve come to the point at which it doesn’t make sense for me NOT to learn the stealth and hacking skills I would need to fix the music at the Dunkin Donuts where I spend too much of my writing time.

When I was in college, I had a PDA with infrared capabilities that allowed me to use it as a TV remote once I installed the right app, although we didn’t call programs apps back in 2004.

Remembering this prompted me to use Dunkin Donuts’ wi-fi to search for “use smartphone to change music at Dunkin Donuts,” though not with any success.

aside Microblog

I’ve been eavesdropping at Dunkin Donuts while I work on Stars Fall Out.

The employees behind the counter are practicing saying “Welcome to Dunkin Donuts” in spooky voices.

There’s a job interview going on behind me with illegal interview questions.

9/25 scenes done on Stars. I took a little too long on a scene that I came up with four years ago, and that I’ve been looking forward to writing since June. Here’s the excerpt:

Maps. He had given me a pile of maps.

I angled back to the fire, less awkward now that I wasn’t trying to draw. “But these are beautiful.” More beautiful than they needed to be: the swoops, the lines that ran from thick to thin, brush and ink detailing all the hills and buildings of my home. He had made Nirsuathu a work of art rather than a box wrapped in chains, and he had gotten the whole university, even the planetarium.

I sat there studying it so long that he stopped watching for my reactions and looked awkwardly into the fire.

At last, I held them out to him. “Wait…” I snatched them back, and looked at his work again. “Why did you need me to illustrate your brochure?”

“Funny thing, but I can’t draw a cup.”

Rippling mountains. Layered city blocks and tiny spires, even the bakery and the locksmith next door. Streets colliding, separating, winding, curving in precise lines.

“Oh, come on.”

“Ok, I can draw a cup. I can’t make a printing plate. And I didn’t have the illustrations started yet…”

“So you had me do those too.”

“You do have an excellent eye for detail.”

aside Fiction | Microblog

I tend to go for funnier bits when I post excerpts, but here’s a more emotional snippet from Stars Fall Out. I should probably post more like this, since digging in and writing more emotional scenes has been one of the hallmarks of my writing experience with this book.

I attempted to smooth out the note and prop it on my nightstand.

Tyatavar, it began. Not Dearest Tyatavar, or Dear Tyatavar, as some of our dramatic early correspondences had gone. But the extra greeting was entirely superfluous; he had written it into the letters themselves, in the care he had taken with every stem, loop, and curl in my name.

The note had been written by someone who loved me.

I had crumpled it, and thrown it at the wall in the bakery.

aside Fiction | Microblog

“Neighborhood #1” is the first Arcade Fire song I ever heard, and it remains my favorite. I always seem to come back to this album during National Novel Writing Month.

aside Microblog

https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/18/california-daylight-saving-time-elusive-for-supporters/4001407002/

I consider the twice-per-year clock changes as proof that our government doesn’t work. Almost no one likes the clock changes. The spring clock change correlates with a higher number of car accidents, likely due to tired people. It’s a simple, non-controversial thing that negatively affects daily life.

And we can’t get it changed.

I’d love to see a switch over to permanent Daylight Savings Time. I’m not sure how that would work in the much smaller state where I live, where people cross state borders all the time. It would be ridiculous for Massachusetts to switch without a handful of neighboring states coming along too. Otherwise, everyone who commutes between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, or New Hampshire and Massachusetts, would have to factor in a time change every single day.

aside Microblog