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.
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.
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?”
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?”
★
Organization is a different beast than cleanliness or interior design.
If a foot-high stack of magazines and mail is how you find your bills and pay them, you’re organized. If you buy a special mail-holder shaped like a duck, but constantly forget that you put your bills there or don’t use it because it’s the wrong shape, you’re not organized; you just have a duck that needs to go in a yard sale, and you might not be organized enough to handle a yard sale.
I hit 200,000 words on Stars Fall Out. A fair chunk of this is worldbuilding, brainstorming, deleted scenes, and bits that popped into my head for the next two books. Still, figuring 250 words per page, I’m somewhere between 600 and 800 pages. As my partner eloquently put it:
“Your book is fucking long. You keep fucking writing.”
When I publish this thing, that shall be my blurb. Here’s another quick excerpt, from my main character’s third experience being interrogated by an imperial oneiromancer:
“I’m sure you’ve heard rumor of my three fearsome beasts. They’re in the adjoining room. Waiting. Hungry.”
“Isn’t one of them on a mush diet?”
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that fearsomeness and a mush diet are mutually exclusive. I could tell you things about Emperor Lirghala that would freeze your heart, and you can count his teeth at a glance.”
★
We’re all so uptight. No dancing in public. No crying in public. No running in public.
If you consider yourself any type of non-comformist, it’s worth asking to what extent you still follow these social norms.
I wonder if it’s like this in countries that weren’t founded by Puritans?