Explanations, but not Excuses

There are few words to express a lack of presence online. So I'm not sure how I'm supposed to start this post. I could say, "I've been busy," but that would be only too true for all of us. At least, us as in Americans. And "I've been depressed" is just, well, depressing. It's true. I've been struggling for the past two semesters, and I finally want to get things going again here. I have plans for this summer, and I want to share it with you all. I want to catch up on life from the past. So, in the interest of keeping things short and sweet, as is my new resolution to blog posts (so they don't eat up my life), I'll give a quick overview of things to come and then end this thing.

The past:

1. Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing (my first writers' conference!)
2. Novella class
3. My second long-term experience with depression

As for the future, there's just one thing: 

Seven weeks in Tansen, Nepal!

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Gone For a Month...And An Award?

I am a bit ashamed. And embarrassed. I slink back to my blog with low aspirations of reception because I have neglected it for a month. And yet, in my absence, it seems I have received a blogger award?! From Kate Coursey, which is an honor is itself, as she is a kick-butt author and teen with multiple books finished, one undergoing editing by Scholastic Press, and another being represented by Edward Necarsulmer IV at McIntosh and Otis. Her accomplishments are enough to encourage any teen author, so check her out!

My Birthday and 19 Words of Wisdom

There have been lots of news I've been hiding from everyone. Or rather, the news crept up on me without my remembrance, so I'm not really responsible for it, right?

"Guess what? It's my birthday!"

A) I'm in Black Hills, South Dakota taking summer science classes

B) Yesterday was my birthday!

Creating the Killer Title

It came to my observation the other day that successful novel titles are all very similar. Classics, fantasy, romance, children's books - they all have one thing in common. Nouns.

How to Keep Your Blog From Destroying Your Life

 Blogs aren't supposed to destroy your life, but it can happen. Here is the countdown to life explosion and how to avoid it.

Like a Novel, Only You're the Character

Broadway scene from Annie Get Your Gun.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you want to be?

Writers' Journals

My first (left) and second (right) journal

So, this week has been my finals week ending my freshman year of college. A summary of the week so far includes: studying, not eating, choir practices, 2 hour long exams, getting sick, losing my voice, and, I saved the best for last, moving out of the dorm room. It was while cleaning my room and rearranging the furniture yesterday that I stumbled a journal that I finished first semester. I immediately was tempted to sit down and start reading through all the old entries, but I forced myself to move on. Today, I have three hours until my family arrives, and having read through the journal, I felt inspired to turn to you guys.

Mixing Psychology and Writing

According to the Myers-Briggs personality test, I shouldn't be a writer.

Rumor is You're a Good Writer

Why authors have it worse than visual artists and musicians.

(With lots of pretty pictures!)

April

So, it's past the middle of April, and I haven't posted anything since March. I started writing an article on grading creativity, but my computer froze and I lost my wi-fi connection and the internet ate it up. So I'm not too keen on restarting that any time soon. What do I talk about? I thought to myself. What's worth forming into words, organizing into thought, sharing with the bottomless pit of internet? What came to mind are the lessons I've learned this past semester in my creative writing class.

A Nothing Character

The full version of the title: How You Know If You're Writing About a Nothing Character and How to Fix It (Without Scrapping the Whole Project). Just so you know what you're in for :)

Tips for a Writing Exercise

This weekend, I rode the train to Chicago. I had planned on slugging out words for my manuscript on my laptop, but this never happened. As things have a tendency to do, something prevented me from writing. I was distracted.

Oblivion

Somewhere in the quiet, when you forget the sound of your mother's voice, when the face of your spouse seems foreign, the mind finds oblivion. Oblivion, during an average day, is frightening to humans. It sucks in all you have until you are not yourself but have become It. The harder you listen, the less you hear. The further you look, the less you see. Rarely does oblivion visit when it is wanted. It saves its presence for the unwilling so that they might see part of it by not wanting to see it at all.

"Eurydice" by Sara Ruhl

Over the weekend I saw "Eurydice" by Sara Ruhl performed by the theater at my college. I absolutely fell in love with it. "Eurydice" is a modern retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through the eyes of Eurydice (as the title suggests). Ruhl uses Eurydice's narrative to explore the relationship between a daughter and her father against a man and wife. Originally, Ruhl considered herself a poet, but during her time at Brown University, she found herself drawn to the medium of drama. Since then she has written ten plays, and, in 2010, her drama "In the Next Room" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Freud Might Be Right

What is the difference between kindness and preference? Between playfulness and flirting? When put in a situation, how is a man or woman supposed to interpret whether or not a possible romantic relationship is just that person being kind or that person trying to grab ones attention? A couple days ago, I realized that I couldn't tell the difference. My deficit in perception is so great that I have found that I do not even assume kindness when receiving it from a male of my age range but almost always conclude right away that he likes me. This troubles me, for my logical self knows that not all men will like me in a romantic way, but somehow in my subconscious, the two have fused themselves together - kindness and preference.

To defend myself against a conclusion that some of you might make after this statement - that I fall at the feet of any guy that has ever been kind to me - let me sustain: as a young adult, I have yet to date and have even yet to kiss someone outside of family members and the dog. It's not that I'm against dates but more like the situation has yet to present itself. That clarified, I'll continue my assessment.

It does not seem that my mix up is an effect of lack of male companionship. I grew up with two older brothers and a father who had a strong role in the leadership of the family. I know how to rough house. I'm comfortable standing close to guys and interact with them. I went to co-ed school systems. It is not the fact that they are male which confuses me, but something else, something which I experienced as a child. (It's times like these when I start thinking Freud might have had something right. And then I realize, it's just common sense.) From first to third grade, I went to a small, private school. My class consisted of twelve students sitting in one classroom all day with one teacher. I knew all the students in that class very well by third grade, and they knew me very well. There were those among the group who were better friends, just like any larger group. There were also those who didn't get along so well. Of the boys in the class, my mind only remembers three strongly.

Harry - the fastest kid in the class

Zach - Harry's best friend

and Adam - the lover boy

Though I remember the other boys, the rest seem faded, like an old picture. I can recall their names and features just as well, but they didn't really impact me. Not like these three.

Track and Field day was a very stressful day for me. As a competitive child, I didn't like to lose, but I never won at track and field. One year, while running the mile, I began crying. I can't remember why, whether it was because my side hurt or I thought I was losing. For whatever reason, tears burst from my face, but the teacher said I had to keep going. I did. Though I didn't like it, and I knew I wasn't winning, I kept going. It felt like the hardest thing in my life. I finished 7th or so. Harry finished 1st with my best friend, Lauren, behind him with a a close 2nd. I was happy for her. I was just glad that I had finished. But something happened. When they dealt out our ribbons at the end of the day and Lauren had almost all blue and red ones and I had few ribbons at all, I started crying again. After all my hard work, it still didn't amount to much. After all the pain, what did I merit?

To hide my crying, I did the smartest thing I could think of: I hid under my desk. Like a peer sitting underneath her desk doesn't stand out at all. Zach, seeing me, decided to call me cry baby. And he continued calling me that until the end of the year.

My relationship with boys got further entrenched by Adam, the class romantic. He was the only boy in the class kind to me, but he was kind to all the girls. Every Valentine's day he would buy all of us roses. When I had my birthday party and he missed it, he still bought me a gift.

Was it during this time that my black and white view of boy relations developed? Middle school in a public high school further solidified this idea. I was either cussed at by the boy at my locker, pestered on my bus, or mock asked out in class. And then when I did get a guy who was kind to me, a rumor started that he liked me.

I didn't want to seem capricious and I guarded the place in my heart for romantic relationships even though I was easily confused by a boy's intentions. To admit I liked a guy felt like saying he was kind to me, admitting that he had talked to me. Which was admitting nothing at all. Guys could be kind to girls without having a romantic reason behind it. I knew this. But I didn't feel it. And it still confuses me now. All because of my childhood.

Maybe Freud was right.

I'm Published!

My brother is now working for Benchmark Reviews writing articles on computer equipment. The only problem is he can't write. I can't count how many being verbs he had (which I did not try at all to remove because it was so long), the same repeated openings, transitions, and verbs, and not to mention poor grammar (oh, the commas!). But he's a smarty, and he has good things to say, so I just made him sound as smart as he is. I put enough of my own effort in (about two hours worth), that I was actually mentioned as the editor*! He insisted to his boss that I am included, and now, I'm published! Sorta. It's not my original work, but a good half of it is mine. Hope I didn't burst anyone's misplaced bubble.

*I am named by my true name, Allison Downing, not my alias, Emery Grey, there.

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Why Authors Never Get Enough Sleep

Writing a novel is like raising a baby.

Not that I would know from experience, but here are my reasonings: You devote every minute of the day to it. You worry about it all the moments you aren't with it. You burp it to make sure everything is flowing together smoothly. You change out old, used diapers (also known as "chapters") for new and improved ones. It goes through stages. Sometimes it will cooperate with you, letting you write when it's good for you. Sometimes it's stubborn. And sometimes, always in the rare occasions when you aren't thinking about it - say, when you're sleeping - it wakes you up, demanding attention.

That's the stage my novel is in right now. The wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-to-write-a-chapter stage. It cries in my ears when I try to fall asleep, accusing me of negligence. And I know that if I don't answer its call, I will find it dead in the morning, panting on the floor, looking at me with big, black and white eyes asking, Why? Even if I am selfish enough to fall back asleep, I can't stand guilt, so I'll wake back up again either way.

Or maybe, if I've had a really bad week at work and can't muster the strength to get up, I'll forget exactly what the story had been telling me, and that Oh So Urgent call that I ignored will never make it into my novel.

Yeah. Like I'd let that happen.



Stupid babies.

Today, I saw a fire

A group of people watched someone's lives burn away today. The house was on fire, and cars parked in the grass to watch it come down. No one cried. They just stood there, mollified by the flames. I wondered where the family was. On vacation, oblivious to the horrifying truth? Would they receive a call later today telling them everything was gone? Would they return home to an ashen lot and be surprised? No one was crying, and that's how I know that family didn't know. We just stood there and watched the smoke carrying lives away.

I called my parents to tell them.
Today, I saw a fire.
Mommy - today, I watched a house glow with heat.
Daddy - today, I was scared.
Today, I drove past a fiery furnace and felt the heat on the other side of the car.

I wish no child had to come home to tell their parents this. But today, someone did.

When I got there, the fire was contained by the last supports of the house. It looked like a box of flames, like some magic trick. I saw a lake of fire poured into a square house and devour it whole. The fire spouted black smoke when the water fought it. It was malice, it was hate, it was terror. The cows in the neighboring lot continued to chew, if only moving to escape the doubled heat of summer and flames. I drove on, watching in the mirror the black flames join the heavy clouds. It would rain today.

When I got home, the air smelled like smoke.

Why Authors Write Blogs

Because there aren't enough of us.

And possibly because we are hiding from our current manuscripts (yes, that's plural). I mean, we're writers. We should be writing them, not this. So, what better way to hide an author than in words? It's time to play "find the author in the word-stack."

But for a serious moment, there aren't enough authors. Sure, maybe an author who is currently sending out hundreds of manuscripts and being rejected every time with pathetic "Thanks for considering us" and "Unfortunately, this is not what we are looking for, try again" is feeling that this is not so. Maybe that said author wishes he or she were the only author in the world, then all the publishers would have to accept his or her work. No, then all the publishers would be scrambling over each other, vying for her work, instead of the other way around.

But ignore all that. I'm talking about the general, everyday author who sits at home, antisocial, and writes. There aren't enough of us. We get lonely talking to the computer, the journal, or whatever writing tool we use, and talking to any non-writer, even the best of friends, wins us blank looks. They don't understand, and I don't blame them. I'm quite confident they receive a similar look from me when they begin talking about volleyball or basketball, training sessions or all-day competitions. Here's the thing - there are plenty of other people who they can talk to about said volleyball or basketball, training sessions or all-day competitions. We authors get no one. Or, if we're lucky, one person. Or, if we're very cunning, a whole internet's worth of persons.

Here's to not relying on luck.