I have wanted to reintroduce a character Evie May from Uneasy Spirits, my second book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. I wrote this book in 2010, fell in love with the character that exhibited signs of dissociative disorder (but in the 19th century setting, seen as a trance medium). And I recently found the idea for basic plot for her. It will either be a short story or novella, which is how I often deal with stories about minor characters from the series. So, as soon as I finish my current work in progress, and start the research for the next full-length novel in my mystery series, I will start this shorter work. (I hope within the next 3 months.) I am very excited about this and I am really looking forward to getting reacquainted with this character (who will be 4 years older).
Goals? Hoo-boy...! Kind of like making a long overdue appointment to see a medical provider. You know it's for the best, but you're not always ready for what's involved, or for the results. I love this so much: "Through my lived-experience of this though, I find it almost always happens just before I think I’m actually ready."
So, that whole book idea. It niggles around in the back of my brain, and it seems more than a few of "us" are setting that as a 2024 intention, and I'm still very much in the "not ready" phase. I don't know how to get past that, because I think, in my heart of hearts, I don't feel worthy. :sigh:
“Like a bowl full of jelly” is a terrific simile, maybe the best one in the poem, although I wonder if children today would see it jiggling as we oldsters do. Why would you eat a bowl of jelly, etc?
In the updated pastiche “Cajun Night Before Christmas,” it’s interesting to see what new similes the pseudonymous author “Trosclair” came up with. In the original, St. Nick looks “like a pedler.” What’s a peddler, etc? In the Cajun version: “He look like a burglar.” More realistic and funny to boot.
I’m indebted to Brian Spears for introducing me to the Cajun version. His recent column is here and includes an embedded reading that also shows the original illustrations.
I agree, This writer’s-life trip is a strange one! After being with my publisher for the past 13 years, she has decided to change direction and not publish children's books anymore. So I am about to self-publish the next Amanda book. It's an amicable separation and the first 9 books will still be on her books. I am scared but willing to try this avenue and see how I do. So that is my big project for 2024.
Songs are also great places to listen for simile and metaphor. In one of Lana Del Rey’s songs, she sings “Happiness is a butterfly / Try to catch it like every night / It escapes from my hands into moonlight / Every day is a lullaby / I hum it on the phone like every night / And sing it for my babies on the tour life.”
Two good metaphors, both pretty simple, but she extends them by giving examples of how happiness is like a butterfly, how every day is like a lullaby.
I think the second metaphor is the more powerful one. Obviously she’s not literally humming or singing the “day.” Maybe she’s like a mother (or therapist) while on the road, perhaps to the younger members of the tour, her backup singers, her “babies” — to complete the lullaby idea. One test of a simile or metaphor is if it sticks in the head — this one does. The rhyming of butterfly with lullaby is pretty darn good too.
I would like to try my hand at a novel this year. I’ve only done short pieces up to this point, so my desire is mostly to see whether I am able to craft a story long enough and complex enough to fill all those pages. (The mountain is there, y’know.)
on learning: I love the Unschool...a writer's community led by Alison. Even when life side tracks you, I can pull over and read an article or other writer's comments and it reminds me that this road is still here. I appreciate that more than you know. I've been to school and studied the formal 'stuff' so this leads to goals...
on goals this year: to write...to put my writing into the world. I'll be spending more time in Arizona it seems, so I need to evaluate whether or not, I can write there. If the desert doesn't accommodate my writing, that may be an issue! But I do love walking in the desert...it is a great place to wander.
(just ordered the Scent of Time...excited to take this to the desert!)
Thank you for all that you do Alison and being the writing road through 2023!
On the one hand, being retired I have "all the time in the world." On the other hand, being retired on an insufficient pension I'm always jobhunting and panicking, picking up short term jobs ones I love, thank heavens! - volunteering to improve marketability (that's never worked in my entire life of hours and hours of volunteering) further limited by physical stupidities. Additional training. Chronic financial stress inspires some writers. It freezes me. So do unsettled schedules. So does knowing I need to move but not knowing when I'll find the place. The de-cluttering. NEVERTHELESS, I have come back to a short story that is good in so many ways, but not good enough. The pivotable scene, fine on its own, is lost when the story is read as a whole. Why? How to burst it to the fore? Despite many rewrites, I may have to rewrite from the beginning to find my way inside this scene and come up with what needs to follow. And then there's the rabbit hole of a memoir which various people over the years have told me I need to write, but I haven't because my life is boring, but find myself - partly through these prompts, thanks a lot, Alison - digging around in the past. Adding these bits to my decades of journals to cull - only I don't have the space to lay all this out. In a nutshell, my resolutions are to move my muscles and my life and to focus on writing.
I have wanted to reintroduce a character Evie May from Uneasy Spirits, my second book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. I wrote this book in 2010, fell in love with the character that exhibited signs of dissociative disorder (but in the 19th century setting, seen as a trance medium). And I recently found the idea for basic plot for her. It will either be a short story or novella, which is how I often deal with stories about minor characters from the series. So, as soon as I finish my current work in progress, and start the research for the next full-length novel in my mystery series, I will start this shorter work. (I hope within the next 3 months.) I am very excited about this and I am really looking forward to getting reacquainted with this character (who will be 4 years older).
Goals? Hoo-boy...! Kind of like making a long overdue appointment to see a medical provider. You know it's for the best, but you're not always ready for what's involved, or for the results. I love this so much: "Through my lived-experience of this though, I find it almost always happens just before I think I’m actually ready."
So, that whole book idea. It niggles around in the back of my brain, and it seems more than a few of "us" are setting that as a 2024 intention, and I'm still very much in the "not ready" phase. I don't know how to get past that, because I think, in my heart of hearts, I don't feel worthy. :sigh:
“Like a bowl full of jelly” is a terrific simile, maybe the best one in the poem, although I wonder if children today would see it jiggling as we oldsters do. Why would you eat a bowl of jelly, etc?
In the updated pastiche “Cajun Night Before Christmas,” it’s interesting to see what new similes the pseudonymous author “Trosclair” came up with. In the original, St. Nick looks “like a pedler.” What’s a peddler, etc? In the Cajun version: “He look like a burglar.” More realistic and funny to boot.
I’m indebted to Brian Spears for introducing me to the Cajun version. His recent column is here and includes an embedded reading that also shows the original illustrations.
https://brianspears.substack.com/p/learning-to-holiday
Who was “Trosclair”? No one seems to know. In “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf wonders if “Anon” was often a woman.
I agree, This writer’s-life trip is a strange one! After being with my publisher for the past 13 years, she has decided to change direction and not publish children's books anymore. So I am about to self-publish the next Amanda book. It's an amicable separation and the first 9 books will still be on her books. I am scared but willing to try this avenue and see how I do. So that is my big project for 2024.
Songs are also great places to listen for simile and metaphor. In one of Lana Del Rey’s songs, she sings “Happiness is a butterfly / Try to catch it like every night / It escapes from my hands into moonlight / Every day is a lullaby / I hum it on the phone like every night / And sing it for my babies on the tour life.”
Two good metaphors, both pretty simple, but she extends them by giving examples of how happiness is like a butterfly, how every day is like a lullaby.
I think the second metaphor is the more powerful one. Obviously she’s not literally humming or singing the “day.” Maybe she’s like a mother (or therapist) while on the road, perhaps to the younger members of the tour, her backup singers, her “babies” — to complete the lullaby idea. One test of a simile or metaphor is if it sticks in the head — this one does. The rhyming of butterfly with lullaby is pretty darn good too.
I would like to try my hand at a novel this year. I’ve only done short pieces up to this point, so my desire is mostly to see whether I am able to craft a story long enough and complex enough to fill all those pages. (The mountain is there, y’know.)
on learning: I love the Unschool...a writer's community led by Alison. Even when life side tracks you, I can pull over and read an article or other writer's comments and it reminds me that this road is still here. I appreciate that more than you know. I've been to school and studied the formal 'stuff' so this leads to goals...
on goals this year: to write...to put my writing into the world. I'll be spending more time in Arizona it seems, so I need to evaluate whether or not, I can write there. If the desert doesn't accommodate my writing, that may be an issue! But I do love walking in the desert...it is a great place to wander.
(just ordered the Scent of Time...excited to take this to the desert!)
Thank you for all that you do Alison and being the writing road through 2023!
On the one hand, being retired I have "all the time in the world." On the other hand, being retired on an insufficient pension I'm always jobhunting and panicking, picking up short term jobs ones I love, thank heavens! - volunteering to improve marketability (that's never worked in my entire life of hours and hours of volunteering) further limited by physical stupidities. Additional training. Chronic financial stress inspires some writers. It freezes me. So do unsettled schedules. So does knowing I need to move but not knowing when I'll find the place. The de-cluttering. NEVERTHELESS, I have come back to a short story that is good in so many ways, but not good enough. The pivotable scene, fine on its own, is lost when the story is read as a whole. Why? How to burst it to the fore? Despite many rewrites, I may have to rewrite from the beginning to find my way inside this scene and come up with what needs to follow. And then there's the rabbit hole of a memoir which various people over the years have told me I need to write, but I haven't because my life is boring, but find myself - partly through these prompts, thanks a lot, Alison - digging around in the past. Adding these bits to my decades of journals to cull - only I don't have the space to lay all this out. In a nutshell, my resolutions are to move my muscles and my life and to focus on writing.