So I have the next scene I want to write in the collaboration firmly in my head.
I also have to use my lunch break to make a cold run to the grocery store. Ah, well. Wish me luck!
Prompted by in_the_blue, for a change of pace:
Again, nothing prompted, so I picked my own topic to ramble on. :grins:
What's new with you?
No one prompted for day three, so I just spontaneously decided to do some belated Thanksgiving ramblings.
I am thankful for the God who loves me, no matter how far I stray, whose love is bigger than my biggest sins, who wants me to be His even when I've wandered so far I think I'm lost forever.
I am grateful for my family and their unconditional love. I have been showered with love and blessings this season beyond what I can imagine I deserve. I have been blessed with enough to remove my most urgent debt, a new tablet, and more thanks and praise than I feel I have merited.
I am grateful for my friends in this writing community o' mine. For in_the_blue who is always there for me and always reading and always writing and always understanding. For thecatisacritic who keeps me writing and keeps me thinking and keeps me wanting to hug her all the time. For lithiumlaughter and arliddian and Rabia Gale who are always lovely and kind and write the kind of observations, reflections, and stories that make me want to linger a long, long time. For all of them who put up with my fits and starts and idiosyncracies and love me anyway.
I am thankful for breath in my lungs and sunshine on my face each morning. (I'm not kidding. It wakes me up through my makeshift curtains.)
I am thankful for Christmastime and holidays with family and hugs and feasts and cards that bring tears to your eyes and shoulders to cry on when you need to.
I am grateful in short that I am alive.
Because naturally, the first person in importance and existence is oneself.
So, prompted by in_the_blue: my thoughts on the first person point of view in fiction.
I have an odd relationship with these sorts of things. Fiction is fiction. It's all a device. It's all a way to convey a story and lock you, the reader, into the moment. Which is a fancy way of saying that I have no opinion on the point of view as a point of view and I often wonder why so many people get up in arms over this.
Divergent by Veronica Roth is in first person. We are told "I" and "we," etc., and that's the narrator/main character, Tris. But once the story gets going, as a reader, I am swept along and forget the point of view, the verb tense, and so forth because I'm lost in the story. When I read a third person point of view story, such as Emma by Jane Austen, the same thing happens. I forget how it's written and get caught up in what is going on. I forget half the words, except as they let me speed faster through the panorama in my mind. If I notice the framing for too long before getting sucked in, then there's a good chance you're doing it wrong. Equally half of my favorite books ever are in first person and the other half mostly in third. The book of poetry, naturally, doesn't count either way. :grins:
There is one thing that I'll admit is difficult to pull off as gracefully in first person—names. You're stuck with self-referential names and thus, Andrew and Natalie, the names of Tris's parents in Divergent, are only mentioned once each. I had to ransack the book to find them for fanficcing. Other than that, they are rightly referred to as Mom and Dad.
So there you have it, the bulk of my opinion on the first person. Though if you think about it, "the first shall be last..." and all that jazz.
So, thecatisacritic asked me to ramble to you all today about the perfect cup of tea.
The perfect cup of tea varies, of course. It depends on my mood. When I was growing up, my grandmother always had a tin full of various Celestial Seasonings flavors and we would boil water and try out a new flavor each time, sometimes go through more than one a night, and even less often, more than one per cup. My favorites growing up were my perennial yerba maté—we were doing Wisdom of the Ancients back then—and Roastaroma, which is essentially chicory tea. I still love chicory and now I use it in my own blends.
Yet and still, I buy those old flavors I loved so much over the years: the holiday teas, Bengal Spice, zinger teas, the new rooibos flavors. Sometimes, I just like the comfort.
Growing up, I often drank cold yerba maté from the fridge (we brewed up pots of it at a time), but after I left my insurance job due to tendonitis, my grandfather would bring me cups of steaming hot maté from time to time, and I was hooked. I'm often cold, so cold tea has completely lost its appeal for me. I'll buy bottled Guayaki if I'm out and about, but I always drink that at room temperature or heat it up. In short, the perfect cup of tea is piping hot and sipped for pleasure, warmth, and whatever additional benefits it may provide.
As mentioned, I make my own blends now. I drink supertea daily for health and it's my standing go-to: equal parts pau d'arco, stevia, thyme, and yerba maté. When I want to get warm and want to save my supertea, I tend towards peppermint chamomile, gingermint, chicory spice tea in various ratios, and rooibos with flavor of the day additions. And every once in a while, I still do pull out tea from the fridge and pour it in a cup to drink it cold—just not often. It's a granddaughter/grandfather thing, this hot tea stuff.
A/N: So this post got lost in email to self oblivion, but since I just remembered it existed, I hereby post it for your enjoyment. I wrote this on November 18, actually.
So Catherine Caffeinated talking about blogging because you had something to say, and it got me to prop my metaphorical chin on my metaphorical hands, plunk elbows on the edge of the desk, and think about why I write. Do I write because I have something to say?
I have often thought about what would make a good blog for a fiction writer and finally thrown up my hands in disgust and realized I hadn't the foggiest idea. My nonfiction and fiction interests are separate and apart. Writing is for writers, not readers. But this made me think about: what is it I have to say when I write fiction? A lot, actually.
I said it once before: I write fascinated. I have found that I am interested in the same things that differentiate literature I love from that which I fangirl. I am interested in cost and sacrifice, power and strength, and mastery of oneself. I prefer the twists of complexity, characters who make hard decisions and pay high prices but accomplish their goal. I love order and making logic of chaos and impossibility. Fiction puts my world into perspective: it enables me to see the underlying patterns and constraints grant the freedom to make those hard choices. Selflessness, love, resolve, endurance, the ability to stand persecuted and not defend oneself—these things are power and a power I wish I had.
But how to put that into blog posts? M.C.A. Hogarth does it with meta and does it beautifully, but I have never been able to write meta. It pulls my characters out of their worlds and makes them constructs. They do not exist in my world to talk to me; they are not voices in my head, but people in their worlds. They are flesh and blood and mind and bone and heart and spirit and blood. I have tried meta and cannot do it.
I have written fanfic but that always becomes simply fic. I dislike writing descriptions of their history unless it is answering a question. Most readers do not read endless fic upon fic on a blog if it is not a serial. I'm fascinated by words, but even I am bored by other conlangers posts about the lexical features of their languages. I love the social structures of my worlds, but best when shown in fic.
En brief, I have a lot to say about love and power and strength and romance and angst and tragic choices, terrible sacrifices, and efficient success with terrible consequences, etc., but I say it in fic. I still don't know how to blog it.
But it has me thinking.
Gacked from likeadeuce:
Pick a date below and give me a topic and I'll ramble on. I'm good at talking. It can be anything from fandom related (specific characters, actors, storylines, episodes, etc) to life related to pizza preferences to whatever you want.
They will probably be brief, or not, depending on the subject.
Also, I reserve the right to decline prompts that I don't feel equipped to meet.
Topics: you can get an idea from my tags/from the stuff I usually ramble about/from things you maybe wish I talked about more but don't.
December 1 - The perfect cup of tea, thecatisacritic
December 2 - rant/opinion/whatever you prefer on use of first person POV, in_the_blue
December 3 -
December 4 -
December 5 - five things you love love love about Colorado, in_the_blue
December 6 -
December 7 - can you tell me a bit about where you're at with fandom? How you got there?, stormkpr
December 8 - what would you as a writer tell you the writer of five or ten years ago, thecatisacritic
December 9 -
December 10 -
December 11 -
December 12 -
December 13 -
December 14 -
December 15 -
December 16 -
December 17 -
December 18 -
December 19 -
December 20 -
December 21 -
December 22 -
December 23 -
December 24 -
December 25 -
December 26 -
December 27 -
December 28 -
December 29 -
December 30 -
December 31 -
My mind is kind of blank space right now. I've gotten all the bad, depressing stuff out of it, but still waiting for new material to start percolating within it. But hey, (LJ users) check out the new icon! I got one for Tris too.
