Technically, I'm not, but bigger stories are mulling and shorter ficlets are not amiss among them. So here goes... Calling prompts:
You are also permitted to specify poetry or prose. :grins:
2013 is an exercise in forcing myself to stretch my wings and grow, particularly in the area of discipline. I've been almost startled at how intensely my writing and even blogging world now revolves around the challenges I have given myself.
The 365 Challenge is essentially a demand to finish things. Not just any thing, but things people want to read. The parameters are hardly binding or limiting, but I do get prompts in the form of questions that make me stop, pause, and ask myself: Do I want to answer this question? How do I want to answer this question? There are dark moments in my characters' lives that I'm not much inclined to get into, but I know them, like my own dark moments, even better. They are worn from internal repetition.
It's also making me stretch because I want each piece to mostly stand alone. There are exceptions. The drabbles for 100 Word Stories need to stand alone, but not as stringently. You can't give a broad sweep of a moment. It has to be very tight, narrowed, and focused.
It was lithiumlaughter that suggested I do more reading this year, and I took her word for it. I've got several unpublished books on my plate from writerly friends and several more from BookRooster, which I'll need to review once I've finally done reading them. Which is also how I got started back into poetry. I yanked out all my writing magazines the other week and started flipping through them, to remind myself of the things I once knew and simply immerse myself back into that authoritative vibe.
I discovered Billy Collins poem, "Adage," and one of my favorites ever, "Anyways" by Suzanne Cleary, and so many others, and then lithiumlaughter introduced me to "Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out," with which I'm in love.
...leaping out of the frying pan of yourself / into the fire of someone else
— "Adage" by Billy Collins
Reading the rhythm of language and the way intense things are presented inside of these poems has inspired me, and I found myself writing a good bit of poetry, stuff I never would have attempted otherwise, with experiments deemed somewhat less than perfectly successful, such as "The Un-Study" and pieces I absolutely love, as "Litterae" and "Normal written in coffee grounds."
Reading G. Jackson's novel-in-progress made me itch to try fiction written in a completely different style from my norm. I've hesitated to jump into this particularly frying pan, but I cannot deny the itch is present and well-accounted for.
Having the 365 Challenge page with its measured progress made me put together a page for the 100 Things Challenge, a blogging challenge I haven't finished yet, have barely even well begun. It made me want to get back up on that pony and start writing for it again. It's not so much about just finishing things as really growing myself by considering creativity, what it means to me, how I practice it.
So that's my 2013. Besides the other standard goals of get a day job, eat better, etc. Thanks all of you for how you inspired and continue to inspire me.
So we were discussing, this challenge buddy of mine and me, and in our discussing “Glass Angel” and the prompts she’d already given me, this popped out.
So it took longer to format this than to write it! Ah, well. Inspired by a version of Rachelle and Justus that will never be, as they’ve been commandeered by the Kingdoms and Thorn world. A bit of romance, en brief.
Memed from likeadeuce:
Sometimes I have to completely stop working on a story and get my head on straight because some characters should never be allowed to come within swinging distance of each other's POV. That isn't to say I can't write them together, even in the same scene; that is to say that I cannot get under both of their skins without expecting some seriously inappropriate meshing.
Today, I got under Shift's skin. I wasn't intending to, but her story's next in the Kingdoms and Thorn universe and she owns Justus and she's serious business and headed up the entire rebellion and just about owns the city she lives in. She also happens to be Rachelle's leader and heavily invested in the future of all of her team members. So naturally, writing about Rachelle and Justus requires a bit of awareness of Shift. After all, their relationship is a literal side effect of his relationship with Shift.
But therein lies the problem. They have a similar worldview, similar chip on their shoulder, similar morals, and rather similar way of relating to Justus. Different, but similar. Rachelle wasn't sounding quite right when I wrote her, not because she and Shift don't talk similarly to outsiders, but because they don't talk the same. The outside makes it easy to forget that the inside is totally and completely different.
Portraying these girls is a dissection of their coping mechanisms and their walls, and in that, they are opposites.
Shift is so passionate and self-sacrificing that she's willing to do literally anything for those she loves and protects. Which means she's an extremely dangerous woman because that leaves a lot of atrocities she doesn't flinch at. She keeps people from getting too close or too deep by being friendly, sociable, and perfectly whatever makes them comfortable. When she's just being herself though, she's got a razor edge of all that dangerousness showing through the sociability.
Rachelle coped by turning off. She's cynical and fatalistic and survivalist. She gets along by not caring. If she does care about you, she's let you in pretty deep, I'll tell you that. Her wall is a razor edge, but when she's really just being herself, she's light and easy and usually not too intense unless she's depressed, which is rare.
They both don't care enough about themselves to not be self-sacrificing, but for totally different reasons. So I haven't been able to write Rachelle today. I'm still flushing Shift from my system.
Do you ever get characters meshing when they're not supposed to? How do you deal with it?
Two not for the 365 Challenge, but just because I wanted to.
mirror, mirror that reflects / in the glass you see your face / mirror, mirror, show my dreams / your body moves with studied grace
dead words upon a page / concatenated ink / don't call it litterae
