So you filled your hands

From here: I am deeply taken with this woman's face.

( Love is a catalogue of deadly sins )

What point of view? from Writer Unboxed (Sophie Masson)

Before beginning a project I can struggle a lot with choosing a POV. It's something I love to play with — and overanalyze. I have lists for The Falling Woman of who is allowed narrative perspective and who isn't. I agonize over whether to tell the story in present or past tense. I hope that I'm not getting too goofy with experimentation if I switch around. (Last year I wrote a long [27K] piece in which the flashbacks were in present tense and the A storyline was in past. It made perfect sense to me, both in a general way and as a narrative conceit for this particular story, but a beta reader really questioned me on it. This is why it's good to get second readers, because you can be in your own head all you want, but someone else has to understand your story, and, to quote my central resolution for 2010, no one can read your mind.)

One book in particular really irked me with the way it used POV: Slow River by Nicola Griffith. It's got three timelines nestled inside each other, and I remember feeling distracted by how clever it felt. It's been a while since I read the book, but that's one thing I remember about it, which doesn't bode entirely well for a reread. Then again, one thing I'm trying to suss out is why I get annoyed by some attempts and not others. I really liked the tense shifts in my own work, but then again, to totally justify myself, I stuck to a very close third person perspective (with one exception: a disorienting flashback sequence conveyed in second person present by another character — uh, yeah, I guess I thought it was pretty cool).

Getting back on track, I do like thinking about how form creates function, how choosing your POV will inform character choices. That stuff is neat to me, and the link above gives a good run-down of how that might happen.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how my space should be when I want to make something. (I was looking up a particular entry I wanted to reference, knowing that it mentioned "space," and got 22 hits. This was the one I thought I wanted, but maybe not. [...] Hang on! I wanted this link, WhereIWrite.org -- there we go!)

Anyway, the point of all that is that I found a similar thing from visual artists who sell their work on Etsy! Which is always fascinating.

In the process of going through all this searching, I came on that month where I tried to post something every day. Even if every day I didn't have content, I do miss that a little.

Anyway #2, I think what I was trying to say was that I am going to be searching for apartments again soon, and you can bet I'll be looking with creative space in mind. Which is kind of a cool thing to have in mind, I think! I haven't really gotten to do that before.

I really need to finish The Falling Woman. Really a lot.

This is absolutely incredible, and it manages to look unreal in the same way the 300,000 starlings do. It's like watching a science documentary, in a way, but those are human bodies. lindensphinx once made a comment about seeing -- the Joffrey Ballet, possibly? -- and remarking that they had turned their bodies into art. This feels like that.



Via Ann Leary

Quietly imagine that I have been posting and/or writing this month.

So, more and more things fall into place. I've been using Trio Medieval's sacred recordings as my basis for the Quiet Sisters up to now, but while I was home for Christmas, I snagged their album of Norwegian folk songs. The only instruments other than their voices are percussive. This is what witches sound like.

Ohmygod.

So, for the longest time I had Cate Blanchett in my head for Gruoch. She has the elegance, the cruelty, the poise, the ferocity — she's it. I made a conscious choice not to think of her in this latest incarnation of The Falling Woman.

So now what happens?

( Holy shit. )

Holy shit.

I was gearing up to make an intelligent post about visual language and how it's inspiring Hecatia and The Falling Woman, but then I saw a free e-book called Headless Males Make Great Lovers And Other Unusual Natural Histories, and I just sort of lost it.

I love Genreality. I don't follow a whole lot of writing blogs, but this one and Writer Unboxed are two favorites, particularly because they're so genre-focused. I realized a long time ago that literary fiction was not where I wanted to make my place, and it's lovely to find like-minded people who say such great things in the same vein on a consistent basis. (Part of me thinks that rebranding Unlined as some sort of writers collective with occasional issues of fiction might be really cool. It's worth investigating, I think.)

Anyway, moving back on target: today my Google Reader delivered not one but two gems from Genreality. The first is by a guest blogger named Shiloh Walker: like me, she does not truck with the idea of a muse. (Oh wow — and let me just say that that's the first time I've used Dreamwidth's journal search function, and ohmyheart I love it.) I think she nails something about this preference on the head when she says that, as an author, writing is mine. This creative process is my engagement with the world. Having what seems like a petulant, surly, passive-aggressive being turning a spigot on and off at will is so much less appealing that just interacting with ideas.

The next is about cutting back deadwood words. I've done editing on pieces where I've just tightened sentences and I'm gobsmacked by how much I lose in the process. It always makes me a little giddy, to be honest. This is the thing that I learned most about my time as a copyeditor, that so much of what we write the first time around is just us trying to get that idea down, the proverbial block of marble with the David lurking inside it. (Of course, with words it's less about stone and maybe more about something with wires and beads and found objects: you do a lot more rearranging than you do with sculpture, which has some limitations if you're working from a block of stone.)

It also teaches you a great deal about your own writing. I am fond to the point of absurdity of pointing out facial expressions, eye contact and what people are doing with their hands. Another part of editing has to be letting go somewhat of how much you're controlling what your reader imagines. It's worthwhile to craft a story; it's not always worthwhile to storyboard it.

So, it's been a few days. And it's funny, because I really am feeling that old "...wait, this is over? I have free time? That's not right." I've actually been doing a little writing each day in December already, though not very much. I have about 750 words that I'm hoping to expand tonight, and I really don't want to lose the November momentum. I've got a few unfinished paper mache projects sitting around my apartment, and I'm not willing to have this story languish like they are. (Granted, this is not National Paper Mache Project Month, so there's a bit of a differential there, but that's beside the point.) My hope is really to have this draft onto paper by Christmas. I have so many other projects to work on, including the post-apocalyptic Americana short story collection and the Prometheus retellings, not to mention the secondary characters from The Falling Woman itself that need short stories.

Speaking of which, holy wow, I am so enthralled with Gabourey Sidibe. And how unbelievably gorgeous is she? I think she's turned into my model for Imber's mom. Doesn't she strike you as a potential ( spoiler )? (The picture comes from this article. I haven't seen Precious yet, but I very much hope she proves the writer wrong. Seriously, she's so freaking charming and happy!)