October 31st. 

All Hallows’ Eve.  The night when the veil between this world and the Otherworld is lifted, and spirits come to visit.  The night when people honor their dearly departed with lit candles and dumb suppers.  Men and women hold hands around tables across the world to call upon the dead.  Girls gaze in mirrors to see the faces of their future husbands.  Children bob for apples and play Trick or Treat. 

For some, Halloween is a solemn occasion.  For others, it is Samhain, the Celtic New Year.   The beginning of the dark time of year.  The time of ends, and new beginnings.   And for others, it is simply a fun time of sticky sweet candy and staying up late watching Bela Lugosi.

And then, for a small group of quite nutty (but harmless) others, it is the beginning of a fervent time called, NaNo. 

Yes.  National Novel Writing Month is here again.

I did my first NaNo in ‘07.  My second in ‘08.  Everyone has their own reasons for participating.  Mine was to teach me discipline.  I wanted to approach writing as a professional.  I wanted to develop the discipline to sit down at the keys when I didn’t feel like it and when the Muse was off shopping for a new dress.  In that, I succeeded.  Ever since I won my first Nano- writing everyday  has become a natural part of my life and I’m pleased with the results of such effort.

So today, I wondered- Why am I doing NaNo again?   What lesson can I gleam from it this year?  And then the answer came: abandonment.  I want to stop thinking so much of the novel I have out on submission.  I want to simply write and have fun.

So, here’s to 3o days of wildly clicking away at the keys.  Total banishment of evil inner editors.  No reading professional blogs about the dire state of the publishing world.  I’m going to write in total, wonderful, ignorant bliss.

For those of you doing NaNo- what are your reasons?

And Happy Halloween, everyone!

Redbreast In the Morning

“What woke it then?  A little child

Strayed from its father’s door

And in an hour of moonlight wild

Laid lonely on the desert moor.”- Emily Bronte  1837

Haworth.  February 1801-

Two-year old Joseph Helliwell snuck outside and attempted to secretly follow his father  from their home at Enfieldside to Pecket Well, where the farmer had a business meeting.  Tragically, Joseph could not keep up as his father made his way up the old Haworth Road.   He was found frozen to death the next morning upon the Moor.

Haworth.  January 27, 1849-

Four-year old Joseph Halliwell was the son of farmer William.   They lived on Far Intake Farm.  One day, the little boy ventured out and became lost.  Four days later, he was found frozen to death upon the same moor which had claimed his  near-namesake less than fifty years before.

resource:  “Strange World of The Brontes” by Marie Campbell

Presently, I’m hard at work on, “I Remember Jacqueline”.   But I wanted to share these words.  Ms. L’Engle doesn’t say anything profound.  There isn’t anything unique or clever here.  Nothing one hasn’t heard before.

No. 

She speaks the truth.

And I don’t think any of us (myself included) can ever here that enough.   The Muse helps those who show up to do the work.

Madeline L’Engle (from her 1963 Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech):  “…And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways.   And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things.  That isn’t the way people write.

I believe this as strongly now as I did then.  Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.

Do I mean, then, that an author should sit around like a phony Zen Buddhist in his pad, drinking endless cups of espresso coffee and waiting for inspiration to descend upon him?  That isn’t the way the writer works, either.   I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter.  I know what he meant.  Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade, they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, does come.  This is the moment when the writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others.”

music playing:  Carmen Prelude

Oh, bless the Muses!  I finished the first draft of my steampunk novel.   Don’t ask about that.  It’s uh…resting in a drawer for now.

But never mind that.   The big news is at the beginning of this week I became possessed.   Not the  split-pea soup throwing, head spinning one hundred and eighty degree- kind.  The good kind of possession.  As in,  I woke up one morning  with an entire novel in my head.  

I’ve mentioned many times before that my stories come to me in pieces.  Rather like a jigsaw puzzle.  Random scenes out of order, bits of dialogue…odds and ends that I need to piece together.

Not this time.  The whole story presented itself clearly to me from beginning to end. 

So then I sat down and did something very unlike me.  I outlined.  I completed the Snowflake method, and started the first draft today.

It’s a supernatural suspense that takes place in two time periods.  The “current” time is the Roaring Twenties.  The other time is the 1830s.  So I get to hang out in my beloved Victorian era, but also get to throw off those corsets, hike up the skirts, pour the gin,  crank up the Jazz, and dance the Charleston.

Tentatively titled, I Remember Jacqueline- it involves an old-fashioned whodunnit, reincarnation, and hopefully lots of fun!

How’s everyone else doing?

Step One:  Find someone to send your submissions to.

 Emily Dickinson chose to send a few of her poems to social reformer and writer, Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Step Two:  Sit down to write query.   When addressing it, be blunt.   Emily simply wrote, “Mr. Higginson,”

Step Three:  Begin query with rhetorical question. 

Emily decided upon, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?”

Step Four:   Compose letter.   

MR. HIGGINSON,–Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?

The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.

Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude.

If I make the mistake, that you dared to tell me would give me sincerer honor toward you.

I inclose my name, asking you, if you please, sir, to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me it is needless to ask, since honor is its own pawn.

Step Five:  Compose this letter in a large, looping penmanship that is difficult for anyone to decipher. 

“It was in a handwriting so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town.” (Amherst). – Mr. Wentworth Higginson

Step Six:  Decide this difficult to read,  rhetorical-begun query is so brilliant that you don’t even bother signing your name.

Mr. Higginson later said, “The most curious thing about the letter was the total absence of a signature”

Step Seven:   Decide you’d better include your name somewhere.  Just in case.  So scribble it on a card using the the same large, loopy handwriting.

Step Eight:  Stick your work inside the card.  Emily enclosed four poems.  Send whatever you wish.

Step Nine:  Seal envelope.  Address it to person’s home address.  Emily mailed her poems to Mr. Higginson’s house in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Step Ten:   Put on sneakers, prepare to head out to the Post Office, when a creeping thought enters your mind: 

Perhaps times have changed.

Slightly.

“People do not live nowadays. They get about ten percent out of life.”

“You were once wild here.  Don’t let them tame you.”- Isadora Duncan (1877-1927)

Born in San Francisco, the poetic thinker and dancer proclaimed,

“I, Isadora Duncan hereby vow on my twelfth birthday that I will dedicate myself to the pursuit of art and beauty; and to the single life.  I will never marry.  I will never submit myself to any claims other than to truth and beauty.  To seal this vow, I hearby burn my parents’ marriage certificate.  Beauty is truth.  Truth, beauty.  That is all we know on earth, and all we need to know.”

While Isadora did eventually marry the Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin, in 1922, the Mother of Modern Dance kept her vow of dedicating herself to the pursuit of art, beauty, and truth.

From early childhood, Isadora studied the lines of ancient Greek sculpture and the movements of nature; both of which she incorporated into her unique style. Rejecting classical ballet which she deemed, “ugly and against nature”,  she clad herself in Grecian tunics, threw off her shoes, unbound her hair, and danced from her soul.  Stressing improvisation and pure emotion, she strove to rid her movements of all artifice.   The result was a simplicity of grace, which like all masterworks, appeared deceptively easy to achieve.

Isadora considered the solar plexus the “internal motor” and would stand hours in trance.   ”I spent long days and nights in the studio, seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body’s movement. For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breast, covering the solar plexus… I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversions of movement are born, the mirror of vision for the creation of dance.”

   In 1903, she gave a lecture in Berlin where she stated her dance principles. 

“My intention is, in due time, to found a school, to build a theatre where a hundred little girls shall be trained in my art, which they in turn will better. In this school I shall not teach the children to imitate my movements, but to make their own, I shall not force them to study certain movements, I shall help them to develop those movements which are natural to them.”

 She opened her first school in Grunewald, Germany in 1904.  Driven by her belief that, “Every child that is born in civilization has a right to the heritage of beauty”, she  covered the poorer students living expenses.  During class,  she urged her students to listen to the music and wait until it moved them to dance.

Of dance, she said:

“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”

“Natural dancing should only mean that the dance does not go against nature, not that anything is left to chance.”

“The true dance is an expression of serenity; it is controlled by the profound rhythm of inner emotion. Emotion does not reach the moment of frenzy out of a spurt of action; it broods first, it sleeps like the life in the seed, and it unfolds with a gentle slowness. The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a movement that mounted, that spread, that ended with a promise of rebirth.

The Dance – it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun.”

“If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and always will be the same.

The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth is ever the same lasting harmony.”

“It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.”

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and Annabella Millbanke, was born on December 10, 1815.  After her parents separation,  she was raised alone by her mother.  Annabella was determined that her daughter would not fall victim to the ways of her, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”- father.   Annabella further believed that the way to avoid such madness was to strengthen one’s mind.  Therefore, despite a very sickly childhood which often kept her bedridden, Ada was given an intense education focusing on science and math.

During this time, Ada was tutored by such notables as  the social reformer, William Frend;  the polymath, Mary Somerville; and the British mathmatician, Augustus De Morgan.

On June 5, 1833, Mary Somerville introduced Ada to Charles Babbage, the English mechanical engineer and inventor.  They corresponded often regarding Babbage’s plans for building a Difference Engine, and later, an Analytical Engine.   Impressed by Ada’s scientific mind and passion for mathematics, Babbage nicknamed her, “The Enchantress of Numbers”.

In 1843, Ada translated an Italian article on Babbage’s plans for his Analytical Engine.  In her notes,  she advanced a process for calculating an order of Bernoulli numbers.  Unfortunately, the Analytical Engine was never built in their lifetime due to lack of funds.  However, it has been discovered that her sequence of numbers would have run perfectly.  Thus, Ada is considered to be the very first computer progammer in the world.

Ada Lovelace died of uterine cancer on November 27, 1852.  She was thirty-seven.

The United States Department of Defense named the computer language, Ada, in her honor.

“I paint pictures which do not exist and which I would like to see.”- Argentine  painter, Leonor Fini (August 30, 1908- January 18, 1996)*

Leonor on her aesthetic strategy:  “I strike it, stalk it, try to make it obey me.  Then in its disobedience, it forms things I like.”

“She is magnificent, perturbing, mocking enigmatic, terrible and compassionate.  She is Leonor Fini; painter of the surreal, illustrator of books, theater.  Her art is the crack in the mirror, the edge of the equation, the dream of tremendous important half-grasped upon awakening, whose meaning dissolves with daylight.”- Catherine Styles McLeod  from the Architectural Digest , March 1986

“In her life as well as her art, Fini continually advanced the notion of autonomous, absolute woman; beautiful, imperious, and governed by passion.”-  Whitney Chadwick, Art Historian

links for further information on this extraordinary painter and writer:

http://www.leonor-fini.com/

http://www.cfmgallery.com/Leonor-Fini/leonor-fini.html

* some sources claim her birth year as 1907

music playing:  Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man”

After brainstorming  for my Victorian murder mystery,  “INSIDE THE LANCHESTER HOUSE” for the last few weeks, I’ve decided to put it aside for the meantime to work on this steampunk novel idea that’s been brewing in my head.

I’ve always wanted to try my hands at steampunk, and last night I remembered a very old fantasy novel I’d hidden away.  I took a look at it, and thought, “You know, with some revising (okay, a lot of revising) this could work.”  The writing is hilariously bad (over a decade old so you can imagine.  No.  Please don’t imagine), but the story itself is a lot of fun.

This morning, I revised the first chapter.  Yeah!  My plan is to go through the whole thing, revising the general story, characters, writing, etc.  When that’s done I’ll see about building my alternative, steampunking Victorian world.

As much as I love the story behind, LANCHESTERS, my heart wasn’t presently into it.   Today, working on the steampunk novel, or what shall become a steampunk novel, was fun.  And I realized after finishing, PORTRAITS, which is rather dark, I needed to engage in something more playful.  So, steampunk ahead.

How’s everyone else doing?

Recently on the popular, “Absolute Write” website, there have been threads dealing with male and female characters.  On these, some people (including females) have stated they find writing three dimensional females much more difficult than males.  This baffled me, so I did some thinking.

This is what I came up with.  It all comes down to fear.  A lot of writers worry needlessly about whether their character is likeable or not.  My hunch tells me that these same writers worry even more about making their female character likeable.

Such concern is pointless.   One, you can’t please everyone.  Just as not everyone is going to like your novel in general, not everyone is going to like your character.  The vital thing is creating an interesting character that people want to read about.

Another concern I’ve heard has been along the lines of, “I have trouble creating a believable female character”.  Believable, being the key word.    Well, guess what.   There’s no such thing as a believable female character.   That makes it sound like all women are alike.  No.  We’re not.  There is absolutely no such thing as A female character any more than there is A male character.   Personality types, hopes, fears, wants, and behaviors run the full spectrum in both genders.

C.S. Lewis said, “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

I believe the same applies to making a character “believable”.  If one sits down and thinks, “Okay.  I need to create a believable female character”, they’ll stress  too much on what they think a female character is supposed to be like, rather than creating a real, individual character.

Your characters, regardless of gender, become real, thus believable, when you give them hopes and fears, good traits and flaws.  Who is your character?  What do they want out of life?  What are their dreams and nightmares? 

Ask your character such questions and let them come forth.    Let them simply be who they are, for good or bad. Let them breathe on the page.  They will be real.  And believable.