Monday, November 09, 2009

NaNo Posts

... just because.

from the topic Anyone Else Doing A Fairy Tale Re-Telling?

According to the outline, my novel "Masters of Fable" is supposed to be nothing more than a series of retellings - or perhaps reimaginings? "heavily inspired by" kinds of things? - of all sorts of fairy tales. So far, I've counted Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Bluebeard, The Snow Queen, Beauty and the Beast, Tam Lin (... which would be a ballad/folk tale, rather than a fairy tale. If there's a vast difference. It's one of my favourite stories of all time), and several mythological tales: Eurydice; the descent of the goddess Inanna (a tale which has haunted me since I first read Victoria Schmidt's "45 Master Characters"); and the story of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. I think being able to finish a short story reimagining of a favorite fairy tale and move on to the next will really inspire me to finish my novel. I'm excited!


from the topic No Female Main Characters?

I've actually encountered the opposite problem: when I had finished developing the cast for my main project, I sat back - and realized that there was not a single male character to be seen. It was rather distressing. I've tried to add in MMCs since, and have so far suceeded in coaxing the FMC's father into the story. All my MMCs, it appears, have migrated to my secondary NaNo project, which was ostentibly about a pair of brothers uncovering the secrets of their mother's past, and turned instead into a great drama between the brothers and their fathers, with the mother's ghost as an incidental sideshow.


In 22k between both novels. Fun and happiness, :)

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Soaring Wordcounts

Note: the title of this post does not apply to me, xD

This is the most inspiring blog in the world. Kateness, NaNoWriMo author, on her way to one million words. Reading her journey toward that extraordinary goal makes me want to run out and start writing like mad. Five handwritten notebook pages a day to stay on schedule? Ha! That can be done. Let's go go go!

But then things like Drawing and German class pull me back to earth and lock up the little visionary Stephanie in a cage.

D<

I need to find my priorities, i.e. novel writing over lingering over schoolwork. Schoolwork, aye, is very important, but not when procrastination makes it an emergency, rather than an enjoyment.

Down with procrastination.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Happy NaNoWriMo!

D:

I forgot to post my annual "Yay, November 1st!" entry yesterday. I shall now take the time to remedy that lapse.

Yay, November 2nd!

I'm writing two NaNos this year (because between them, I should be able to reach 50,000; this pleasant hope frees me to concentrate on the stories I want to tell, rather than the number of words I thirst to achieve.) I'm in roughly 15%. I'm writing one novel by hand (the sequel to my 2006 NaNo and the rewrite of my 2007 NaNo, now with 100% more story!) and typing the other. I ponder aloud, hourly, whether my creative writing teacher will accept a first-draft NaNo for my final portfoilo. The syllabus merely calls for a "substantial prose piece", >_>

Story details!

Story #1, the sequel/rewrite, is primarily about my RPG characters Amaranth and Mencha. My 2007 featured Raziya (another RPG charrie), and so Raziya returns, with a smaller role and no gossiping animal companions to distract from the story this time around (you will never believe how much an animal companion can gossip. O. M. G. And furthermore, how it can gossip about nothing whatsoever. It's really amazing). I threw in my latest RPG wunderkinder, Mitya, into the mix just because it's NaNo and hey, why not have some fun. And I reappropriated a really fun character from 2008's farce as a villian. Wicked Witch for the win, 8D The summary, in short, is that Amaranth has debts to pay and the Wicked Witch wants her payment, and Mencha suggests that rather than running off with Amaranth's soul (... again. Soul-snatching has become such a cliche in my stories, >>), Amaranth and Co. can pay her in well-told stories. The Wicked Witch accepts with the necessary Dire Warnings Against Trickery and Such. Cue fairy tale retelling extravaganza, 8D

Story #2 sprang utterly out of the blue and I still can't wrap my mind around it. Summary: driven by the threat of blackmail, two estranged brothers must reconcile their differences and search for the truth about their mother's past. The story is, by necessity, a mystery (or at least the shadow of one; the younger brother is diligently trying to drag fantasy elements into my very real world setting and turning it into a paranormal... something, and I will admit, ghosts would be fun. But there can't be too much fantasy, or I'll end up being vague and wordy about nothing: I've not yet worldbuilt enough of an urban fantasy universe to write about it properly). The setting is my backyard (or near enough... I can call the nearest town my backyard, can't I?), and the main characters are named Terrence and Jamie. A Beautiful Maiden created herself today, to give my POV charrie someone to talk to. And they both speak German. Or at least try to speak German, i.e. the author practicing the day's lesson in her novel.

My goal for this month? The words "The End" in either one or both of my novels. And if I manage to pick up 50k on the way, all the better. ^^

Love and luck to NaNoWriMoers and all writers everywhere!

EDIT: Utterly forgot that I had mentioned these same NaNo ideas in the last post, xD Ah well. I'm keeping the glass coffin for the second story, just in case you're curious. But it's now called a solarium.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Looks Like A Broken Aesop

This post has spoilers for a movie called Snow White: Fairest of Them All. But the real question is, does the reader care? xD

You will excuse me if I take today’s post to RANT RANT RANT?

Last evening, my mother, sister, and I watched a movie called Snow White: Fairest of Them All. The title and cover spoke volumes; I wasn’t expecting it to be particularly good. Fantasy films rarely are. This movie, moreover, was made for television. But we watched it anyway. I even voted to watch it. Who knows? I thought, I’ve been proven wrong about things before. Perhaps the adulations on the back cover have a point to them.

But they didn’t, of course. This experience has proved to me that when it comes to movies that I, personally, would not care to watch with any kind of enjoyment, my powers of foresight, while grievously mortified in other circumstances, are unerring in this instance. This is not boasting. This is a caution of the highest sort, D:

Fairest of Them All begins most unexpectedly: the only kingdom over which the Father and Mother of Snow White rule is their own rustic cottage. And when the inevitable fairy tale plot device has stolen away the poor Mother, the Father goes wandering through the snow in search of milk for baby. His despairing tears awaken a genie from the ice, and the genie grants him milk, a kingdom, and a queen. I wondered briefly after this odd beginning, but then concluded that it was due to the rule of the modern retelling of fairy tales: Our Fairy Tales Are Different. And Better. And Edgier. Cheers.

So Father is now a King and Snow White a Princess. But there is no queen to help rule and care for the child; the obliging genie hastens home and turns his sister (a veritable goblin to look at, complete with a Wicked Witch’s unspeakable fingernails) into a beautiful lady who can seduce and win the king. But the king’s heart still remains with his poor wife. His daughter screams bloody murder when the witch attempts to hold her.

So the witch flees back to her brother and her brother gives her a magic mirror to smash. Bits of glass rain over the kingdom, and a single, solitary piece falls into the king’s eye. The next time the witch shows up, all he can see is her (glamoured) beauty. He is effectively seduced, and Baby Snow White screams in her crib in the next room.

It was at this point that I turned to my mother and sister and exclaimed, “The witch should have put a bit of mirror in the baby’s eye. Who cares about the king—if she won over Snow White, then the king would have to follow suit and just think what kind of awesome story that would make! And anyway, it was so obvious she should have put that mirror in the baby’s eye; it’s the baby who hates her—”

“Ssh!”

So I hushed and mourned the waste of a spectacular inversion to the usual tale. A line of text informs viewers that sixteen years have passed; the next scene finds Snow White, her father, and her stepmother in a carriage, with the stepmother gabbling about the prince who’s coming for a visit and Snow White, sit down and stop waving to those peasant people no one cares about them blah. The exchange between stepmother and stepdaughter informs viewers of Mutual Dislike; Father pops in to inform viewers that the years have turned him senile and spineless. And he’s still pawing at the eye with its sliver of mirror. … It’s been sixteen years.

The queen beats a horse, to show us how evil she is, and the carriage arrives at the castle (where she steps on the carriage driver’s hand. To show us again how evil she is. And before now, she’s been turning dwarves and gnomes into statues. Just in case you couldn’t guess she was evil). She rushes upstairs to meet the prince, and stumbles in on him ogling Snow White from a window. She falls wildly in love with his curly hair. He turns to look at her and thinks, with horror, “She has lines in her face.”

Some stuff happens between now and the prince’s welcome feast, wherein Snow White appears into the queen’s magic mirror to declaim her own beauty (and her display of narcissism is perfectly repulsive; it makes the queen look tame and humble), king finally gets the glass out of his eye (… after sixteen years) and the queen decides to use the glass to ensnare the prince and his curly hair in a net of Enchanted Love. But the prince stares so long and hard at Snow White that his natural clumsiness gets loose, and throws the queen’s plans awry. She snarls at him, “Idiot.” This viewer then wondered why the heck she is trying to enthrall an idiot who can’t keep his eyes in his head or his jaw shut for half a second. He’s scaring Snow White as if he’s some kind of molester. He bumbles about worse than Bella Swan. He has no virtues aside from curly hair, and curly hair is not a virtue so I shouldn’t even be making this point. And yet... oh, whatever.

The piece of glass intended for Prince Curly flies instead into the eye of a servant, who ogles and leers at the queen. She facepalms. Meanwhile, Prince Curly stalks Snow White into a maze and confesses True Love. Snow White complains bitterly about the shallowness of people—they only ever see the outside of a person, but does outward beauty ever inform one of inner goodness? Nope. Nada. Never. The prince, with a strained look of glee on his face, presses his hand to her chest and tells her to look inside her own heart.

There’s an Aesop in there somewhere, and Snow White is supposed to be referring to the queen and all but… you know… Snow White and her tragic complaint are just not working. Snow White’s outer beauty is an accurate reflection of her inner beauty. People have been shown to react to both (though I have my doubts about the prince, =/). As for the queen, only the king has ever been enchanted by her beauty, and only just enchanted (that piece of mirror was defective from the start). Everyone else had seen right through her: peasants, carriage driver, Snow White, Prince Curly, all of them. The only people she’s fooled is her silly husband and herself. And her husband deserved to be fooled, as far as stories go: he wasn’t very intelligent to begin with. So just what is Snow White quibbling about? I am, by this time, growing rather sick of the idiocies in this movie. I think with longing on the 30+ tabs I have opened on TV Tropes.

Back inside the castle, the leering servant has pledged his Eternal Love to the queen, and she commands him to kill Snow White. He takes a torch and seeks out the princess in the maze. He leers at her and hides his face and shadow and as good as says, “Come along, little girl. I’ve got some candy for you in my van.” (Actually, he says something to the effect of your parents want to see you. ALONE. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.) The prince feels that he has not adequately convinced the viewers of his stupidity, and so giggles, “Why Snow White, you should follow the nice man! Just don’t leave me here too long!” Snow White goes. The servant turns into the woods. Snow White says, “Why ever are you leading me there, dear Hector?” Says Hector, “We’re going to check the rabbit traps.”

Says all three viewers: “Please. Hector. The obvious evil. It hurts.”

Some more stuff happens and Snow White huggles a rabbit until Hector raises a knife. She calmly puts the bunny down, turns on her would-be murderer a blank face and asks in monotone, “Oh Hector. Why.”

The piece of glass slides obligingly out of Hector’s eye. There is a muffled sound of outrage from the audience. It took the king sixteen freaking years

This viewer, by this time, is fed up, and with great dignity, absents herself from the television screen and returns to TV Tropes. She listens to Snow White get into all sorts of scrapes (without once mussing her hair), to the prince getting turned into a bear and proceeding to lumber through the woods moaning, and to Snow White’s mirror image replying to the queen’s inquiries, “I am the fairest in the land. I am. I am. I am the fairest in the land. I am. I am. I am the—” ad nauseaum. I tune out after a while. The article on the Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots is positively riveting. Don’t click the link, or your life will be ruined.

I drift back to watch the end of Snow White: the queen has failed to kill Snow White and her genie brother returns to turn her ugly again. The prince regains his curly head of hair and his ogling face. At some point, there is some moralizing on beauty and ugliness, and how people never think to look beyond the outward person to the beautiful, sparkly inward person. Again, the Aesop fails. Snow White’s shining face and flawless hair are an accurate reflections of her heart. The evil queen’s TRUE appearance (warts and fingernails and everything) is a true reflection of her heart. So what if her brother glamoured her into beauty? That beauty was a veil, drawn over the truth of her appearance, and the truth of her appearance tells the truth of her heart. So much for beauty does not equal goodness. It does, in Snow White. And the queen is bad because she is ugly. Pixel Johnson, preserve us. Perhaps the Aesop is more subtle than my accusations. But perhaps such a consideration is overly generous.

I come to the end of this post and realize it was not much of a rant. I guess writing calms me down or something. Ah well. I hope, at the least, you the reader were entertained.

In other news, I don’t know what to write for NaNoWriMo. On the one hand, I’m considering a revision of my 2007 NaNo: seven characters tell seven stories to save one of their number from being fairy-snatched. It’s a perfectly useful idea: I can squeeze all the other stories I want to write into it—stories within stories, and all that jazz. On the other hand, I came up with a story, yesterday morning, that made me very happy: two estranged brothers are forced to come to terms with one another while they work to solve the mystery of their mother’s life (or they will be eaten alive by blackmail!) However, as time passes, coming to terms grows increasingly more impossible: the younger can’t let go of the past and the events that estranged them to begin with, and the elder is beginning to lose his grasp of reality as a result of the battle he wages against his sibling. He, a rational man dedicated to the pursuit of hard fact, science, and logic, concludes, by the end, that to win free of his brother, he must resort to exorcism, while the younger concludes that to resurrect the past (in which he was happy and his brother was not, but that doesn’t matter), he must put his brother into an enchanted sleep and bury him in a glass coffin. This was actually not inspired in any way by Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, xD

But I'll see.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Or around about there, anyway, :D

The weather is turning cold (though I've probably jinxed it by mentioning this; Thursday and Friday are supposed to have a high of 40, but it'll probably rise to 80 thanks to this blog post. Weather always works that way, =/). I've decided that October, November, and December are my favourite months of the year (October because that's when fall begins to settle in and I have an excuse to curl up with a cup of black tea and a volume of gothic romance; November because what the hey IT'S NOVEL WRITING TIME; and December because Christmas has only increased in brilliance over the years, as the family has begun a tradition of making, rather than buying, gifts, as well as writing end of the year newsletters in faux-Victorian style for the entertainment of our extended family out west). I'm dedicating October to good (or at least, laugh-out-loud amusing) reading (link leads to Wikipedia's gothic fiction page, which has been updated, to my immense satisfaction, since I last linked to it), November to NOVEL TIME, and December to rewriting the fruits of novel time. I'll see if I can squeeze in school on the side, xD

Still editing 2006 NaNo. It's grown very exciting. I threatened to exile my inner critic unless she shut up, and she obliged me; in the silence she left behind, I have discovered all sorts of undeveloped themes I would love to spin out and work toward and foreshadow and all that delicious stuff. Truly, the best writing is in the rewrite.

And now to leave you with a quote, or, Why C. S. Lewis is one of my favourite authors:

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.

- C. S. Lewis

Friday, October 09, 2009

She Saunters Back, (A) Month(s) Later

:: waves ::

Hello, cyberspace. It's been forever, hasn't it?

I've been a good young lady, for all that I've abandoned SP in the past few months, xD All the writing energy that might have gone into the blog went instead into stories (... mostly. I do have a bad habit of pouring itsy bits of my muse into schoolwork, but it does result in German journal entries/timed creative writing exercises/charcoal drawings that make me proud. So never mind. About the "bad habit" bit). I've been writing short stories and have finally, finally started editing my 2006 NaNo. I was inclined, at first, to be irritated by the melodrama, but I've overcome that reflex, and reminded myself with each page that, "This is a first draft. It is meant to be dreadful. It is meant to be dreadful. The best writing comes in the revisions. Not in the first draft. The REVISION." The mantra has helped. I am no longer so quick to rant in red ink across a page, but have taken to asking questions of my characters. Questions help me to see the potential of the story far better than writing "CHRIST PIXEL, I HATE THIS OMG", =3 And it's the potential I need to seek out, rather than rubbish. I have a theory that the rubbish will not be able to stand in face of improvement, and will take care of itself.

I've been listening to author interviews lately, and it's been a wonderful exercise - hearing the inner workings behind the polished cover of the novel, in the mind of the author. My favourites have so far been Anne Rice (an older interview, not too long after the publication of Lestat), Toni Morrison (and how it is not unreasonable to believe that Beloved is a ghost) and Christopher Paolini (mostly older interviews, since I can't find many post-Eldest and Brisingr for download. It's fascinating how he mentioned he can't read Eragon anymore. Imagine having read a book that many times... ouch ouch ouch, xD)

I've just finished reading Beloved yesterday, and oh, it was beautiful. I've distilled its brilliance just enough, in my mind, so I can rave about how deeply I've fallen in love with the story, before I let the tale re-expand in all its complexity in my thoughts. I hadn't expected to like it (so many people of my acquaintance have told me what a difficult, often times incomprehensible, novel it is; I gathered from that criticism that Beloved was one of those novels where the author plays beautiful havoc with the language and doesn't bother to tell a story). But the interview I listened to made me wonder just what was so incomprehensible about it - Morrison described the story as that of the ghost of a murdered girl returning to ask her mother and murderer an unaskable (real word?) question: was the murder justified?

I leaped into the story ready to accept Beloved as a ghost, and I think that, along with having heard Morrison describe her own ideas about the story, really helped with understanding. I knew where the story was leading (but the story is so well written that one could know all the plot details and still be moved by its sheer beauty) and didn't bother about worrying over Beloved's true identity (who is she? What is she? Why won't the author tell me? Halp, D:): I could take her as the ghost everyone who knew of her believed her to be. A scene near the end made me ponder the possibilities of mass hallucination, though, xD

But the intricacy of Beloved goes far beyond Beloved's identity. There's the story of the past, and how it shapes the present. Morrison moved seamlessly between past and present earlier in the novel, and the speed at which she moves can be a bit bewildering. I finally caught the rhythm of it (and loved it, because I've played with that style so often myself; it's nice to see it well done; it gives paltry personal attempts a glimmer of hope). Sethe's history is just as immediate as her present, and the story doesn't stop when she slips into Sethe's history - it gains momentum, and the present is clearer for it. But in the present, there wasn't so much mystery that I was confused or aggravated (that aggravation comes from senseless mystery in other novels, when everyone but the reader is well informed, and ever character flaunts the fact that they know something crucial that the reader doesn't, enough to make the reader - pah, enough with anonymity: ME - scream).

To be brief, I shall have to read Beloved again (for with the epilogue, and BBC World Book Clue interview I listened to with Toni Morrison in London, I suddenly - tentatively - saw connections I hadn't noticed before) and then again, and then maybe a fourth time and then a fifth. =D

Did you know what before Charlotte Bronte died, she wrote two chapters for a new novel? Two writers have (lately? certainly compared with the years in which Bronte lived) completed her manuscript. I'm reading both. There's Emma, by Another Lady (... I know. She's just another lady, according to the cover) and Emma Brown by Clare Boylan. Both are good enough novels in their own right.. The first was a bit too sensational (and fast-paced, with none of Bronte's introspection) for my tastes, and the second too sentimental - I feel as if I am being wrestled into feeling the pathos of characters and situations I cannot bring myself to feel anything but a vague irritation for. At the very least, it interesting to compare and contrast the novels.

I'm also reading Villette, by Charlotte Bronte, and The Cider House Rules by John... Irving, I think his name is. So! Lots of reading, lots of writing (mostly on the editing side), lots of schoolwork: I have a quiz to study for in German, workshop submissions to read and comment on in Creative Writing, and a week to breathe the sweet air of No Homework in Drawing 101.

I am learning to draw with charcoal. I love charcoal now, :)

Ciao! And let us hope to meet again before the month is out. I have neglected this blog too long.

P.S. NaNoWriMo is on its way!

Monday, August 03, 2009

School's Out!

Wow. No more essays. School has finally finished, :] Until the fall, then.

The professor assigned the most intriguing poems. I was first entranced by the poems on Icarus's tragedy, and now this latest! Billy Collins's "On Turning Ten". My favourite bit:

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall on the sidewalks of life
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Summer reading ended on August first, and I'd managed to finish twenty-one books! I'll have to post about them at some point in the future.