#wordweavers#Writing 16. If your characters were in a museum, how would they act?
Collections of wonders in 1700 did not usually have labels or placards explaining things, so Franz-Karl asks lots of questions and gets into long conversations with the custodians. Fritzel joins in.
(In a modern museum, Franz-Karl would be like me and my brother and annoy the rest of the party by reading ALL the information provided. Audio-tour headsets would be Heaven, but he would still read EVERYTHING.)
all the stars were born
to illuminate this night
draw you clean from the darkness
a liberation
amidst the scraps of our world
the light needs to kiss your skin
Alice Munro's death was announced yesterday. Her self-described "second oldest remaining friend and colleague," fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood, has written this tribute to her on her Substack, In the Writing Burrow. It's meant for paying subscribers, but a substantial portion is free to read.
"Alice could be quite mischievous, and not only in her writing. Both of us had dark curly hair at one time. We were about the same height.
"Alice: I was standing on a train platform and a man came up to me and said, ‘You’re Margaret Atwood!' 'Yes,' I said, 'I am.' Then we had quite an interesting conversation about your working methods and where you get your inspiration.
"Turn and turn about: After we both had white hair, and after Alice had won the Nobel, people would come up to me and murmur, 'Congratulations.' 'For what?' I would say. 'You know. Winning that prize.' After a while I stopped trying to explain, and just murmured back, modestly, 'Thank you.' Though the Thank Yous were really for Alice."
#PennedPossibilities#Writing 314 — Has your MC ever felt as though they were reborn in the mental / emotional sense?
Hella interesting topic.
Parthia/Ta'regi experienced a sensation that felt akin to 'awakening after a heavy slumber' when the ritual happened and then spends the rest of TCotWS off/on wrestling with an existential paradox of always having existed and never having existed as she does.
#WritersCoffeeClub
Have you ever attended a writer's fair / festival to promote your work? Would you?
I'm just about to. I'll be at Continuum in Melbourne, Australia, this weekend. Mostly just to see what's what, but also walking around with a sign and a few books. I do want to give away some review copies, if I can find a good fit.
#PennedPossibilities 315 — What smells remind your MC of their childhood? CW: Food, gross.
Two stories, two MCs, two very different answers...
Devil-girl:
She was not ever particularly copasetic with her elevation from middle class to atmospheric. When she found herself having mistreated a servant, threatening their livelihood, her autistic construction of empathy as in /I'm living in her shoes and this is fear/ kicked in. She worked hard from that moment on to /be/ with anyone humbly, and the servants kept her secret of visiting in their quarters or at the homes safe. (Actually, not entirely as the servant-mistake was one of her guardian's "lessons," but let's ignore that.) What she came to adore was a peasant bread that represented in her head getting away from all her responsibilities. Buttery, cinnamony, yeasty, with lots of honey and chopped up pumpkin. Passing by an open bakery door will often remind her of simpler times.
Wintereyes:
She doesn't remember a lot before her gift manifested at age 7. The going theory is that it broke something in her head. Farm smells, flowers, even fields of corn, elicit nothing, though she visits her birth parents' land claim regularly when the Blue Feather's pack hunting grounds shift to that part of the Fell Woods. Her mother's cooking in her kitchen, usually fresh venison or rabbit Wintereyes caught, is simply human food. How she survived going off with a wolf pack at that young age is a tale I should pursue at some point. The fact is that she did. Survive. And well. The smells of a fresh kill, laced with steaming iron scent, does make her remember becoming wild and first running free. It also reminds her of the other smells associated with recent death, some quite noisome. There's a thrill there, even if in the beginning she was barely surviving on too rich organ meat her teeth could chew, or when the alpha wasn't kind, meat Mother Wolf chewed for her. That was a special smell she remembers fondly. Her brother—a hunter that the wolves soon tolerated so long as he didn't visit often—taught her to make fire and to cook meat. The half-burned smell of meat dropped into a wood fire still makes her mouth water, even as it dredges up memories of reaching into a fire and burns, and of ashes and charcoaled fat, which ground in her teeth like soft sand. She became a much more skillful campfire cook out of necessity.
Oh, one other smell: Wet wolf (which is identical to wet dog), because while a wolf could keep themself "clean" with their tongue, the result of a human attending a kill, skin caked with ground-in dirt, sweat, and later ash, was more than the sensitive noses of her pack could stand. They often chased her into streams. She splashed them back, of course!
Genuine question for #WritersOfMastodon - with the rise of AI generated everything, is it now possible to be published by an actual publisher? I'd heard it was virtually impossible before AI but presumably they're now inundated by manuscripts that are either part or fully AI creations. I ask because I always assumed I'd write my great novel one day, but it seems vanishingly unlikely now. I have 2 brothers who's father was a successful author, although he had his foot in the door via being a reporter (who brought down Concorde and was the only person ever allowed to interview/write a book about Pablo Escobar), so was already semi-famous and had contacts. I met a published author the other week, but she's a proof-reader for Penguin books, so also has a foot in the door. I assume that if you write something you're happy with, you no longer just send it to publishers and hope they read? Interested to know if anyone has had any success with this or if everyone self-publishes now.
Tomo: "Ume. I had to talk her out of investing in a maid cafe in Hanno and not paying some scam publisher to look at her stories.."
Ume: "All true. But least gullible sounds like a good thing. Tomo wouldn't believe me about Mikawa being a ghost even after she tried to kill me and Shiomi several times. Mikawa literally had to knock on our door before he would believe me."
ROFL It’s ironic that I write more during downtime at work than at home! It’s going to carry over into after my shift as I have a fairly strong hold on what I want to take place. It’s a calm before a storm, I love writing scenes that follow a big event! Aftermaths tend to get quite interesting, so many directions to follow.
The author that brought you Troll Song and Forgotten Legends now offers you the chance to read the third book in the The Wizard's Scion: The Third Wish.
shake your made money
jingle pockets full of change
but for all your wealth
and haunted machinery
there will always be
a kid with dried gourds on sticks
filled with sun-dried seeds
dancing the rain of pummelled
skins stretched on wood frames
weaving patterns of counter
and pulse, free, beyond your claws