Stringing Words

Sometime over this past winter, I began to realize that I was lacking a solid writing community. "Twist," I said to myself, "there's just no excuse for being a solitary writer these days." So I checked in with my local NaNoWriMo region and began stalking some writers.

If you're looking for writers in your home area, National Novel Writing Month's regional forums are a great place to start. (And why aren't you NaNoWriMo-ing? It's fun, addictive, and often wildly productive.)

Our local region here in Hamilton is great. Throughout ScriptFrenzy, we had regular in-person meetings that were really helpful. One of my fellow screnziers and I are still soldiering on with weekly meetings, which is awesome.

Of course there's also the online writing community. Through one of the Hamilton region writers, I was introduced to Stringing Words, a writing forum that she and two other women founded. This is an awesome group. There's a huge range of experience and ages here. There's a core group of people who it seems have been around for a while, and let me tell you, these are nice people with great senses of humour and an impressive passion for writing. They are writing fiends.

So if you're looking to hop on a bandwagon, these people will let you call shotgun and tell you you're gonna fly that thing to the moon.

Right now, plans are cooking for something called "The Summer of Fantasy". It's looking like it will be a three-month extravaganza. June is dedicated to world-building exercises, and July and August are set aside for drafting a fantasy novel based on what you build in June. I'm ultra excited about it. Come join us! I dare ya!

Forums are mostly members-only, so you'll want to join to get a full browsing experience in.

stringingwords.com

Five Dragons

I got word from the good people at the new anthology Escape Clause that they've accepted a piece of mine called "Five Dragons". I'm bursting with pride, especially because this is a Canadian speculative anthology. And, you know, we're a speculative nation.

Spring comes to the woods

Hey, it's spring. Let's take a walk.

Come on!

Come on!

Everywhere, the trees are bursting with life.

Winter's back is broken. The old gives way to the new.

What was frozen flows again.

The trees reach for the sky.

These are trout lily leaves, poking up out of the forest floor. Our friend Wendy showed us that these are edible. They taste a little like sweet peas (the bean, not the flower!). You can eat the roots, too. They're nice in a salad.

Here's a bunch of them, growing at the base of a tree.

They also flower (hence the name, I suppose!). Isn't it beautiful?

These tiny purple flowers started growing everywhere a week ago.

Some of the things that grow here are a little strange. This plant has rust-coloured flowers. I can only imagine the insects that are attracted to this!

Even the slightly nasty plants are growing like crazy.

Look, an alien pod!

There's still the meadow up ahead. Come on!

Come on!

The meadow grass is slowly greening.

It's time to celebrate spring. All the best to everyone this season.

Danse Macabre

Try not to cut yourself on idarem's cheekbones while you watch this.

Something Useful

I recently followed the advice of Dr. Wicked on "Writing and Technology: Finding Your Place" and purchased an AlphaSmart 2000. This is the durable but less flashy older brother of the Neo, for those who aren't familiar with this cool little device. Basically, we're talking about a super lightweight smart keyboard that remembers up to 64 pages of text and retypes it into the file of your choice when you want it to. It runs on three double-A batteries for a billion hours. Dr. Wicked explains it extremely well if you need more convincing.

I am (and shall remain, I boldly declare) a steadfast believer in pen and paper. I write first drafts by hand. As a lefty, I experience an intuitive connection with the page that is quite different from the balanced intellectualism of keyboard work. And I love the grace and ease of certain pens. I work with a Rotring fountain pen and Aurora or Noodler's ink, which is a much more economical option than some of the roller ball pens I worked with as an academic. At two and three dollars a pop, disposable pens end up costing a whole lot more over time. (To compare, a seven or eight dollar bottle of fountain pen ink lasts a year even with heavy daily use.)

But enough about my pen fetish...

The point is, when it comes to getting text off the handwritten page and into a word processor, I find I often get sidetracked (Videogum, I'm looking at you!). So the idea behind the AlphaSmart purchase was that I could separate my writing time from other, superfun, but perhaps less productive activities. I'm thinking a super lightweight portable keyboard is also a better option than my big old superheavy laptop for transcribing research in the library, for taking out to the coffee house, for dropping on the floor accidentally, and for traipsing about the wilds of Northern Ontario. (Our family cottage doesn't have regular hydro service. There's a generator, but we don't run it 24/7 and it's loud and unreliable.)

So the point of all this, is that I ordered an AlphaSmart from some dude on eBay for $9.95 US, and it came today. They tend to go for a little more than that, but not too much more. I purchased a simple cable that you need to upload files from the AlphaSmart to your computer, and I was ready to rock and roll.

The point to this story is that the AlphaSmart was previously loved by a school that used it to help kids work on their writing (or for all I know, their typing). As it turns out, files do not get deleted just because the device doesn't have batteries or a connection to power. When I turned it on, I found that two of the files had, uh, content in them. Reading these made me immediately want to go out and get some schoolage kids of my own.

The first item:

Dear Mrs. Losey

we would like your approval to have an’end of the year water party’the we would like to set up are water balloontoss,quismo,gallonfill,freetime if you let us do this we will be on are best behavor and we will clan it up.

I have no clue what half of this stuff is. Quismo? Sounds diabolical. But at least this child is promising to honour his Scottish roots. Or maybe his supremacist roots.

I also found this short story? essay? about a touching weekend camping trip:

When me and my uncle were at a forest I was throw rocks I hit something and that something was a Camodo Dragon.It chased us intill my uncle found a stick and hit him with it.Then he died,he picked him up and droped him on his head again an again to make sure he was dead.Then raped him up and was heading home.I sat in front cause I didn’t know if he was still alive.

I love that it becomes unclear whether the kamodo or the uncle dies and gets "raped up". Powerful use of ambiguity, that. Seriously, kid, if you're out there and this is your work, I hope you kept writing. I can only imagine what kind of sick stuff you'll cook up after you experience the horrors of dating and life after high school.

They Drink Us in Our Sleep

The editors of The Devil's Food Anthology have accepted my short, "They Drink Us in Our Sleep".

That just makes me feel...about as awesome as watching dancing dogs!

My Illuminated Agenda

Currently writing 2k a day, five days a week while I wait to see if I've got employment for the summer. If I act like a professional writer, will I be paid like a professional writer? (Hundreds of cents coming my way!)

I've been making art to use as inspiration for the short stories I've been drafting. "Making" is sometimes only a rough approximation of what I've been doing. Sometimes I'm printing out old woodcut images and colouring them by hand (I'm into pencil crayons right now). Today I messed around endlessly in a photoshop knockoff. I ripped the various images of the fish with legs, cavorting fetus skeleton, and woodcut mushrooms from various online sources, and stamped and manipulated the heck out of the resulting collage.

Internet, your images are not safe with me!