Of Elsewhere
As you may recall from earlier on this blog or elsewhere, C.S. Lewis writes about sweet desire: a hunger that is better than any other fullness, a sensation of miserable longing so beautiful that one feels compelled to recapture it and fails. In lieu of a longer post tonight, I thought I’d share two excerpts […]
Today I have been trying (and mostly but not entirely failing) to rewrite a bit of Evernost. I know the problem (my main character bores me and so does the storyline) and I think I know the solution (write it anyway, trying to make it as smart as I can, because neither is inherently boring […]
Quickie today, but I made another zine! This one, Of Unreal Identities, is more about the pictures than the words. It’s a selection of self-portraits, loosely defined, interspersed with a few comments on identity, some mine and some others’. It’s also a quarter of an 8.5 x 11 sheet in size rather than a half, […]
So. I have my 240,000-word trilogy Of Evernost in a depressingly boring first draft. I have to keep reminding myself: it was supposed to be bad, it had to be bad if it was ever going to be done. I’ve revamped the structure in my head. I’m provisionally getting rid of two novellas (there were nine originally, three per volume) […]
Last things first: I am revising Evernost-the-novel (as opposed to Evernost-the-compilation-of-poetry-and-pictures, which will take much longer to mature). This is very exciting and somewhat exhausting. Sometimes to encourage myself along the way writing I’ll pick up a random or near-random book on writing. Today’s was John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. I read his The Art of […]
Today’s post is adapted from an essay I started a few years ago and recently rediscovered. I hope you enjoy it. It definitely gets at some of the struggles I have creating. “Get inside the sound,” said the leader of the African drum group. Fifteen of us sat inside a room in the local art […]
I finished George MacDonald’s The Wise Woman and Other Stories, in which I read only the Other Stories, because I already know The Wise Woman well and don’t have the bug to reread it right now. I found “Little Daylight” rather lovely and expressive but also a bit slight for my taste. “Cross Purposes” was fun but pretty silly […]
I started reading George MacDonald in high school, at C.S. Lewis’s recommendation. My first George MacDonald was, if I remember correctly, “The Golden Key,” a lovely story about a boy and girl who enter fairy land to go on a quest and find as they near the end that they have lived their entire lives […]
I’ve been too distracted by other projects to want to blog lately. Evernost continues to evolve, with excitement and sometimes drama. For a long time I’ve vaguely wanted to write myself into it as a lying narrator and alter-ego of a major character or two. So I’m trying to write a coherent or semi-coherent account […]
This past two weeks I’ve reread Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer—I read it the first time in a public library, I think in high school—and finished C.S. Lewis’s narrative poems (I’d read Dymer and the Launcelot before but stalled out before The Nameless Isle and The Queen of Drum). A few notes from Letters […]
Of Elsewhere 