Of Elsewhere
We all know it’s hard to get published. My intermittent efforts show this (I am, as of August, trying to submit poems every month—haven’t submitted any for October yet but preparing), and the process has been very tough on many of my friends who’ve been through it more than I have. I think this is […]
Hello! I took a bit of time off work to do Evernost rewrite/revision, and while I wasn’t as productive as I’d hoped to be, I at least hit a major milestone. And I came up with an experimental strategy for revising: turning the prose into poetry and back again. In theory, it will help me […]
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’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 […]
I have a lot of balls in the air right now. Grad School Bug is almost but not quite dead, but I’ve written this 20-some page paper on Diana Wynne Jones that I want to try to edit and publish. Unfortunately, I can’t motivate myself to work on it anymore now that it’s preliminarily done. […]
A bit of research on haiku reveals that the strict 5-7-5 syllable pattern we learn in school is frowned upon, or, at the very least, unnecessary, in English (apparently, 5-7-5 sounds too long and wordy in English because Japanese syllables sound shorter than English syllables). In addition, I gather that haiku are supposed avoid figurative […]
Of Elsewhere 