Categories
Travel Writing

Writing with and without a routine

As evidenced by my previous post, I was in New Orleans (fully vaccinated and wearing a mask in all public spaces, for those who may be concerned.) And writing EOM was…. Easy? Perhaps that’s the wrong word. But it just flowed. It felt like, “yes, you are in a new place, you should be writing this.” Things that had me stuck at home just resolved while I was in a new place. It felt wonderful.

Though only writing while I’m travelling is not a sustainable plan. I cannot travel enough to write all that I want. 

Hence the routine.

Every book on writing I’ve ever read has stressed the importance of making writing a habit, incorporating it as a part of your routine. So, I’ve done my best to establish one, and, surprise surprise, I’ve been more productive!

My writing routine is:

When travelling – just writing every day at any time, because everything is stimulating and it’s seems all I want to do is write.

When I’m not travelling, I try to leave the house by 7am (this was the case before the pandemic and now again since I’m vaccinated.) Libraries and cafes work best. Monday through Thursday mornings I work on Where Power Lies, (which is currently over 70,000 words and a little more than half-way done. No doubt it will take lots of cuts and redrafting editing in future, but not today!

I’ve started putting my phone on Do Not Disturb, that rather than just silent for my morning hours. It’s too easy to get derailed. Just as one gets into a flow, one is brought out of it again by a text or a news notification. Already doing just this has upped my word count.

Another part of the routine, (inspired by Rachel Aaron’s book 2k to 10k) is to take five minutes before I start drafting, to write out in a notebook what the scene(s) I am about to write will be like. It only takes few sentences, and it really focusses my mind. 

Fridays (like today!) are for EOM and perhaps also a blog post, if I have anything at all to say. (And it appears that today I do.)

Yes, I need to keep to a routine. It will allow me to complete projects and get more writing done. 

But nothing will compare with the joy of writing in  new place. I feel I write my most and best when I’m experiencing a place for the first time. I’m more observant, I make connections, ask questions, and am just filled with a general sense of wonder and curiosity. And that of course, is immensely helpful in the creative process. 

I have plans for a vacation this autumn for Morocco and Spain, which Delta variant is seriously menacing. The intention was (and still is, for the moment) to write fun shorts while I’m away, based in the location I happen to be! I’m really looking forward to those projects. My future travels will inspire a little series of stories that I hope to put up on Amazon and other e-book platforms. I just want to put something out there. Get it over with. Break the barrier and start sharing my work, even if it’s rubbish. 

Oddly, I do not have this hangup about fan-fiction. For some reason, fan-fiction readers seem much kinder and go into a story wanting to enjoy it. I know any readers for novels and novellas I e-publish will never be as wonderful as fanfiction readers. (Unless they are my fan fiction readers. Would I be so lucky.) But I can’t let that stop me from putting my work into the world… (anymore.)

So the plan is:

1. Post a new chapter of EOM next Friday (yay!) 

2. Finish the first draft of Where Power Lies by the end of August (a stretch goal, to be sure, especially considering that I also want to finish building the cabin by then, too). And, 

3. (Travel gods willing) write story or two during my vacation, and publish them as little e-books (probably in November? An untraditional but worthy NaNoWriMo project.) 

So there. I’ve put my routines and goals out there in the world, and now I can be held accountable.

Do you have a routine? Any tips or tricks you’d like to share?

Categories
Books Travel Writing

Writing in NOLA

July 22, 2021

Greetings, from New Orleans!

After half an hour of ambling down the Mississippi River, past the Audubon Aquarium and the famous Natchez steamboat, I wandered into the French Quarter and finally found a suitable café for writing on Decatur street. Unlike Café du Monde and Beignet Café (also on Decatur street), this one has indoor seating, air-conditioning, and is not full of tourists. I’m the only customer here, matter o fact. So I’ve finally found a place to stop and write (and stop sweating.)

There are plenty of windows here. In fact, I think they are actually sealed up old doors, as if once this cafe, like many of the others, sat open to the street. But despite the abundance of windows, there is no view to speak of. The glass, framed in a dark wood, is entirely covered in condensation– a result of the battle between the 100-degree heat without and the 60-degree air conditioning within.

I just noticed, the chairs have holes in the backs in the shape of a steaming teacup in its saucer. I want one. The booths of maroon leather match the chair seats.

I say booths, there are only the two; it is not a large café, might seat a dozen people. Fortunately, for the moment, I have the place to myself.

I am also sipping my first cup of caffeine in 22 days. (A café au lait for the record, which is not only the traditional way to prepare coffee in New Orleans but also my preference anywhere I go. Of course, they got it right. They never do at home, alas.) I’m not cheating on my pact with S; I was given dispensation. He agrees the circumstances are extenuating. We both agree that 23 days without caffeine is as good as 30 but not as good as 0. We were mad to attempt it to begin with. (I needn’t mention that July has not been my most productive month, as I (along with many ADHDers, self-medicate with caffeine.)

But back to the café. I was sat in one of the two leather armchairs, but the direct blasts of cold ar were too much for me. For the first two minutes I sat there, it was nice to commune with the little succulents in a bowl on the side table. But longer than that, the sweat started to turn to ice on my skin. 

I can still appreciate the artistic industrial-style hanging lamp fixtures and the exposed wooden beams from my seat at a table.

In any case, it’s time I stopped describing the café I’m going to write in and actually get to writing.

EOM or WPL?

(Later: EOM, as it turned out, even though my usual day for it is Friday.)

July 23, 2021

Finally made it to Baldwin & Co. This was the one real place on my list of places to visit, especially while I was here, apart from Café du Monde, for my sister’s sake. (I did manage a visit later with A after she got in. We shared beignets, and yes, got powdered sugar everywhere. The music playing was lovely. Everyone, please tip buskers. Being an artist is difficult, be it musician or writer, painter or potter. But to spend hours working, essentially for free, and only making what people feel like giving. Tragically, this is often nothing), and in this heat? Please feed the artists if you enjoy their art!)

Wow, that was quite the digression. 

Back to Baldwin & Co. Here I am! Definitely worth the hour’s walk and the three blisters I collected getting here (a first for these shoes. Alas. I may have worn them out at last.)

I’ve bought a splendid volume of poetry. Read half of it right here at the table before writing this. Vulnerable AF by Tarriona (Tank) Ball, local slam poet, author, and musician. Please do give her debut collection a read. 

This café-cum-bookshop itself, though having a limited selection of books, is spectacular. A larger than life portrait of James Baldwin is painted on book spines, and a mural of Langston Hughes next to his poem I, Too takes up a whole wall.

And they have a podcast studio in the back that you can rent. The walls are glass, and you can see people speaking into microphones. I wonder what they are saying.

The floor is part light wood that merges halfway across the room with black hexagonal tiles that climb up the coffee bar as well. The walls are brick and light wood, the same as the floor, pillars and exposed ceiling beam. 

Baldwin & Co. is so well designed. I am impressed. Moved even.

For I think my favourite thing about this place is that all the books they stock face outward on the shelves, displaying each and every cover. Such a respectful way to display books–giving every work its due, not choosing which precious few covers get to be seen while the rest anonymously cram together spine to anonymous spine. You can tell that the owners of this place are proud of their writers. 

This place is an homage, and one can feel it the moment you walk in.

The whole of this city feels much the same.

(I’m not great at taking photos when I’m out and about. But here are a couple that I managed.)

Armstrong
A live oak with resurrection ferns growing on them. The ferns can often look brown and dead, but after a rain they ‘come back to life’ as you can see here.
Not only atmospheric, these gas lanterns are iconic, and a distinctive feature of the city.

Until next time…

Categories
Uncategorized

Camp NaNoWriMo

Camp NaNoWriMo

I have participated in NaNoWriMo SO many times. I’ve succeeded… once.

I’m enchanted with the idea. I would love to write 50,000 words a month. I get geared up in October and make grand plans for (finally) winning NaNo. 

But I simply do not work well at that pace. I’m not a speed writer. I am a notoriously slow reader, and an even slower writer. I do all the things they tell you not to do: I edit as I go (not for minute typos, obviously, but I stop and erase and seek for just the right word. On a good day, I hit 500 words an hour for creative writing, and 250 words an hour for academic writing (I do my footnotes as I go, it makes the end much less hectic and bibliographies a breeze.)

Sure, I have good days when the words fly. But most days they plod, or I have to drag them along behind me.

August will mark a year since I started the novel I worked on for November’s NaNo. I’d like to finish the first draft by then, and Camp NaNo this July seems the excellent opportunity for that final push. 

Of course I want to finish this novel. I will be the first to admit it is not the Great American Novel. It’s not a great novel of any kind. It’ just a bit of fun for me and my brain, and I would like to finish it.

But I would also like to pass the big exam I have coming up mid-July, and I would also like to finish building a tiny cabin in the woods, a project that, at present, takes about 20 hours a week.

So perhaps July simply isn’t the best time for extravagant goals. But that’s the joy of Camp NaNo. You set your own goals. If I stay consistent, even if it’s writing a couple hundred words every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, that’s still progress, and I’d consider that a win.

So perhaps that’s what I shall do. Set a shamefully modest target and celebrate the achievement. Then in August when my time is more my own (and hopefully I’ll have a little cabin to write in) I can step up my ambition.

Of course, I’m going to sign up and record my progress for camp NaNoWriMo, because it is fun to be in the community. 

Anyone else doing it this July? What are your projects/word goals? Look me up on NaNoWriMo.org and lets be friends!   (My username is KathrynAmonett)

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Uncategorized

March Reads

From time to time, I will share some books that I have recently read. (If you follow me on goodreads, these titles will be familiar.) 

Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey

Ivy Gamble isn’t magical, her sister is. Well, she was. She’s been murdered. And it’s up to Ivy to find out who did it and why.

Feels like a classic noir mystery novel, but the protagonist is female, and it takes place on the campus of a magic school.  

I love a good detective story, (I am constantly reading mystery novels, especially with lady detectives) and this book ticked so many boxes. It was a creative and original mystery. It had an original (but still classic) detective (drinking problem, embittered, barely making ends meet.) And it didn’t succumb to any pitfalls of the magical school setting. And I totally didn’t see the twist at the end! Which is what one wants in a mystery story. 

Just. Fucking. Great. 

Sarah Gailey is brilliant queer author whose magical stories are just that. Magical. And gritty. 

Marriage of a Thousand Lies – S. J. Sindu

Oof. I liked this in the way a sad smile is still a smile. I’m not spoiling the story by saying that Lucky, the protagonist, is gay, but married to a man. Her husband is gay too, an arrangement they came up with to please their traditional Sri Lankan-American parents, who do not know about their sexual identities. Lucky’s first love, Nisha, is getting married to a man, thinking she can handle it because Lucky did, not knowing that Lucky’s marriage was a sham. 

From there, I won’t reveal more, but this book is about family and being true to one’s identity, when those things are mutually exclusive.

Turning Darkness into Light – Marie Brennan

Who doesn’t like a dragon novel? I do, which is why I read Brennan’s series on the study of dragons. But this book takes place decades after the original series, and follows the granddaughter. A translator. This novel, despite being fantastical, is about (draconian) academia and archeology. I pick up books with linguist protagonists whenever I can, and for what it was, it didn’t disappoint.

The series it’s based on was as grand, adventurous and sweeping as the dragons themselves. This book was a smaller relative, wearing glasses, and whispering because it is in a library.

Man Without a Country – Kurt Vonnegut

A collection of thoughts from Vonnegut’s later life. I enjoyed some more than others, but his voice, hopeful and cynical, humorous and gloomy, encapsulates the weirdness and breadth of Vonnegut’s work. Give it a read, but take it in sips. It tastes better and lasts longer that way.

The Thirteen Clocks – James Thurber

Please read this. Aloud. 

This is such an enchanting topsy-turvy story.  Somewhere between Norman Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth and Grimm’s fairy tales, it is charming in its absurdity, and surprisingly dark with its whimsy. I have it on audio, too and I listen to it probably once a month. In fact, I think it goes on my list of all time favourites. 

The Revolution of Birdie Randolf – Brandy Colbert

I liked the themes in this book, how it gently addresses race, sex and sexuality, coming of age, drugs, etc. But the story itself is average. Not a bad thing! I kind of liked that it was average. That these stories don’t have to be presented in a way that seems to say “THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS BOOK ABOUT VERY IMPORTANT STUFF.” It’s just another coming of age story, that includes all those things, and well. If this is the sort of stuff kids are casually reading as they grow up, hurrah!

The Sound Inside – Adam Rapp

A neat little short I got for free on Audible about a dying creative writing teacher. I enjoyed the conceit, but you shouldn’t feel like your missing out if you give this a pass.

Dispossession – Tayari Jones

You are missing out if you don’t read this. Another free short from Audible but sooo good. A story about Cheryl, a woman who picks up a job at a moving company in order to make ends meet. Her first house is a dispossession, a forced eviction., of a fellow black family in her own neighbourhood. It brings back memories and stirs up questions about why her son never comes to visit her. Race, family, and decisions we make for the best, but have far reaching and unintended consequences. 

My Brother Michael – Mary Stewart 

Thunder on the Right – Mary Stewart

These two are ‘romantic’ suspense (the romance is barely there, which is just how I like them, and back in the 60s when these were written, a novel written by a woman had to be categorised as romance, it seems. Mary Stewart is the pioneer of this genre, (though I would call it Woman travels abroad and there runs into trouble, with a garnish of romance. Granted, that is much longer and more difficult to say. So we will stick with Romantic Suspense for now.) What I love about Mary Stewart is her description. She can make anywhere feel real and immediate, especially her descriptions of nature.

Full confession. I want to be a modern day Mary Stewart. My ‘chic-lit’ novellas will be odes to her and the genre she created. 

Night Boat to Tangier – Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry, a much touted author of Ireland creates an atmospheric trip here, which is appropriate, as drugs and confronting/rejecting/not understanding reality seems to be a theme here. I picked it up because I thought it sounded great. Ageing Irish gangsters/drug runners go back over their lives while sitting at at a ferry port, waiting for an estranged daughter to arrive from Tangiers.

The language was evoking. The way the old gangsters talked to each other was just fun. But, I confess, I didn’t really like the story. We are supposed to feel sympathetic towards them in the end. I felt like shrugging. My sympathies were with the daughter.

Definitely a book for a certain type of people. Just not me.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat –  Aubrey Gordon

Definitely do pick this up this book of essays of cultural criticism. Not only is readable and accessible, Gordon is unflinching in her story-telling, about her own experiences and others’, of the how society has failed fat people. Not just failed, but persecuted, and what we can do to stop fat-phobia and fat-shaming, and how being fat can be yet another layer of intersectional discrimination (ex. of being a woman and fat, a person of colour and fat, being a woman of colour and fat, queer and fat, etc. 

I think everyone should read this, especially ‘straight-sized’ people who have no idea what it is like to live in a fat body. Even if you don’t think you are fat-phobic, you might still learn something not just about fat-phobia in general, but about yourself and things that you do that are, indeed, fat phobic. I was ashamed several times reading this, and thought, “Oh god, I am afraid of that,” or “I have said that to myself.”  

So, I’m sharing this book in the hopes that everyone reads it, learns how pervasive and harmful fat-shaming is, and do what they can for fat justice.

I read (and reread) other books but this post is long enough already and I think I included a good selection. 

Next one of these I do will take the more interesting ones from April and May combined.

What are you reading? What have you read recently (or not so recently) that you would recommend to me (or to anyone)? I am always taking suggestions. 

Categories
Writing

A degree in Creative Writing?

Some people who read this are probably writers. Or are considering being writers. And a lot of people ask me about my MA in Creative Writing. Did I like it? Was it worth it?

The short answer: no.

Well, yes, I did like it, but no, it wasn’t worth it.

Unless you are absolutely financially secure (or you live in a magical place where university is free or cheap, and doesn’t cost over $20,000 a year) and know you don’t want to do anything else in the next year or two but write. Or if you don’t know what you want to do with your life because you haven’t sorted out what you want to be when you grow up (no matter what numerical age you are) and want a seeming-legitimate way to pass the time while you find out (and write). 

Even then, I wouldn’t recommend it.

I confess, that was me. All of the above. 

I have no doubt there are exceptional programs out there that have been a tremendous help to some. But I argue that you can take online classes at a fraction of the cost and inconvenience, join a writers group, and you will get a comparable experience. A better one, if your group is dedicated and consistent.

I adored my classmates. To this day we keep in touch and talk about writing. But I think I would have had just as good a time, if not better, if the twelve of us had just been in a critique group and cut the profs out of the process entirely.

The male profs were disinterested, though I had two lovely lady profs who seemed to actually care, and whose classes actually imparted some knowledge and creative challenge. But the leader of the programme and the other main lecturers were there not because they like encouraging writers or discussing the brilliance of all kinds of fiction, but because they could not make ends meet as a writer. 

No shame in that, of course. Most of us can’t. But to take our your bitterness on your students because you consider yourself an under-appreciated high-brow author and you have to critique a fantasy novel or “chic lit”. (The work in question wasn’t chic lit, but the student who wrote it was a woman and it included a female protagonist in a modern setting. But it was far from humorous or light-hearted. It was an intense and moving story about two women, one homeless, one lost and wanting to give her life meaning and she tries to do that by ‘helping’ the homeless woman. In the end, nothing changed.) Still, it was treated as unsubstantial ‘women’s writing’, and dismissed by staff.) I don’t need to say here, surely, that there is nothing at all the matter with chic-lit. (Misogyny and racism in publishing deserves it’s own post, so I won’t go on about that here, other than to say, yes, it certainly was an issue in my creative writing MA in the UK.)

But speaking of chic-lit, I have plans for a novella or three.  And I’m quite excited about them.

Fun fact: After completing my own creative writing programme, I wrote a long and complaining email to the head creative fiction prof (not about the programme. That, I had done in my end of term paper. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t like ‘An MA in Creative Whiting’ a treatise on how all the authors we studied were white, male, and usually dead).

No, it was a travel essay of sorts, on a topic he wrote a lot about, so I shared it with him

He responded (based on this one email) that apparently I was better at non-fiction. 

This coming from a man who had been reading my fiction all year.

Ouch. 

Not all courses will be like this, naturally. You may have interested teachers who are generous with their time and their commentary, who will do their best to advise you, who encourage genre-writing and exploring boundaries between instead of sticking to what is considered ‘high-brow’. But more than instruction and advice, one benefits most from reading reading reading, writing practice, and critique. And you can do that without a degree. 

In fact, I was so bludgeoned by my course that I didn’t write for a long time after that. Others from my MA and people who were enrolled in completely different programmes experienced the same thing, that it stole the joy from writing. The burn-out is real, and you come away knowing what good writing is, not yet able to achieve it, and too demoralised to continue trying. Quite a demotivating situation. Most writers I’ve talked to on average take a year or two to start writing again after their course.

Having a group, however, is wonderful and essential. People, or even just one other person, who will motivate you to keep writing when you don’t want to, or commiserate with you when you can’t seem to get through a section of your novel, or who will go on artist dates with you to a museum or a park, or just to a cafe to scribble. Someone who will give you honest feedback and who likes reading the kind of stuff you like writing. (I wish for the sake of a few friends that I enjoyed sci-fi, but I do not. I know this is a personal failing, not a shortcoming of the genre. But I am not the target audience for their work, so I’m not their ideal reader.)

So cultivate a connection with other creative people, be accountable to each other, and keep working. At your own pace, yes, but keep working. 

Categories
Travel Writing

Why I’ve been gone so long

DEPRESSION! 

That’s the short answer. But like most simple answers, it excludes a lot of important nuance. And the complicated truth is much more involved.

But yes, I stopped writing, I think, because I stopped travelling. Travelling and writing for me go hand in hand. If I’m travelling, I am writing. But in 2016 I went back to uni, getting a new undergrad degree in Economics. I could have made some time for travel (if I had the funds, but I didn’t) but I was trying to hurry through my course as quickly as possible, as I wasn’t getting any younger and gave zero fucks about the college experience. So I clocked an average 25 hours a semester, taking classes between terms, and taking classes at other nearby unis to transfer to my uni later (because my uni has a cap on how many classes you can take in a semester, even though I got special permission to take 21 hours, it still wasn’t enough to complete my degree in two years.)

Not to toot my own horn (who am I kidding, that’s exactly what I’m doing) I came out with an almost perfect GPA, ruined only by B in calculus….(grrrrr.) My confines to the ivory tower kept me in the United States, and worse a constraint was my time, which was given over completely to finishing the degree.

I continued immediately with a masters in economics, going to London for an MSc in Global Economic Governance and Policy. While I was there I did almost no travel. Only a day trip to France for my anniversary (just the ferry to Calais for crepes and walking along the beach) then back to London to take an exam the following day.  And throughout all this schooling, I was doing a lot of academic writing, but none creatively. 

Then, after I finished school I immediately landed a dream job. A wonderful opportunity with a promising future career! It was mostly WFH with a London based charity/think tank on a project to improve lifetime outcomes of girls in Africa and the Middle East. Exactly the kind of work I wanted to do. And I even got to travel for work. To Ethiopia and to Jordan, and the potential to travel to Rwanda and more! But those work trips were so busy that I didn’t have time to see Addis Ababa at all, nor Amman. Which… was fine. I still had a flexible enough schedule and was finally making enough money to be able to travel without extreme budgeting. (Ramen noodle meals and taking a piece of fruit and some bread from hostels’s breakfasts, putting it into a napkin and secreting it into my rucksack, to have for lunch.)

So, I was at a place where I had the time and the money to travel!

But… the pandemic…

I had been in Amaan for a month when the travel bans were announced and I decided to go back to the US. Where I stayed, stuck, to this very day.

The data collection stopped in Jordan the day I left, and without new incoming data, I didn’t have much of a job to do other than the most basic and mundane of tasks that grew painful to even contemplate. At one point I remember thinking, “If I were dead, I wouldn’t have to do this.”

I took that as a sign and left my job because I assumed that wasn’t a indication of excellent mental health. But appointments with psychologists were booked up for months, and leaving my job actually helped.

Turns out I have severe depression and ADHD and my brain in the pandemic was dangerously under-stimulated, made even worse by the tedium of what my job had become, which rapidly depleted what little dopamine I had until I had none left. Quitting was the right choice.

I rested.

I spent more time out of doors.

I started treatment.

I started to write again.  It was crap, but it was something.

I also took some online classes.

Because of a shoulder injury, I couldn’t do most forms of fun, so walking was the thing. I walked. I wrote. I read. 

I am still walking, and writing and reading.   

But now that I’ve been vaccinated, and it looks like the world might be opening up slightly, I mean to make my way through it. 

I have no doubt unrealistically ambitious plans about my writing from now on, but still, I have several projects and deadline goals and plan to pursue them. I won’t share them just yet.

But know I know my brain needs the stimulation of travel to thrive, and it isn’t just a quirk of my personality. So I shall travel and I shall write.

I’ll have to start small.

But that’s still a start.

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Uncategorized

For Readers of Every Other Midnight,

It has been five years. Five years since I’ve posted on this blog and five years since I updated EOM. I want to say the world has changed, and in many ways it has. Some for the better. Chapter 83 (where James finds out getting a marriage license is impossible) was written before gay marriage was legalized in the United States. So hurrah! (It would be a surprise to no one who reads EOM that real-life issues inspire many elements in the story.)

But more obviously, the world has become a darker place. I am from the United States, and while the world as a whole is dealing with Covid19, here there has been a steady dissolution, or hollowing out, of the institutions that make democracy possible.

In the last few chapters of EOM, we saw specific groups in society arrested with no provocation and often killed in the process–those in law enforcement facing no consequences. This has not changed in five years.

In chapter 83, a panellist on a radio programme said, “Wizarding world for wizards,” and that muggleborns should be locked up or not allowed entry into the wizarding world. This was written before Donald Trump’s presidency. White nationalism was already alive and thriving, but the Trump presidency has invigorated and (seemingly) legitimized it. But this is a post for another time.

Also, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize now for future chapters. I took a five-year break. An athlete who does not train her body for five years will not perform at the level she did at the peak of her career. So it is with me. 

I wrote most of Chapter 84 a long time ago, and it (and I) got stuck in a dark place. Azkaban is not a happy place for your mind to be stuck. (Spoiler alert- dementors = depression. That feeling like you’ll never be cheerful again? And I could no more write my way out of that chapter than I could write my way out of depression. Indeed, I’m still in Azkaban, I’m pretty much always in Azkaban. 

Just some days the dementors are nearer than others.

But mental health is also a post for another time.)

So at the time of publishing chapter 84, mostly old work, I was struggling to write the chapter that is to follow. My writing is weak— my creative muscles are barely capable of lifting a pen. I know I’m a worse writer than I was five years ago. 

Blogging will be my cross-training—reflective non-fiction to do in between daily prose sprints. (I’ve also started running during the pandemic, and I’m afraid the mindset is leaking into my other pursuits.)

I often fear that two fanfictions, EOM and Professor’s Discretion, will be the best work of my life. I’m certainly proud of PD, it’s the only writing endeavour I’ve ever finished and been satisfied. I’ve never gone so deep—politically, emotionally, and in terms of plot— in my original fiction as I have with those two. But those characters were already formed, people’s attachment to them already steadfast. I cannot create that from scratch, nor carry over the care I took with those. I don’t know that I can do it again, even now. 

And as I was going back through previous chapters to prepare to work on the next, I was surprised by my own writing—everything I’ve written recently is so staid and colourless. I was actually impressed with past me, at the description and the depth and the intricacies of it, and disappointed with the present me. I tried to write up the rest of the chapter but couldn’t. I tried multiple times. Somehow, I couldn’t get any traction, couldn’t find any footholds. I just couldn’t get a purchase on the story to pull it, and myself, forward.

Until one day (yesterday, as it so happens), by some miracle, I found the old falling apart notebook in an old backpack that had fallen apart, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to throw away because it had given me ten years of faithful service and I kept telling myself I’d find some use for it. The notebook inside contained 76 pages of chapter 84 and parts of Chapter 85. 

The notebook itself I bought in Serbia and I’d taken it with me all around the Balkens. Inside the old thing was a single-page print out map of a city where I had stayed—Prizren, in Kosovo.

It was folded and tattered, but I opened it, and on the back, in blood-brown ink, was part of what will be the next chapter. And I suddenly remembered. 

In Prizren, there is a tall hill. Near the top, was a cafe, perhaps there still is. I had had spent the better part of an afternoon hiking up it. My plan had been to tarry in the cafe a while and write, but I finally got there only to find I had somehow managed to come all that way without my notebook. I had the map of the city though, and filled the page with tiny handwriting. 

I can’t believe I used to write it longhand. I have written over half of EOM with pen and paper. Half a million words. So many notebooks. Where are they now? (I know one is in Saldanha Bay, South Africa, when both notebook and I took a tumble into the drink.) 

Did my hands used to cramp? I don’t remember.

I have therefore decided to write EOM in by hand, rather than on the computer. It might solve part of the problem. 

Another might be that I’ve always written elsewhere. Travelling and writing were part of the same process. If I travelled, I wrote. If I was writing, I was travelling. But now I am implacably stuck at home. No real possibilities of the yonder.

At least I know I’m not alone with this.

In any case, here’s to trying again.

~Kathryn

Let me know in the comments below any questions or topics you’d be interested in hearing about! (I can’t promise to answer all questions completely, but I’ll do my best!)

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I shall return….

I’d abandoned this blog –abandoned writing all together– but I’m making a comeback.

    Coming soon…

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    Veniceland

    July, 2015
    Venice

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    Limited time offer

    come see it before it’s gone!

    If you’re lucky

    you might even spot a real Venetian

    in its natural habitat.

    Would you like a fan?

    A mask?

    A bag?

    It might even be made in Italy!

    Here is the Grand Canal.

    Gondola ride?

    Here is San Marco Square

    and the Rialto Bridge.

    Would you like to make this moment more special

    with a selfie stick?

    Don’t forget to visit the gift shop on your way out,

    in, and through

    Veniceland!

    Limited time offer!

     

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    Little Nothings from Montenegro and Croatia

    July, 2015
    Podgorica, Montenegro

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    I sat waiting for my bus at the station in Podgorica. I don’t remember what I was thinking about, but it must have been gloomy because a woman after waving for a bit to get my attention blew me an enormous kiss, both hands, and smiled and waved at me again. I looked around, but I was the only one in that direction. “Yes you!” her smile said.

    She succeeded in cheering me.

    Thank you, sweet lady.

     

     

    July 2015,
    Split, Croatia

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    I sit down at the table near the stall where I’d ordered my sandwich, only to be soon confronted by a waiter of a different establishment to which the table actually belonged. When asked what I wanted I panicked and said “beer” though I never want beer. The first and second sips only confirmed that my taste hadn’t changed. I scowled for a bit at the innocent beverage (Karlovačko) until I remember that morning, I’d been given honey with my tea. Don’t sweeten my tea, but I’d kept the honey packet to put on my bread the next morning for breakfast. So I rummaged through my bag for it and squeezed its contents into my beer. Did it magically transform it to my favourite drink ever? No. But it did make it palatable.
    That’ll do.