Sentential Links!

Time for linkage! These are from blogs of fellow writer type people.

:: Sometimes life imitates art, but more often it's the other way around. As strange as it sounds, what happens to Sara in this chapter happened to me when I was visiting my best friend's grave. Darbi died in a car accident when we were only seventeen, and I thought of her often while I was writing this book. Her death hit me really hard, but I believe what happened that day at her gravesite was her way of letting me know she was okay. (I haven't been reading this story, but I do believe in our writing and our art being shaped by the things that have happened to us along the way.)

:: Something incredible happened to me this weekend. It was an unexpected, monumental moment in my life, one that I have dreamed about for so long but part of me actually doubted if it would ever happen. But it did happen. It definitely did and I have the proof here on my computer.

I started to write my novel again.

:: Do you ever read a book and one of the main characters, or a beloved character, dies? Do you get upset with the story itself or do you actually get upset at the writer? (It depends, I suppose. A death has to make some semblance of sense within the story. It needs to be set up; it can't be arbitrary. Yes, in life, death is often insanely arbitrary, but I don't read or write in order to reflect the real world. Arbitrary death always feels false to me. So does excessive death. George RR Martin comes close to being excessive at times, although frankly, the degree to which his stories are bloodbaths isn't really among my complaints about his books. Nicholas Sparks, though? There's a guy who is so reliant on death as a narrative device that it really lessens the impact his books have, the more you read. And then there are movies where the villains do so much killing that it's not a moment of triumph when they are defeated, but one of relief. I'm thinking of The Patriot, with that awful scene in which a villain whose villainy is already well established decides to lock a bunch of colonists in a church and set the church afire. Another example is Air Force One, which has Gary Oldman kill a couple of people in taking over the plane...and then, a bit later on, has a gratuitously depressing scene where he holds a gun to some poor woman's head as he gives the Action Hero President until the count of ten to surrender. The President doesn't, and Oldman kills the woman. For me, in my writing, death is the Big Gun. I know that I will have to kill a few characters off over the long haul, but I don't look forward to it. You know who handled death really well in her books? JK Rowling. The deaths in the Harry Potter books get to both mean something and be arbitrary. I'm kind of starting to think that Rowling is underrated as a writer.)

:: Have you planned a writing retreat or attended one? (I never have, and I'm not sure I'd want to...let me put that differently, I'd be nervous about attending one. I tend to be wary of sharing my work or talking about writing at all, which is my introvert self taking over. Maybe I need to start getting over it....)

:: So far, so good.

I have a place for all the Elements.

But the problem I have here, is that the mythology of these Elemental directions is then out of whack.

This causes me problems, because I like the idea of endings in the West, where the sun sets, and begins in the East, with the rising sun, and the many stories that go with these associations.

Placing my Elements as I have, doesn’t fit this.

So what is one to do?

:: Parker is almost six, though she will correct you immediately that she is “five and three-quarters” if she hears you say that because she is precise, and detail-oriented, and very much her father’s daughter in that way.

But she is my daughter too.

A daughter that I was petrified of having, and then elated that I was having – all because of a very tumultuous past I have with my own mother.

:: Sometimes when I'm reading a novel or watching a show, the writer throws an empty threat into it. In a novel I was recently reading, a love triangle develops, but I knew from day one that the protagonist was going to stay with her first love. Yet, the author dragged me about this awkward love triangle for the majority of the book. It was still interesting, but it lacked stakes, it lacked intensity because I knew nothing big would come out of it.