“It’s cool that you let lovely lily read the letter”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings4 Comments

The summer I was sixteen, my best friend and I wrote letters to each other.  We used pink pens and glittering ink, decorating the outside of the envelopes with song lyrics.  We made up names for ourselves and everyone around us, a secret, sacred world we could slip into at will.  Lost boys wandered through our pages, disappearing for days on end, sometimes forgotten, sometimes rediscovered, always beautiful.  It was a magical correspondence.  When I read the letters now I am still imbued with a sense of the infinite, even though it is clear from a distance how quickly we were beginning to unravel.

I am not, it seems, the only one who misses writing letters.  Mary Robinette Kowal has issued a challenge:  during the month of February, write one letter every day the post office is open.

I have decided to do this thing.  I will write to the people I have left scattered across the places I have been.  I will write to the people who post addresses and invite mail from perfect strangers.

And, if you wish it, I will write to you.  Send me your address (at my email or via direct message to @thegirlhaswings).  I’ll cast my mind back to the where and the when of how we knew each other, and I’ll put down on paper those things I always thought I should have said to you but never did.  You don’t have to write back, but I do ask, in the spirit of hand-written correspondence, that my letters stay offline.

I don’t want to post my address online, for all the obvious sorts of reasons, but if you’d like to write me a letter, send an email or a tweet.

Questions and such welcomed.

“The New Year”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

imageBack in New York, and a strange sort of not-quite jet-lagged.  We started in the Keys at 8:00 yesterday morning, spent the night somewhere in the Carolinas, and crossed the river onto the island at 4:30 this afternoon.  In some ways, I think it’s easier to get onto a plane and travel across a continent than it is to drive that same distance.  At least with the first, you can fool the body into thinking it’s only gone a short distance.
Florida was wonderful.  The last time I was there was in Jan 2007, in St. Pete at Writers in Paradise. It helps that all of Florida (at least, the part that’s not the panhandle) looks like all the rest of Florida.  Wide roads, low mission-style buildings, palm trees.  In fact, we even stayed in a bright pink hotel.  And even though we were on the other side of the state, and it was a good 30 degrees warmer, it felt like coming back home. Had drinks at South Beach and watched the tourists, went swimming at night after all the tourists left, came home covered in sand and sunscreen.

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Thinking about New Year’s, and resolutions, and slowly coming to the realization that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.  It’s frustrating in a way, because I’m almost thirty and I’m not nearly anywhere I wanted to be.  Instead, I’m slowly learning how to get to where I’d like to go.

My resolution this year is to get serious about my writing.  First, to finish Persephone and send her off into the world.  I’ve held onto her entirely too long.  Second, to start a new novel, and to do it right this time, plotting first and writing second.  Third, to try to write a short story a month, even if the first draft is no good, even if I have to sit down and pound out twenty pages of dross.  I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the short story for a long time, always hating how little space there was in which to create a world and admiring those writers who could do so successfully.  I’m realizing, though, how much room there is to play in a short story, how essential it is to learning the architecture of building worlds.

I’m giving myself (by which I mean that I am forcing myself to sit down and write for) an hour each day.  Not as much time as I would like, but I suspect there are going to be days where taking an hour seems all but impossible.  I’m going to try to do it, anyway.

“To You I Bestow”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

December 31, last day of the year.  Such an arbitrary date.  It would be much for sensical for the calendar to begin again at the spring solstice, when the days balance and the light begins to overtake the dark.  When the world begins to wake after the long winter’s sleep.  But we are where we are, and having not yet been appointed benevolent overlord of the universe, I can’t order the calendar to shift.

Instead, I give you a wish for the new year.

May you find something that has been lost.  Because often, those things that are lost or forgotten along the way are the ones that mean the most to us, even if they have been gone so long we don’t even remember what it is that we are missing.  And may you discover something new, something wonderful, something nobody has ever thought of or dreamed up or imagined before.  But most of all, may you find joy, and someone to be joyous with, and something to be joyful for.

“The Candy Man Can”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

My birthday ended up something of a bust this year, as it so often is.  Personally, I blame December.  Between snowstorms and the flu and Christmas break…  This year it was the end of the year push at work that did me in. My husband got me a wonderful chocolate cake, but when you’re coming home after midnight to blow our the candles, it looses something.

I decided to make up for it this weekend by making Oreo cookie cupcakes.  Recipe after the break.

Continue reading ““The Candy Man Can”” →

“No Light, No Light”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

I feel as though I’ve finally been inducted into the ranks of actual writers now that I’ve received my first rejection.  He was rather sweet about it, kindly offering up sandwich style criticism and a sincere-sounding hope that another agent would find it more to their taste.  Not that it didn’t sting, but it was a kinder and gentler let down than I suspect is the norm.

The whole auction process felt strangely like being back in a freshman level writing workshop. There’s the part where you, the immature writer, gamely attempt to coalesce the whirling ideas in your head into story.  There’s the part where the rest of the class reads it, and doesn’t get it, and then proceeds to give you feedback in the form of variations on what the girl who went first said.  And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the part you’ve been holding your breath for all class, the part where the instructor tells you what he thinks, because let’s face it, he’s the only person whose opinion you really care about anyway, and he says it’s not a bad attempt at characterization and moves on to the next story.

I’m still not sure what to do with the feedback I got.  Most of it revolved around a suggestion an early commentator made about not liking the scene as a flashback.  Which would be fair enough if it was a flashback, but it’s not.  It’s more like a prologue.  This is the story the character tells herself about who – and why – she is.  It’s what she’d tell you if it were late at night, and she’d had more to drink than she should, and you asked her why she looked so sad all of a sudden.  It’s structured the way it is because I want the reader to carry this memory with them throughout the book.  It should be something that they don’t forget – something they cant’ forget – because she doesn’t.

Whether or not that works as a structure point, or a plot point, or a literary device, or a whatever you want to call it is still up in the air.  But it frustrates me that the bulk of the feedback I got was on a point which, in my mind, is moot.

As for the rest of it… The skew of both the entries that got bids and those that didn’t as well as the comments I got made me realize something I hadn’t really thought of before.  The agent matters.  It’s not merely a process in looking through profiles and choosing someone who’s represented authors I like or someone I’d want to have a cup of tea with.  It’s finding the person who’s looking for the type of fiction I’m writing.  Because that’s the person who’s going to ask to read more.

For the curious, the link to the auction page is here.  And if you’ve read this far and are interested in more, I’m still looking for beta readers.