Eseme's Den

So there were brain weasels last night, I got all these ideas in the shower and had to sit down with my laptop, download Audacity, and speak until I got all the stuff out of my brain.

I think it is trying to write again, but I don't really have any free time to speak of, so I just have this long audio file.

I suppose it is seasonally appropriate (Hello, NANOWRIMO) but I know I cannot manage over 1,000 words a day.

I need to figure out what to do with that.

Also, I am reading a friend's translation of a novel from Russian to English and pointing out bits that are rough or confusing. It is neat.

So, I said I would take the yammering about dragons to a post in my own journal (as opposed to the comments of someone else's journal).

Terry Pratchett has a theory about human mythology, that it is turtles all the way down. There are a lot of how-the-world-was-created myths which involve turtles, and a number of cultures have at one point or another believed that the world is carried on the back of a turtle or tortoise.

For me, it's dragons all the way down. I started reading stories about dragons at some point in grade school. I'm pretty sure one of the earliest things I read was Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, consisting of Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons, and Talking to Dragons. I still have my battered paperback copies, although I like the covers on the library's hardcover copies better.

Then I read everything my small library had with dragons in the children's section. During middle school, I got access to a new library, and discovered Ann McCaffrey. I'd already read Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon series (it was in the children's/j section for some reason, while McCaffrey was in the YA section).

In sixth grade (middle school started at 7th, so this was before Pern), I wrote what I considered a novel (about 80 typewritten pages, single spaced) about a girl who went through a portal in our world and ended up in a fantasy kingdom which she happened to be the long-lost princess of. Yes, I was twelve. There were dragons, and in order to drive off the evil guy trying to take over the kingdom she had to hike into the mountains and find the dragons and ask for their help. There was a boy living with one of the dragons, in a cave. Again, I was twelve.

I read this out loud to my entire sixth grade class, and to one of the second grade classes, when the teacher heard about it. I thought I was so cool. And of course, I was going to be an author when I grew up.

In eighth grade we had to make a magazine as an English project. We could pick any topic we wanted, but we had to design a cover, write a letter from the editor, a short story, a book review, and an ad. I picked dragons, of course. Then I had the problem that all the dragon books I knew of I had already read. The teacher insisted that we had to read a new book for this. So I went to the library and ran a subject search. I came up with two books I had not read with the subject of dragons. One was Terry Pratchett's Strata, which turned out to barely have dragons in it (which won it a less-than-enthusiastic review from FLAME magazine), and Douglass Adams' Last Chance to See, which is the funniest book I have ever read about endangered species (the dragons were komodo dragons). I wrote a story about a girl finding dragon eggs, which is in an entirely different setting than the first one, an ad for a dragon BBQ service (dragon shows up to BBQ your food, not the other way around), and included both book reviews.

The dragons were dormant for a while, though I continued to read fantasy and the occasional book with more dragons. Then I had this assignment in grad school - write up the mission, goals, and vision statements for a library (real or imaginary). Clearly, this needed to be more fun, so as in eighth grade, I added dragons.

THAT idea stuck around. A couple of years after the assignment, it was still kicking around in my head, and I decided to try to write a novel. I've tried this before - I have the beginnings of two other novels on my hard drive. But this one actually made it past ten chapters. It's not done, even over a year later. But its dragons, which is not a surprise to anyone who knows me.

Dragons. All the way down.

Lyn Thorne Alder (author of Addergoole) is going to be livewriting this weekend.

She will take prompts, and write what you want. She'll also be raising money for Drake, her cat who was recently diagnosed with diabetes. Donations will get you more words written on your prompt, and will let you watch as she writes in Google Docs.

Both Saturday (8:00 PM - midnight Eastern) and Sunday (2:00-6:00 PM Eastern), so there will be lots of writing!

For more info, go here: http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/138275.html

Help out Drake! He's a good kitty, though he does try to eat visitors...

This is mostly for my own reference - I want a place to gather some of this stuff. I may find a better way to do this in emails to myself, so I should stop cluttering up friends lists soon.

( Money, Craft, Business, Steampunk, and the great genre TV debate )

I've got her latest book, The White Road But haven't started it yet. Mostly because I know it will CONSUME days of my life.

She's also got a chapbook coming out sometime in August, which sounds neat:
http://otterdance.livejournal.com/400572.html
http://otterdance.livejournal.com/402784.html
http://otterdance.livejournal.com/404008.html

Notice how the stories change as she writes them (she's added some stuff).

And then there is the cruise. She did a writing cruise this year, and has another one planned for October 2011. In New England, with an excursion to a place where she was inspired for the big epic battle at the end of Stalking Darkness. Sadly, I am relatively sure that I will not have an entire week of vacation time (and if I do, there's this thing called a honeymoon which should happen one of these days), and also unlikely to have the money for it.

But is does sound extremely cool, and is over a year from now, so who knows?
http://otterdance.livejournal.com/404376.html
http://connectiontocruise.vacationport.net/OfferDetail.asp?PriceId=1992821&TripId=463603&EmailId=&ReferralType=3&ReferralId=463603/

On the one hand, unpacking is not going nearly as well as I would like. I am not going to have room for my craft books in the living room shelving units like I planned. It's so frustrating. The bedroom is the place with the most clear floor area... which doesn't really help when one has company coming. The living room is still entirely boxes. And while there is finally a table in the dining room, it is hemmed in by stuff.

*sighs*

And yet, there are very good things in the world. A while ago I stumbled onto the journal of haikujaguar who not only writes amazing and in-depth stories of other cultures and other worlds, she illustrates them as well.

Her The Aphorisms of Kherishdar project was moving and beautiful. The art she has made to go with it is complex and breathtaking.

She is now working on a companion series of short stories, The Admonishments of Kherishdar. Today's story is simply titled Cutting and it is one of the most touching things I have read. For the world to have someone with such gifts in it makes me very happy.

Check out both projects. The top of each page has additional links to illustrations and such, and on my computer those links show up very small. But they are there and worth looking at.

The main page on her site, with links to more artwork, is http://www.stardancer.org

Aside from the continuous need to get ever more resumes sent out, I've gotten a fair bit done lately.

Went to my favorite beach to go Shell-hunting for silver_spider. Got the shells into a diluted bleach solution, so as not to send him germs. Still need to sort and label stuff, then off to the post office.

Got done with another errand too. Finding time to get to the shop before work was challenging (especially when they called me the day of and asked me to come in early). So the Lissa-errand is done and in the mail. Should arrive tomorrow or Monday.

Got btoblake a card at a neat shop in Wiscasset last week, and got her address last night. No one in the world is going to appreciate that card as much as her. Found it in a shop called "Rock Paper Scissor" which turned out to be a stationary shop of sorts, with a tape dispenser shaped like a garden snail and all sorts of cute stuff from Japan.

I have ideas for writing again, although it is of course for the story that I didn't bring with me. All my earlier notes on this one are in storage in Buffalo, which is annoying. However, I have a few notes, and have started plotting again, to the extent that I have what should be a cohesive plot. Yay! I have various ideas for scenes, and intend to get them on note cards so I can grab them when I get to that point. I've also got a fun short story idea and hope to use that to get in the right frame of mind.

I've got a present for little Jess, but need to get her address from her mom. And given that I'm not able to make phone calls (most days of the week) during the time that Jen is home and awake, this has been a sticking point. Poor child is going to get an extremely late birthday present at this rate.

I haven't updated much lately, especially about the fun things I've done on my days off with M. Not much since the Fiber Frolic ( http://eseme.livejournal.com/144441.html ) anyway.

That will be the goal for this weekend.