I Am Half Finished, Incomplete As The Moon In It's Phases, Yet Still I Am Curved Into A Crescent Smiling

I’ve just finished reading The Girl Who Chased the Moon and magic realism is my new favourite thing - historical fantasy has always been my lane, but I’m definitely branching out. I have already ordered some more of Sarah Addison Allen’s books and I’m thinking of making a list of some more magical realism books. Recommendations are welcome!

i am haunted. i am my own haunting. i am the ghost in the graveyard of my body, mournful, monstrous.

Wednesday, 28th July 2021

Love is more than the dream wistfully painted across torn pages in dripping ink and meadows of wildflowers, by writers and poets huddled by candlelight seeing love written in beloved faces. Seeing love in yearning clouds slowly chasing after the sun's fragile rays. Love is heartache and hurt and pain - a climbing river pushing back against everything you know. It inspires and challenges, it breathes life and ends it. It is everything we want and everything we do not dare to have. Love can bring just as much destruction to the harmony it creates. But it’s never about what love is or what it is not - it is how we shape its destiny within our own lives that counts. Love will always be with you, but will you let it stay? And sometimes we know that we just have to chase it away. 

some highlights from my writing seminar with honestly one of my favourite authors of all time who shall remain nameless bc i dont want her to know i was spilling her secrets online

The first trick is to detach yourself from your idea. You don’t have just one novel inside you, and it’s not a big deal if you don’t finish this novel.

She was skeptical of the common advice “just write!!1!” - she talked about how long ideas for her most popular novels were marinating inside her before she properly wrote them

As a continuation of that, she was a big believer in knowing what you want to write before you write it. Not what you’re going to write, what you want to write. 

The first thing she decides about a novel is what the mood is going to be, and this informs every other decision (e.g. the mood for Shiver was bittersweet)

Ideas should be personal, specific, exciting and they should exclude secondary sources. A personal idea isn’t necessarily autobiographical (which should be avoided), but it speaks to your emotional truth. 

She said she had been read Ronsey fanfiction and she couldn’t view her car in the same way since. 

Story is the thing that seems most important to reader but is most changeable to the author - story is subservient to your mood and your message. Change what you like in the plot as long as your book retains its sense of self.

Story is conflict, exploration and change. A good story has active tension -the characters want something, instead of just wanting something not to happen (e.g. wanting to kill an enemy instead of simply defending a stronghold against an enemy) 

A story needs to have a concrete end, something to be done. 

Satisfaction is important - deliver what you promise to the reader. The other shoe has to drop. Ronan Lynch doesn’t ever talk about his feelings, so its rewarding when he does. 

Earn your emotional moments (she threw shade at Fantastic Beasts lmao)

Forcing a character to be passive is dissatisfying to the reader. 

Characters are products of their environments, consistent/predictable, nuanced and specific, moving the plot, and subservient to other story elements. 

She always starts with tropes for ensemble casts like sitcoms. Helpful for building good character dynamics.

Write scenes with characters saying explicitly what they’re thinking and then go back and make them talk like real people in the edit. 

An action can also prove what they’re thinking, instead of making them say it or another character guess it (e.g. Ronan punching a wall). 

Move the reader’s emotional furniture around without them noticing. 

All her books follow the three act structure. Established normal -> inciting incident -> character makes an Active Decision -> fun and games -> escalation -> darkest moment -> climax. 

Promise what you’re going to do in the first five pages. 

Read your book out loud. Record yourself reading it. 

If you have writer’s block, it’s because you’ve stopped writing the book you want to write. She likes to delete everything she’s written until she gets back to a point where she knew she was writing what she wanted to write, and then carrying on from there. 

I'm getting in my own way again...

Call out to me so my footsteps halter

Burnish my skin of these lasting marks

Made by tears of my own making

With every footstep that I falter

In fog formed by clouds I mistook in my own ecstacy

Sometimes I read books that I only want to keep to myself as if the whole world would conquer the magic I felt in a few simple moments

0903, O.L. / Tumblr: @3lsahart / Peggy Toney Horton / September Days, In New England Fields and Woods, Rowland E. Robinson / Unknown / Alexander Theroux / Memory of Water, Reina María Rodríguez / September, Helen Hunt Jackson / Wallace Stegner / Instagram: @kjp / H. Stuart / Unknown / Unknown / Henry Rollins / Margaret Atwood / Diario Cuatro, DC de Oliveira / Virginia Woolf / Unknown / September 1st, D. E. / Beginning and ending with my death, Zeina Hashem Beck / The Whole Word and Other Stories, Ali Smith / Turquoise Silence, Sanober Khan / Victoria Erickson

Cherry blossoms float;

Flurries of delicate snow

in the heart of spring

I ache for the world and I run away from it