Turns out they were right when they told me Paramedic school was going to eat all my free time. Friends, it has been a chaotic marathon of a year. And there’s still, like, a quarter of it left (lord-a-mercy).
Technically speaking, I have been writing all year. Patient charts use words, you see. Oh, you mean fiction? Hmm. Well. I haven’t written nothing (take away my double negatives, I dare you), but it’s more accurate to say my projects are in the fridge than on the back burner.
That being said, school is done, I’m a paramedic (this is my circus and those are my monkeys), and I’m finally back down to one (1) full time schedule again. I have so many half-imagine story ideas champing at the bit and begging me to write them. I’m not planning to aim for weekly blog posts at the moment, as I just don’t have that much to talk about, but keep an eye out for short stories periodic writing/life related musings.
So, by this point I should probably know better than to think I’m going to get back to regular updates without a specific plan for said updates. Whoops.
Anyway, hi! Happy 2025! I’m still here and still alive, and still very busy.
I did complete NaNo last year, marking my 15th attempt and my 14th success and providing even more proof that deadlines are my friend. Despite my best intentions, November 2024 kinda snuck up on me, and I completely pantsed the whole thing; considering that, I’m actually remarkably happy with what I wrote. Yay fantasy worldbuilding and a blatant refusal to set it on a spherical planet. I had fun.
Part of what’s kept me so busy the past year has been a return to working in EMS, with most of last year being spent working night shift. I love working night shift. It does make it harder (for me) to take time to go write, though. That being said, as of next week I’m returning to schedule that’s more compatible with a functional circadian rhythm– because I’m going back to school. Paramedic school, specifically. Yay! Somehow, though, I can’t imagine it’s going to add to my free time.
I am still writing, even if not as consistently as I have in the past, and as always, I don’t think that’s going to change. I’m also still reading (or listening to) books, and have been thoroughly enjoying the fact that between Spotify and Libby, I have access to a ridiculously huge number of fantastic audiobooks. Highlights definitely include the Earthsea Cycle, which I’m about halfway through. Le Guin is an incredible author.
So, yeah! Happy New Year! I hope yours is a good one!
Having just watched the final season of Legend of Korra for the first time, one of the things I think the series did best was how it advanced the world of bending into a new age. I also recognize that that’s exactly what bugged some people about it, since it made those advancements so quickly it felt like a bit of a stretch. But ignoring the timeline for a second, I want to argue that it deepens the worldbuilding in a way we don’t get to see super often.
Part of that is just because most stories take place in a singular era. Take The Lord of the Rings. Leaving aside the incredible lore included in The Silmarillion and other works like Unfinished Tales (mostly because I’m a bad nerd who hasn’tactuallyreadthemyet), the events of The Hobbit and the trilogy take place in a relatively short time span. Things are changing, the elves are leaving, the Age of Men is about to begin, but we don’t see a significantly different world between the two works.
And most other fantasy series that come to mind don’t even get that close. The stories are focused on a specific chain of events with no need for the narrative to reach far into the past or the future. In fact, the only other example I can think of is Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn books with the second series taking place in a world that is so different that it’s fully a different genre. Unsurprisingly, I really liked those, too.
In both cases (Korra and Mistborn Era 2), I think the thing I find most interesting is that the writers create worlds that feel substantially different not by changing the rules of their systems of magic, but by digging in even deeper. Allomancy and bending both work (roughly) the same way as they did before, but they’re applied differently, and that’s what changes the world. And overall, I think it works really well. It certainly makes both worlds feel that much deeper, that much more alive.
One of the unexpected side effects of the last few months’ unintentional hiatus and my generally lower writing output has been the return of an old idea I’ve never quite figured out how to bring to fruition. If any of you have wandered over to my Projects page [link] you may remember my blurb for Runner, a werewolf story I’ve been fiddling with since 2010 and, despite using it for two NaNo projects, getting nowhere with. Mostly because I can’t (couldn’t?!?!) figure out the conflict.
Maybe I just needed to let it sit.
It’s way too early to tell, and is still going to require the same buttload of work any novel takes, but it feels like the logjam that’s been holding it back has shifted. Plotbeavers, perhaps. Or maybe I’ve gotten a little more of the life experience I’ve needed to tell the story I want to tell.
It’s a fun exercise, occasionally, to imagine what our lives would look like to someone or something that didn’t have the lifelong context that we do to make certain things seem normal.
Take cats, for example. We have invited these small, fuzzy creatures into our homes, where we love them and care for them and they repay us (hopefully) by loving us in return in their own small, fuzzy way. Usually by way of lots of purring, headbutts, and falling asleep on your legs in ridiculous positions.
Or pouncing on your ankles when you’re least expecting it. It’s a toss-up.
Now imagine you’re from some distant planet or an alternate reality where it is not common practice to share your home with miniature predators who can boast that five out of their six ends are pointy. It might seem… questionable. Now imagine learning that not only do we allow them into our homes, we allow them onto our beds. While we’re sleeping and vulnerable. And, in fact, that some of us actively encourage them to do so. And that, far from trying to discourage their vicious prey drives, we simulate small creatures for them to attack by way of toys and laser pointers.
So many questions. So very many questions.
Of course, from our perspective, it makes perfect sense. Sure, cuddling with cats might come with its own risks, but most of the cats I hang out with are pretty good at not causing intentional harm. And the purring is pretty cute. And the security of knowing that they’ll at least try to kill any spiders they notice in the house is… well, maybe it’s just the thought that counts.
All this to say, cats might not be someone’s first choice to include when trying to worldbuild their own setting for some new writing project. There’s no way one of the most common pets would be something so potentially dangerous, you might say.
I’ll just make this a quick update this time around, partly because there’s not a lot to talk about, partly because it’s late and I want to go to bed. (And now you know for sure, I absolutely do not have a buffer of posts written up for each week. If only.)
Last month saw me reading and writing as usual, though still more slowly than I’d like. Real life is busy, y’all. In fact, checking on Goodreads, it looks like I only finished one book. Fortunately, it was a very long book, and I’ve read varying amounts of at least four or five others, so, eh?
Writing… well, writing… I need to find a dedicated spot in my schedule to write, or I’m going to keep piddling along as I have been. Even so, it felt good to finish one story and to work on several others. Plus, I’ve started the process of structuring the Correspond stories I’ve been working on so that I can turn them into a novella for NaNoWriMo this year. Since the darn thing just kept expanding in my head and all.
Anyway. Seems like it’s just small victories for me this year, but I’ll take them. Happy halfway through 2023!
At the risk of making my age (or the lack thereof) blatantly obvious, I’ve been struck lately by the frustrating realization that I don’t have time to learn everything, to explore and study and experience everything that I want to. Not in the sense that I don’t have time right now because life is too busy (well, that too), but more in the sense that I recognize that I have a limited time on this planet and more things to fill it with than minutes in the day.
There are going to be– have already been– things that I can do and would like to do that I will choose not to, because something else takes priority. That’s nothing particularly profound. That’s just… life.
And I think there’s a way to view that as a gift. Or at least to recognize the benefit of having to make those choices. It can provide a certain focus. The fact that our time is limited is what gives it such great value. So spend it well.
Here were are, skating in towards the halfway mark for the year. Wild.
Like I mentioned in my last post, my writing took a hit last month due to a number of unavoidable circumstances (and, admittedly, some avoidable ones too… but Tears of the Kingdom is amazing and I regret nothing) but I’m looking forward to making sure I carve out the time in my schedule to get back at it. I’ve got some fun ideas I want to play with for Tanner and Miranda, for one thing, and I’ve realized that the story I’ve been working on with Correspond is even bigger than I thought it was, so the plan is to put in the work to structure and outline it properly and use NaNo later this year to write the thing.
I did still manage to keep up with reading, which included the two newest Black Ocean stories out from J.S. Morin (space magic and time travel shenanigans!), the newest Country Club Murder by Julie Mulhern, as well as The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Giver by Lois Lowry. Currently, I’m still working my way through The Priory of the Orange Tree, which I’m appreciating for the complicated worldbuilding and the author’s penchant for following along with all kinds of high fantasy tropes just to turn them on their heads when it suits her.
Hope all is well with everyone reading this, and, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, enjoy the starts to your summers!
If I’d had a little more foresight, I might have posted up something like this at the beginning of the month instead of spending the entirety of May fooling myself into believing I could keep up with my schedule…
ANYWAY.
Like the title says, I’m considering May as a retroactive hiatus month. So, no story this month, and it covers that blog post I missed a few weeks back, too. But! June should be a calmer month (she says, full of optimism and deadly naivete), or at least one with less house guests and a more predictable routine– so I’ll see you then!
In the book I’m currently reading (The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri), I just finished a chapter containing one of the most effective depictions of grief I’ve ever read. It is beautifully written, of course, but no more so than the rest of the book has been. Its strength does not come from flowery language or overwhelming descriptions. There is no devastating itemization of the pain the characters are going through, no over-the-top metaphors attempting to capture all this human feeling and pin it to the page.
If there was, it wouldn’t have worked half so well.
Rather, she just takes several pages to describe the space the character that died once occupied and a few minor details of their existence, as well as an almost emotionless description of the actions taken by those they left behind. And the result is devastating.
It reminds me a little of That One Episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you’ve seen it, I suspect you know exactly which one I’m talking about; it’s not easy to forget. If you haven’t, I won’t spoil it here, other than to say that what the episode shows Buffy going through in the wake of a sudden and unexpected loss is similarly powerful in the way it is utterly mundane and so terribly painful in the way it seems to just stretch on and on.
Both, I think, are phenomenal examples of the writer’s constant quest to show and not tell. As mentioned above, they don’t expend much, if any energy, in depicting every feeling, every emotion. Rather, they slow the action down to a snail’s pace and invite the audience to walk beside the characters as they have to continue on, handling all the things that must be handled when such things happen. There is, if anything, a distinct lack of emotion as the characters that might be expected to feel those emotions don’t have the time, the space, the ability to do so while so many things have to take precedence.
Maybe it’s that very lack of catharsis that allows both to weigh so heavily. There is nowhere for the grief to go so it just builds, piece by piece, growing until it cannot be ignored.
F.A. Hakimian 