in Life's name and for Life's sake

I had two opportunities to talk about writing today with writers, which is really weird and unusual and lovely and should happen more often. Both of these too-brief conversations were held before the beginning of a class, and inevitably there were other (non-writer) people listening. In my Clarissa seminar the guy who sits across from me noticed my NaNoWriMo travel mug, asked about my history with NaNo, and was sincerely impressed that I'd managed it for seven years (this last year was his first). Of course my seminar leader/advisor/all around awesome person Jenny is a novelist in addition to being a professor and she started talking about writing too and it was awesome.

I was thinking about NaNo so when I somehow got onto the subject of writing fiction with a girl in the MA before my next class, I ended up mentioning a couple of my novels-in-progress. I gave her the flippant/irreverent/shorthand description of The Printer's Tale and she sounded interested, but one of the other girls in my cohort, who was sitting in front of us, turned around and made a disparaging comment that implied I was following up on the popularity of Twilight, of all things, simply because my less-than-one-sentence synopsis mentioned werewolves.

And the thing is, yes, my flippant, irreverent, shorthand description of the novels I write will always leave something out. And if you're not already into the few things that show up in the shorthand, that kind of description isn't going to interest you. But if you are? Then I can convince you in less than a sentence...or at least get a laugh out of you. In fact hopefully that's exactly what these will do!

Lunar Reflections (2005): teenage angst on the moon

Kes Running (2006): unpremeditated gap year in space

The Printer's Daughter (2007): Beauty and the Beast meets Jane Eyre with werewolves

Gil and Leah (2008): feminist fantasy cross-dressing farce

The Inconvenient Dreamer (2009): woman travels to alternate universes in her dreams

Beneath Strange Stars (2010): gender-swapped Pride and Prejudice in space

Chasing Ghosts (2011): Possession meets Neverwhere with cross-dressing

The moral of the story: I need to find more fantasy/sci-fi writers (or at least writers who are sympathetic to these genres even if not writers of them) with whom to talk about my novels.

So I've been busy today writing up my application for the program I want to take this summer at Stanford. And I feel like posting a few of my responses to a few of the questions that were asked...so here goes.

2. For each of the subject areas that you circled above, please write a few sentences explaining what you like about the subject area. For example, if you listed the Mathematical Investigation: Number Theory course among your preferences, you can start with “What I like most about math is…” If you would rather comment on the particular course, rather than the subject area, you are encouraged to do so. You are welcome to write about a specific experience you had in a course in that subject area, or something that you learned that made you interested to find out more. Be sure to write separately about the different subject areas.

What I love about writing is the sense of power and discovery that I feel every time I sit down at my keyboard or pull out a pen and some paper. To me the blank page becomes a frontier just as interesting as outer space or the ocean’s depths, full of possibilities that not even I know exist. It is this feeling of all things being possible that motivates me to write, for I know that my writing can go anywhere that I want it to, without any restrictions or limitations. In creative writing, there is no “right” or “wrong” answer; there is only the ongoing dialogue between the writer and the page. Sometimes the conversation becomes rough, but those times I endure with the knowledge that there will be other time where words will flow from my fingers onto the page to create scenes and characters and images that will last in my mind forever. I love the way that a story will sometimes seem to write itself--where I start out with one idea, but throughout the writing process the initial concept is transformed into something more, something I had never expected. In a sense, writing feels like the investigation of the unknown. Whether the unknown be physical, like an alien landscape, or emotional, like the inside of a human heart, the process of discovering what’s across the next hill or around the next corner is exhilarating and thoroughly rewarding.

3. Describe yourself as a student. Do you like to study? What do you like, or dislike, about school? Feel free to use examples from your personal experience to help with your description.

As a student, there’s nothing I crave more than the “eureka” moment--the expression of “Aha! Now I understand it!” The moment in which simplicity can be distilled from complexity is the moment where I thrive. I may genially dislike most mathematics, but the derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus was a moment like this for me. The feeling, not only of “this makes sense,” but also of pure amazement and wonder at how a human being, just like me, could discover something so important was inspirational. It’s like the one sentence in a book that utterly clarifies everything and brings to light the hidden meaning of all the preceding text--like the one line of writing that you somehow manage to get just right, so that in retrospect it seems like perfection. The edge of true learning--that’s where, for me, the excitement begins.

6. Tell us anything else about yourself that you feel is relevant, or describe some of your non-academic interests.

I have always enjoyed writing, so when I had the chance in eighth grade to participate in a distance education writing program through Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth, I was thrilled. The course, on Crafting the Essay, was the first real class I took that focused specifically on writing, and through it I learned through experience a great many of the writing techniques that I still make use of today. It’s almost funny to look back now on the days immediately before the course began, which I irrationally spent worrying about the class itself--what it would be like, whether or not I was a good enough writer to be involved in it, and especially whether or not I would like my tutor. Those worries were completely unfounded, and I came away from the program a much better and more confident writer; indeed, some of my favorite essays that I have ever written were completed during that course and revised thanks to the feedback of my tutor for the program. It widened my writing experience, and caused me to think about essays as more than just the five-paragraph evils that were too structured to have fun with. Since taking the course, I have leaned more and more toward personal essays as a form of expression, something I never would have considered an essay capable of beforehand.

But even before that essay course--really in about fifth grade--I had decided that, not only would I be a writer, but I would write a novel and have it published before I left high school. Since then my goals have become more realistic, but I continue to work with the storyline that I created nearly seven years ago, and slowly but surely, Azuria--my story--stretches its way toward the length of a novel. It’s gone through numerous revisions since those first ideas in fifth grade, I’ll admit--I’ve created new plotlines, changed names and (in one notable case) genders of characters. This summer, with my document nearing 50,000 words, I realized that the beginning was all wrong. Though it was difficult to do, I decided that it was necessary to essentially trash the first 30,000 words and rewrite the beginning from scratch to ensure better character definition and clarity of plot. It was, I’ll admit, a difficult decision to make; I have much less time to write now than I did as a fifth grader, or as a seventh grader or a freshman (the ages that I was during past “major” revisions). But I eventually came to the conclusion that the changes were necessary, whether or not I had the time to make them. It doesn’t surprise me to see the differences between the manuscript of years past and the manuscript of today. In fact, from fifth grade until now, only two things have remained noticeably unchanged: the title, which is also the name of the planet on which the story is partially set, and my conviction that I will someday complete it.

Despite my lack of time for writing, mostly caused by my focus on academics, I was lured this November into doing something that seemed at the outset to be insanely fun. In retrospect, deciding to write a 50,000 word novel within the span of a 30-day month was probably more insane than fun, but participating in National Novel Writing Month--known colloquially as NaNoWriMo--was an experience that I won’t soon forget. The “contest”--which I write in quotes because there are no losers, only winners and those who will be winners eventually--is more of a challenge to all people who’ve ever thought they had it in them to write a novel. Essentially, supported by a group of fellow writers from all over the world organized online, I set out at the beginning of November to write 50,000 original words by the month’s end. Everyone who can prove at the end of the month by word-count validation that they’ve reached the goal is a winner. The idea is really simple: a chance to write for quantity instead of quality; a chance to have fun with writing things that aren’t perfect yet aren’t expected to be. It was an idea that initially repulsed me--I’m the sort who’s never finished with rewriting things so that they’ll be just perfect--but the more that I was disturbed by the idea of not having time to rewrite, the more I knew that this was something that could be beneficial to my growth as a writer. So I did it. At 50,343 words, Lunar Reflections is the longest single piece of writing that I have authored--and though I passed the word count deadline in time to be counted among the NaNoWriMo winners, I have realized that the story is far from being done. It now has taken its place in line after Azuria as the next novel that I know I will work to finish.

So I was bored today and procrastinating shamelessly when I realized that, seeing as my novel is written in journal form, it would be really easy to organize onto a livejournal.  Three hours later, I am proud to present lunarreflection , which is (for all extensive purposes) a copy of the journal of my main character (who has now been officially named Kae).  In other words, the novel is being posted in journal increments on that journal, which has been set up specifically for this purpose.

In order to be able to keep my dates straight, I'm backdating everything.  Same dates as the ones I have in my novel...except the year starts in 1970, because LJ won't let me date entries in the future and '70 is the furthest they'll let me go into the past.  My explanation for this is that it's 1970 AE (yes, Chris, after Earth).  Because of the backdating, I don't know how effective it would be to friend the journal -- entries wouldn't probably show up on your friends page, since they're all (supposedly) from 1970.  But if you want to know what's going on with my novel, check it out.

I know there was a suggestion that I e-mail my story out to all of my friends, but somehow that seems like not the best of ideas, so I've set up this journal instead. 

And now I'm going to go and try and do some homework.  Fun...