Filler Post

My reader has been clamoring for a new post.  Yes, I only have one reader.  I can see how many times my posts have been viewed.  I'm thinking about starting a new blog.  One that has more of a theme, i.e. ranting about books/movies/TV shows and generally being a pretentious hipster.

Am I still a hipster if I admit I am one?  Because I do like some things just because they are obscure.  Granted, you need a critical mass of fandom for it to be fun, but things that everyone likes just aren't the same.  So yeah, I'm a tea-drinking, Mumford and Sons (they're actually on the radio) Frank Turner listening, Galen Beckett reading (I liked him better when he was publishing under Mark Anthony, though I get why he went to a pseudonym), German speaking hipster.

That wasn't what I was going to post about.

Well, it was, I think.  One of the things.  Summer is a time of idleness and reflection, a time of setting goals you never achieve, but at least you have enough time to do them if you wanted to.  Usually.

This summer I am taking two summer classes.  One is an online class about language development and its for my minor.  The other is an upper-level queer theory class that involves two weeks in San Francisco and making a documentary film.  And lots and lots of angry readings about the heteropatriarchy.

(My reader knows this already, but since it's on the internet I feel like I have to make this coherent to the general public.)

This summer I am also living off-campus, on my own (i.e. not under adult supervision, because I am an adult, or so I've been told). 

This summer I need to start seriously looking in to grad school applications.  It's not just a distant dream to get me through a depressed phase - it's my actual future that I hold in my own hands, and I'm terrified I might drop it.

This summer I hope to start an etsy shop and sell crocheted My Little Ponies (no, seriously, those things go for $20-$40, and you know what?  Yarn is cheap) in lieu of getting a real job.

See, my original goal for this summer was to get a real job and my driver's license.  Then San Francisco happened, and I put growing up on hold.

So maybe this post is about growing up, and how it's not happening, only it is happening.  I'm not reaching milestones, but I'm learning more about myself - not changing, but becoming more who I am (coughhipstercough yeah, what of it?it's true).  I'm a hipster.  I'm a brony (that's for another post).  I'm queer not a lesbian, and I don't give a damn about dismantling the heteropatriarchy, I'm going to change the world in my own small way by writing books.  If I ever finish the damn things.  At least I'm writing again.

I stopped writing.  And then I started again.  And then I stopped.  It's like when I used to get depressed (used to?) - so depressed that I felt like I would never be happy again.  I went through so many cycles, eventually I realized that I would always feel happy again.  And I would always feel sad again.  And maybe that was the first step in my growing up and leaving behind the adolescent woes, because once I stopped fearing my depression it had less power over me.  Until extenuating circumstances, but even that passed.

I'm going to stop before this gets any more rambly.

So, my dear reader, I hope this was enough to break the monotony of your North Dakota wasteland for a little while, and I will be sure to keep you posted on my future activities in the blogosphere.

What Was I Thinking?

Hello Hello!  I'm still here.  I don't know if you are, though.  Ah well.  I don't take blogging seriously, like some people I've met.  I believe I'm going to consider this my training blog, so that when I'm a published writer and people actually care what I have to say, then I'll know how to say things worth saying.

Blah blah blah aside, I'm doing better and worse on the writing front.  Worse, because I haven't written anything of significance in...well, I'm not even sure.  Since I decided to finally put that nameless Baleful Polymorph that I'd been working on since high school out of its misery and be DONE WITH IT FOR REAL THIS TIME.  I am now free to work on my multitude of side stories that are all so much more interesting! 

...

...

You know, despite being a hideous monster with a broken plot that had gone through so many versions it didn't even know what it was anymore...I don't really feel the same sort of dedication for anything else.  Maybe it was just my age, and now I realize it was crap, I'm hard pressed to come up with something new that isn't.  At this point I'm tempted to take it out of storage, dust off the pieces, and see if there's anything I can stitch together.  But I can't.  It's dead.  As it should be and it's time to move on.

I did say I was doing better, though, and here's why:  I'm taking Creative Writing.  Yep.  I displaced some poor Creative Writing major who won't be able to take any actual CW classes for another semester.  Eh.  They have so many generals and literature components they won't really fall behind.  It seems that a lot of the people in that class aren't CW majors either, so it's a nice laid-back atmosphere for me to finally rid myself of this damn phobia.

For those who haven't been following, I have an absolute terror of sharing my writing with other people - what I like to term "page fright."  What I noticed the first time I had to read a poem in that class, however, is that it was mostly physiological.  I was twitchy and tense and kept fidgeting with a yo-yo while I took deep breaths and tried to keep my vision from blurring.  You know, like I was on the verge of a panic attack.  Only I wasn't actually scared.  It was weird.  And they liked my poem.  Better than some of the others.  A lot of the others.  I'm not going to say there are some bad writers in that class, but some are better than others.

So I think I'll be able to kick this habit, since it seems to be a Pavlovian reflex more than an emotional response.  Problems:  It's exhausting.  Writing a poem every week. Reading twenty poems a week.  What was I thinking?  I'm a prose writer.  I'm sick of poetry, and we're not even halfway through the poetry unit.  There's only one short story required for the class, and  - best part - the professor will not accept fantasy. 

Now, if his rationale had been that traditional High Fantasy requires a great deal of worldbuilding that does not work well in short works - okay.  I can accept that.  But no, he just doesn't like fantasy because he thinks it's crap.  This guy, by the way, writes crime fiction.  Murder mystery detective stories.  Room to judge?  I don't think so.  He also refuses trashy paranormal romance - but you know that several girls are going to write trashy mundane romances anyway.

 Does it matter if a stupid girl is in love with a stupid angsty hipster or a stupid angsty vampire?  At least if there's a vampire, you know that someone's going to bleed eventually.  And you know, just bcause a story is a paranormal romance does not mean it has to be trashy - people just write with that assumption.  The thing is, there are some good mundane stories about lovers - The Time-Traveller's Wife, The Gargoyle - okay, I lied when I said mundane.  But this just proves the point I was going to make anyway!  Fantastical elements do not automatically make a story crap!  It is how you use them that determines the quality of your story.

Better stop now, I'm rambling.  I shall return anon!

(Top) Five Books About Griffins

Why am I doing all these lists?  Because I'm bored!  And I read too much!  And I've been watching a lot of Nostalgia Chick videos!  And because I can!  And because I just finished a griffin book.

I like griffins.  You may have guessed from the title of this blog, even though it is a word I got form watching a spelling bee years ago and apparently means messy handwriting and has nothing to do with griffins.  The thing is that griffins are way underdone, especially compared to, say, dragons, or wolves.  So instead of being a "Top" Five, this is really just a list of the five books about griffins that I've read and ranked.

5.  The Griffin Mage Trilogy - Rachel Neumeier

This one I only read a couple years ago, but I had to do a library search by "griffins" because I could remember neither title nor author, nor the names of any of the characters, nor exactly what happens.  I only read the first book, Lord of the Burning Sands. So let's see.  There's this girl, who's an orphan, and lives on a horse ranch (points for not making it a generic farm) and then a bunch of griffins swoop in and make the area a desert because they have some kind of Grogromon effect on the environment.  And then they kidnap the girl because she has some special magic.  And...stuff happens, and there's a big fight at the end.  Oh, and there was some sub-plot with this soldier boy, and apparently certain humans have a kind of magic where they can control a particular type of animal, and the big twist at the end is when the soldier boy discovers he can control griffins.  Which makes them animals or what?  They seemed pretty sentient.

What I did not like about Neumeier's griffins is that she focused on making them savage and unhuman, which to me made them uninteresting. 

4.  The Fallen Moon Trilogy - K.J. Taylor

I was at the new bookstore, and I felt like I had to buy something, so when I saw The Dark Griffin  I was like "Hey!  I like griffins.  It can't be too bad."  And it wasn't.  More on that later.

My first big hurdle reading this was when I realized that people are riding these griffins.  They're  bond creatures.  But it is fairly integral to the plot, so I got over it.  And I mean, I had a griffin-rider fantasy when I was, like, twelve, so I can't really judge.  The prose isn't the best - it reads like a draft, but a draft by a rather good writer.  It's like in the original draft she wrote "And then the baby griffin grew up on its own" and by the final draft had to wrack her brains for details that really didn't matter to the plot overall.  And there there was the food.  Literally.  Her characters always eat "food."  As in:  "The food was plain but nourishing" or "His house had been ransacked, the food trampled into the floor."  Again, it seems that she put it in as a placeholder, and by the time she got to later drafts was like "Crap.  What do they eat instead of pizza and ramen?"  Her answer:  Bread.  Cheese.  Dried meat.  Apples.  Oh, and cabbage.  That was the one original item mentioned, only the thing is, you don't eat cabbage raw.  You have to cook it.  So what do they do with cabbage in...whatever the country was called?  Steam?  Boil?  Bake?  Fry?  Pickle?  Or do they eat it raw?  At one point the main character eats stew at an inn, and that's as excitingly detailed as it gets.  Read Redwall if you need inspiration, girl.

The only real problem I had with the book, though, was the characters.  They were so flat I could not tell that the one chick was the main character's actual established girlfried until they were having sex.  This was about three or four conversations in, and I had been wondering if they were a pre-couple.  There were so many times during the book I was practically shouting "Why are you doing that?  You have no motivation!  Real people don't talk like that!  Real people don't act like that!  Real people aren't motivated like that!"  Namely the part where the main characters friends all try to help him feel better after his griffin dies (oops, slight spoiler, but it's fairly early on).  And I'm thinking Dudes, his bond creature just died.  Some 'verses don't have people survive that, though that's usually the telepathic ones (points for no telepathy).  And the friends...you don't get any real sense of friendship.  The author was just "Hey, main character must have social life (insert friends here)"  None of them have a distinct personality and one can tell their only purpose is to be the failed support network.  They are characters playing a role, not people.  Also, more amusing than anything else - the one friend seems to be the only cop in town.  I mean, it's implied that it's kind of a bigger city, but every single time the cops show up, Bran is there.  Every.  Single.  Time.

I will give credit where credit is due, though, and say that the book has a very good plot.  As in I want to read the sequel even though the characters are flat as paper.  It's a Martinesque rather than a Tolkienesque story, meaning (I think; I'm just making this up and I've only read about three chapters of GRR Martin) that it is a human story with twisty political gimmicks, rather than a quest to destroy a Great Evil*.  The main character is sent to capture a wild griffin and told "Oh yeah, you'll be fine"  when really that sort of operation takes a specialized team, but he manages it even though his griffin partner dies.  And there's a mini-conspiracy against him, and this racism subplot that makes it really obvious the writer is white.  The second plotline follows the titiular dark griffin that he captured.  On the whole though, it's a really intriguing story despite the blandness of the chracters.  Plus there are references to Diana Wynne Jones, I swear there are.  The oranges.  The arena that is totally Costamaret.  You don't...?  Oh never mind, just keep reading.
(*Just read on author's website that it is supposed to be a villain origin story.  I am intrigued.  Library, y u no have sequels?!  I don't like it so much I want to spend more money on it.)

3.  The Black Griffin - Mercedes Lackey

Yes, I ranked a Mercedes Lackey book this high.  I actually kind of like this one.  Mostly because of the griffins.  This book is about...um...a sort of masseuse/psychotherapist/companion who hangs around an army camp in the middle of a war.   And so do a bunch of griffins.  Okay, they're fighting in the war, but I think the reason I actually like this book is because it is more character driven, rather than trying to destroy the Great Evil.  The war is there, but it is background to the story until the very end.  The other books in the trilogy are meh at best - the second book could show them rebuilding after the war, except by then everything's kind of rebuilt and Lackey has to introduce a new conflict from the Other Continent.  And the third book is a Disney sequel where the offspring of the main cast go off on adventures that are not nearly as interesting as the parents'.  But the first book is solid.

2.  The Firebringer Trilogy - Meredith Ann Pierce

Yeah, okay, the main focus in this series is on the unicorns, but the griffins are a major subplot, and there's one of the cover of the first book.  They are shown as enemies of the unicorns at first, but then they are shown to have their own culture and traditions, and eventually make peace when the unicorns decide to drive the wyverns out of their ancestral lands instead of squatting on the griffins' ancestral hunting grounds (really, the griffins were only hunting them because they drove out the deer.  It's all just a misunderstanding.).  Only it gets a little weird when the one griffin has a romancey relationship with one of the unicorns, and it's implied that they have offspring, which is like, wut?  I would kind of like to read something about that, though.  The offspring, that is.  Except it would end up being full of race-angst, so maybe it's better she left it at that.

1.  Dark Lord of Derkholm/Year of the Griffin - Diana Wynne Jones

Of course I rank Jones at the top.  Am I biased?  Only because she's a damn good writer.  Was, I mean.  Fuck.

Book 1 of the...duology...introduces Wizard Derk genetic engineering wizard, and his genetically engineered griffin offspring.  Plus the two human ones.  The rest of the plot is about how the pseudo-medieval fantasyland is being exploited for tours from a parallel world.  Wizard Derk is bullied into running the operations for a year, and his kids, griffin and human, all pitch in and help.  The second book is after the tours are abolished, and follows one of the griffin children at college dealing with the aftermath of the tours.  And yes, that makes it sound like a Disney sequel, except 1) Elda was around in the first book, she was just too young to do much, and 2)  Even though it is technically less epic, it is still quite interesting - perhaps even more interesting.  It's not a sequel, it's completely different, slightly related story.  I like these griffins (okay, they were my first impression of griffins) because they are people, not talking animals or mysterious "others."  Lackey actually managed to do that too.  Huh.  Whodathunk?

But I wanted another sequel, dammit!  I wanted to see Elda and Flury hook up!  That would have been so adorable!  And I wanted to see the Other Continent.  And now Jones is dead and there will be no more, ever!

Anyway, we have, in ascending order:  Griffins as Grogromon, Griffins as bond-creatures, Griffins as created race, Griffins as...other race, and Griffins as created race AND other race on the Other Continent.  Griffins as different magic-users from humans, griffins as the ONLY magic-users (I thought that was pretty cool, especially since the didn't spend a lot of time on exposition, just snuck it in there periodically), griffins as the same sort of magic-users as humans, griffins not exactly using magic any more than anyone else, and griffins as mostly the same sort of magic-users with cultural and personal variation.

Shortlist:  Squire by Tamora Pierce, in which there is a griffin on the cover and the main character takes care of a baby griffin for a while which does absolutely nothing to further the plot.  The griffins are just part of a magical ensemble and aren't really important.  And it's Tamora Pierce.

That's about all I had to say about griffins.  Or, well, books.  I realize I may very well be obligated now to read Game of Thrones if I'm going to be making claims like that the Tolkienist movement has now split into Eddingsian and Martinesque factions.  Or maybe I'll just stay with my indie-fantasy.

I like griffins.  I've had a griffin story on backburner for years.  Must write before they become the new dragons...do you think that could ever happen?  There's been a lot of indie dragon deconstructions lately, so they might be on their way out.

Hmm.

Time

Time is a funny thing.  It is elastic, like a rubber band, so the same length of it can feel very long or very short.  Seconds can grind slow as hours if you are giving a presentation in front of a class, but you can sit down to talk with a friend you have not seen in far too long, and find the hours flying by like seconds.

So whether this was a long year or a short year, I cannot say.  A year ago today I was on a airplane to Germany, somehow convinced I was going to have the time of my life, despite the frightful doubts in my head that I was in completely the wrong place.  Empty lonely hours stretched long in the Scheissburg, but back at school my life was carried away by a whirlwind until I finally took it back by force.  Then stood staring, wondering what to do with it.

One year ago today I took to the air and I still cannot say if I have landed safely. 

There was a lot this year.  I hit the low point of my life, and pray to whatever gods may be that I never go there again.  I have discovered I am not who I thought I was, and though I no longer have the adolescent urgency to figure it out, I am looking down a lifelong road through self-discovery.

This was a year of redefining - redefining of relationships, goals, desires.  And though I don't feel like I have any more answers than when I started, what I have is, I think, enough to carry me through 2012.

These were my goals for 2011:

1.  To no longer be afraid of things that won't kill me.
2.  To stop making things my problems that aren't.

I think I did okay on those.  Certainly not going to leave them behind, but I think I need some new ones for 2012.

1.  Take control of my own life.
2.  Make new friends and take care of the ones I have.
3.  Show someone a story (a real one, one that matters).  Shouldn't be a problem if no one bugs me about it.
4.  Actually learn to play something on the guitar.
5.  Redefine my relationship with my body.

If you know me and don't know what #5 means, don't ask.  I'll tell you in my own time.

(Why do I post things I don't want to talk about?  I guess I feel more comfortable writing than talking sometimes.  It makes me uncomfortable to talk about the things I blog about, which is why I blog about them instead of talking - like they are still being expressed, more than in a private diary, but I don't have to say anything, and I don't get immediate responses.  Things I need to say but can't.  I forget sometimes that real people I know read this.  Like it doesn't exist in the spoken reality.  Ah well.)

Re-emerging Into Reality

You may have noticed that I have been somewhat less diligent about posting in this month of November.  That is because I have been participating in a cult group madness challenge called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.  50,000 words.  30 days.  One writer.

Okay, not one writer.  That is what is so wonderful about NaNo.  Writing is by nature a solitary activity, and sitting in a group of people all absorbed in their own laptops writing their own novels does not sound like a party by anyone's standards.  Still, it is a great way to stay motivated.  I tend to write in creative spurts, but I have a hard time finishing.  I get about half or two-thids of the way through, and the story starts to sag, and I start to see all the places I went wrong, and I want to start over and fix things.  And I get to a point where I don't know where to go next and I don't really care.

But with NaNoWriMo, every word counts.  Rule #1 is DO NOT DELETE.  Rule #2 is DO NOT GIVE UP.  I was up to being seven days behind, but I made up the difference in the last few weeks and pulled across the finish line with hours to spare.

I have done NaNo several times in the past, and this was a year of firsts for me.  It was the first year I made an outline the night before from a story I thought of that day.  It was the first time I threw out that outline on the first day and started with a story that had been smoldering in my head for a while.  And it is the first year that I re-started on the second day with a completely new story that had been gestating but I had not considered ready to be born; but it was my most viable option.  It is the first year I had no idea where the story was supposed to go.

That is another thing about NaNo.  It forces you to be creative.  For the first 20k or so I was writing myself in circles.  Then I added witch hunters.  I never thought I would until I realized that I needed something new.  And there they were.  That got me close to 40k before that arc came down.  The rest was a first person account filling in the gaps of the first arc.  Note:  First person in lovely for wordiness.  You can throw in so much opinionation and asides and rants.  It's wonderful.

Then I was still about a thousand short and spat out half a bonus scene with the witch hunters.

Every year after that first one I have told myself that I won't do NaNo - I don't have time, I don't any good ideas, I'm in the middle of another project - and yet somehow I always do.  And I don't regret it.  Any of it.  Even though all my drafts so far have been shit, and I don't very much think this one is any different, I wrote that damn novel.  I have proven to myself that I can can overcome my creative barriers.  It does not take skill to write, after all.  Skill can be learned.  It takes determination and persistence, and I definitely leveled up in that area this month.

Now for a rest. This is also the first year my wrist actually started twinging (at the 47k mark, when I was starting to think I might actually make it).  That has not stopped me from starting a new crochet project.  I want to get back to my translations - I've been making trips to the career center to see what the heck I can do with my life, and translator is still one of my options.  I also want to start reading books again.  Am halfway through the third Temeraire book and also for some reason have a strong urge to re-read the entire Chronicles of Chrestomanci.  Oh yeah, finals are coming up too.

Blah blah words blah oh wait, I don't have to count them anymore.

Writer's Block

My parents read my blog - that's what I get for posting the link on facebook, I suppose.  Luckily I had not yet posted any embarrassing information.  Come to think of it, I don't think I have any embarrassing information.  I don't drink.  I've never been romantically involved with anyone.  They more or less already know my secrets.  It's just a little embarrassing.  Awkward.  Something I was not expecting and did not expect to come up during a skype conversation the other day.

Though all my mom had to say was, "Actually, we went to Iowa State University, not University of Iowa."  To which I did not reply. "It's Iowa.  No one cares."
No offense to anyone who may be reading this if you are from Iowa, have friends in Iowa, eventually move to Iowa, or have some sort of fondness for the cornfield I mean state.

So for my sanity's sake I am just going to pretend my parents do not know that I am writing and carry on as normal.

Several readers have made it known to me that they enjoy reading my blog, and that they consider it well written.  First of all, thank you, it really does mean a lot to me.  It's actually a little mind-blowing to hear/read that. 

I've struggled with writing since I was about six, about the same time I was solidifying my reputation as a bookworm, and paving the way for the many ironies of my life.  Of course I could understand those wonderful things called books, and read those magical things called words, but generate my own?  Take those words that have already been laid down in perfect order by holy beings called authors and scramble them with my own clumsy efforts?  Use them to express my own weak thoughts and tiny life experiences?  Impossible.  Every sentence was a drag, and I kept to the bare minimum, ashamed of my puny efforts to control words.

It did not help that in the midst of this, I had a slightly traumatizing event.  First grade.  We had been herded to the gymnasium to watch some concert/performance thing, probably the middle school or high school choir.  Then we were herded back to the classroom and told to write a journal about it.  I stuck with my three sentence minimum, ending with "It was cinduv (kind of - this was, believe it or not, before I devolped my mad spelling skills) boring."

A reasonable statement, yes?  In fact I had enjoyed the concert or whatever it was, but due to the disorganization of the management, we had waited for the show to begin longer than a six-year-old's patience finds acceptable - that was the part I had meant was boring, though I could not think how to express it.  I showed it to the teacher to get it stamped off. 

She did not like it.  In fact, a part of my memory that I do not entirely trust but do not entirely doubt says that she tore the page from my journal.  "That is not how you talk about other people!"  she told me sharply.  The part of the memory I am sure of is that she was loud enough to cause the entire class to look at me and witness my humiliation.  And for a shy child who does not have many friends and does not like being in the spotlight, can you imagine a worse punishment?

Now that I am older (it seems there are advantages to growing up after all) I find the teacher's response to have been entirely unreasonable.  Since when was "boring" a forbidden word?  Since when was an opinion of disapproval socially unacceptable?  And what the HELL gave her the right to frickin' embarrass me in front of everyone and give me a literary handicap that still affects me today at nineteen?

For years I could not show anyone anything I had written.  The safest course, in fact, was to not write anything at all.  It's not like I intended to be a writer or anything, as so many smiling adults asked me when they heard I liked to read.  But there was still curricular writing to deal with.  Make a sentence using each of the spelling words - I couldn't even do that.  Well, I could, but it was very, very uncomfortable, especially when the teacher sat down and read them right in front of me.  Don't even think about writing a story.  Or book reports.  I sucked at book reports.  Summarize the book:  It's about a kid who finds out he's a hero and has to save the world.  Now tell why you liked the book:  ...I don't know, I just did?  Because it was fun to read and a heck of a lot more interesting than my own life?

That fell a bit short of the 1-2 page requirement.

Oh, and in sixth grade, I found out at the end of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education, for those who don't know or forgot) Program that we were supposed to have written an "essay" about how DARE changed our life, which I had not realized was mandatory.  Nor had I realized that we were supposed to read it out loud in front of the whole frakking class. So I and the underachievers were sent to the computer lab to type something up - I think that was probably my first experience BS-ing a paper - and called back into the classroom to read our pieces.  And I couldn't do it.  A kind girl offered to do it for me, and I let her, sitting for the next two minutes in abject misery, each word a slap in the face from my incompetence.  This part might have more to do with stage fright than write-fright, actually, but the two were closely tied.

It did get better, oddly enough, in middle school.  However, as this post has run rather long (and is not what I was intending to write about at all), I will save the story of how I triumphantly overcame my difficulties (And you can too!  Isn't it inspiring???) for the next post.

I started a blog

It seems to be the thing to do these days, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon. 

Blogs have always struck me as a rather pretentious means of expression used only by those who have no friends to talk to.  However, this view has been refuted by my many friends and acquaintances who have blogs. 

It's like letting someone read your diary, and why would you do that?

Or perhaps it's more like writing a letter to the world.

If I had to offer a reason for why I am starting a blog, I think it would be because my life it finally getting interesting, and people might even care enough to read about it.

So.  Here it goes.