Sorry-in-the-Vale meets Potsdam, NY

Well hello there. Pardon me while I wipe the dust off this blog. I have a couple of posts upcoming - an update and some other things. This is something else.

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So Sarah Rees Brennan is hosting a contest for an ARC of her upcoming book, Untold. One of the categories for this contest is to take a picture of yourself reading Unspoken in a weird place.

Naturally I translated this to “PHOTOSHOOT ALL OVER POTSDAM!” and recruited two lovely friends (Debbie Scharbach and Maria Gonzalez, they are wonderful!) to take pictures of me. So here is a tour of my much-beloved college town with the premise, “How many parallels can I possibly find between Potsdam, NY and Sorry-in-the-Vale?”


Attempting to mimic the cover at the gates of Bayside Cemetery.





Old Snell Hall is a part of Clarkson College. It is a very creepy, most probably haunted old building DESPERATELY in need of rennovation. It’s not *quite* a Gothic manor, but I think it does almost as good a job as the old Sisson mansions, which are now frat houses – I didn’t know how to find them or get into them.

The Sissons are one of the old families of Potsdam – along with the Clarksons, the Snells, and probably some other names that adorn the buildings of the local colleges. There are lots of stories about their nefarious schemes to keep money in the family and the bizarre things they did in their mansions. One of the popular legends is that they have tunnels connecting their mansions under all of town, and some of these tunnels are blocked off from the current owners until the last living Sisson dies.
In lieu of a proper Sisson mansion picture, have a ghost story here: The Sisson Haunted Mansion. True story: Three of my sorority sisters got a tour of this house. It has at least one secret staircase.


Inside Old Snell.





They went over the wooden bridge over the Sorrier River, stands of bright red wolfberries waving at them from the bank.
“The Sorrier River?” Jared asked when he saw the sign by the bridge.
“It’s haunted,” Kami said with some pride.
– p. 102. Taken by the Racquette River, which is not haunted (by bells or otherwise).





Bayside Cemetery is a gorgeous, old riverside cemetery that contains the mausoleums of most of those old families I mentioned before.





Potsdam, like Sorry-in-the-Vale, has its very own sandstone. It is red and called Potsdam sandstone. I find this vastly less interesting than Cotswold sandstone, whether you consider it the color of honey or of pee.





Obligatory hole in which a person might be buried alive. This picture was taken by Samantha Fay on an oboe studio hike (Mt Arab for those who know the area). I was DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED to have neither a camera nor Unspoken when we came across this hole and demanded that somebody take a picture for me.

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That’s it for the parallels, but here are some other fun pictures we took:




Believe it or not, this is a roof. The Crane School of Music is built into a hill and most of it is underground.




Cassie’s Harp – a wind harp dedicated to a student who died before finishing her degree. A beautiful spot, and haunting when the wind makes the harp sing.




I have no idea why this is not behind the construction fence.

Fun things!

Over the weekend, I hit 50,000 words and an ending. Now I get to go back and restructure the novel so that there is the appropriate amount of story between beginning & ending. Exciting but bewildering, because it does not at all end where I thought it would. This "book" appears to be the trilogy that I had originally wanted to AVOID (because honestly, wouldn't it be nice to be able to read a book and have it be a stand-alone now and again?)

On another note, I'm sick. YAAAAY BRONCHITIS. Since I'm a resident student and have no doctor up here, and since our student health isn't super reliable about respiratory stuff, I had a two-hour wait in the afterhours clinic for a ten-minute appointment. I brought some Neil Gaiman with me to read, but there was a radio playing, so I couldn't concentrate. And I have this thing where I find offices/places-of-business weirdly inspiring to write? I dunno. Anyway, I started scribbling on the back of an envelope because it was what I had at hand, and I felt very writer-y about it. Have a snippet:

"How are you?"

The pause of someone deciding whether or not to admit how shitty he feels, and then Rinehart answered, "I'm all right."

"No, you're not," Sophie said matter-of-factly. "You're miserable. Why do we say that, anyway, how-are-you-i'm-all-right, when nobody cares if you're all right and you don't want them to know you're not?"

The next pause was the sort that always followed Sophie's being honest. "It's nice to know you're concerned," Rhinehart said at last, tartly.

"I didn't say I wasn't concerned." Sophie swung herself up onto a fallen trunk and sat by the roots, heels kicking. "When people say 'nobody cares,' they mean 'everybody-doesn't-care.' I'm not part of everybody, so I'm not part of nobody when nobody really means everybody-doesn't."

"I see." Rinehart's lips quirked up - despite his best efforts, Sophie was sure. "And if you're not part of everybody-doesn't, what are you part of?"

"Well, everybody-not, of course. But everybody-not isn't a thing you're part of -- either you're everybody-not, or you aren't. It's a title, not a group."

Rinehart was silent so long Sophie almost started to worry he was having a true sourpuss day. Then he said, "I can't imagine how you must confound your teachers at school."

"I am a very smart individual," Sophie quoted, "who consistently fails to apply my talents to the proper avenues of study."

Sophie is a very smart, very weird, and slightly obnoxious girl. She happens to be able to see fairies, but this is not what makes her smart, or weird, or obnoxious. She also happens to not give a shit about whether people understand her 90% of the time, and it is beautiful. She's going to have her turn in the spotlight whenever I finish Ker's story.

Quick update

Words: 32,490 and counting. I'm supposed to be at 100 pages (approx. 50k with this font size) in two weeks.

So this book. I 100% intended it to be a standalone, because I didn't want to be tied to the first world I ever worked in (given that I am sure my writing will improve MASSIVELY over the first few years I'm writing). And then I started plotting and realized I had too much material for one book - it needs to be two, at least. And now I'm realizing that the world I've invented is simply too large to be explored fully in one story (or set of stories). Originally, the story was going to gallivant about from the city of Quorina to at least two or three other cultures. Now it's looking like the entire first novel is likely to take place in Quorina. This makes me sad, because it is SO MUCH FUN to explore the fruits of my worldbuilding.

So I suppose I will have to write some short stories or novellas or whatnot in addition to this. Who am I kidding? I would love to write an entire novel about a child growing up in Elatxaia.

I need to get back to my writing. I want to get another 2 pages written in the next hour. Here, have some snippets I had to excise:

She could see now that Keranos’ fists were clenched; his perpetual scowl had deepened, if possible.

“If you two could postpone this argument until we’re in the sewer,” Luxinus added, crouching down on the floor and pulling some sort of grass blade out of a container, “that would be excellent. You’re raising your voices again.” He stuck his arm through the grate hole and wiggled the grass blade back and forth.

“You’re not the only one ever used,” Keranos said to Eritsena, and if his voice was softer, it was twice as vicious. “Do not say, northerner, just because you – because you…” He trailed off, his face twisting. Then he spat something in an unfamiliar language and snapped, “Your words are not good.”

Luxinus paused in his magic and blinked at Keranos, apparently befuddled by the comment. The sentiment was so familiar to Eritsena that she nearly laughed. She controlled herself before the prickly northerner could take offense, and said, “They’re his words, not mine.” She jabbed a thumb at Luxinus. “I only speak Imperial because it’s what most people understand. It has all the wrong words for all the wrong things.”

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She took a few moments to slip into a clean dress and neaten her mussed hair. She did not bring a lamp with her to the garden. The halls of her childhood home were as familiar to her as the soles of her sandals, and anyway there seemed to be a great deal of moonlight tonight; she could see grey, shifting shadows on the corridor walls.

She realized that the spirit was still with her when she reached the garden. Scent hit her strongly as soon as she stepped through the doorway: flower and leaf, marble and dirt, sweat and skin and the overpowering perfume used to cover such odors. The garden was shaded in deep greens and greys, and its beauty in this altered state nearly took her breath away.

Oh hi I exist.

Hello, lovely people!

Quick update since I haven't been around lately. My first draft/first-chapter revision is OFFICIALLY my project for my capstone course at college. I am SUPER EXCITED for this largely because it means this novel will have to stop acting like a constipated lump in the back of my head. I have 17,073 words and counting. :D

Anywho, have a nice long snippet from a scene that went VERY QUICKLY AWRY and is being scrapped and completely rewritten. Actually I'm not sure how I feel about even this part, but at least it's not all plot-awkward and Totally Not Following The Purpose Of The Scene.

“Ladies, meet Eritsena Kingsbrother of Senxal. She’s from Elatxaia, and a princess on her father’s side.”

Clotea, the slave who had handed Eritsena sandals, advanced with a jar of oil and a metal tool that reminded Eritsena of a small scythe. Never having quite understood Quorian bathing practices, Eritsena had always brought her own supplies to the bathhouse and used them as she best saw fit, to the occasional dismay of proprietors; now, she held very, very still in the hopes that the slave woman was not about to murder her.

Meanwhile, the aristocrats broke out into another series of exclamations at Anticia’s introduction. “How exotic!” one woman, Eritsena’s age, beamed. There had been a brief flash of dismay on her face, one Eritsena had not missed, before she noticed that her compatriots were smiling. “What brings you this far south, Eritsena?”

“Travel,” Eritsena answered cautiously. “My people often travel the world in their early twenties. It’s said to bring wisdom.”

Clotea had poured the oil over Eritsena’s left shoulder. Now she began to scrape it away with the scythelike tool. The woman who had spoken before remarked, “How strange! I’ve never seen an Elatxaian before.”

“It’s unlikely you’d see a woman,” Eritsena allowed. “Few of us come this far south.” In recent years, more and more women were restricting their years of wandering to Elatxaia itself. With Quorian ideals seeping outward to the fringes of the Empire, fewer and fewer territories were interested in entertaining a horsewoman or a female messenger. The road was more dangerous for a lone woman than it once had been, as well. “It may be they were dressed as locals, if you saw one – our dress isn’t really…seasonal in this weather.”

“Charming,” the older woman said. She was squinting shortsightedly at Eritsena’s torso. “But you have children, I see, or your stomach says so. Surely they miss their mother?”

Eritsena felt a slow, dark flush creeping up her neck and into her cheekbones. She wished, fervently, that she were stranded on a rock in the ocean, being picked at by vultures; it would have been less excruciating. “I was very young when my son was born. He didn’t survive.” It was a half-truth made mostly by omission, but it was more than she wanted these strangers to know.

Several of the aristocrats made apologetic noises, but the older woman clucked her tongue and looked away, as if Eritsena had killed a child simply by being away from home. A brief silence fell, into which Eritsena clearly heard the younger woman whisper to another, “She hardly has an accent! Do you think she’s really…”

Oh, and if I seem not to exist, this novel is why. So I guess I'll see y'all sometime in March when I have break.

Here, have a snippet.

Instead of doing my proper novel-writing today I did some ventwork. It's a beginning which could possibly be a novel if the story decided to behave. It's about a snarky psychic named Melanie Shefford and Brian, her ex-fiance. This is how it starts:

I didn’t go to work on Friday. I spent the morning curled up next to the window with a cup of tea and a book. The tea was chammomile, which is good for the stomach and the nerves, and which I occasionally forget to despise. I was wearing my warmest sweater and fuzzy slippers and a blanket around my shoulders. The blanket was for comfort, mostly.

When I didn’t turn up to work and I didn’t answer my phone, which was dead, again, Brian showed up to check on me. Either he predicted my response or he was really worried, because he poked his head around the door before I could answer his knock. “Mel, you really can’t just skip –” he began when he saw me, then took another look and stopped. “What – ”

“I’m fine.” I tugged the blanket tighter around my shoulders. “Kettle’s on the stove if you want tea.”

“Are you sick? Why didn’t you call in?”

“Phone’s dead. Can’t find it,” I lied. “I’m not sick.”

“It’s not like you to just…not show up.”

“Felt like being spontaneous.”

He gave my very settled position a very pointed look. “You know Carl’s the sort of guy who’ll get you fired for spontaneity. He’s being nice because we’re worried. You’ve been different since – ”

He stopped, bit his tongue as if he’d almost spit poison. I wished he’d just say the goddamn word. Dancing around a thing, refusing to take it head-on, you have to judge it by its shadow – and the shadow’s always been a hell of a lot bigger for me than the thing I’m scared of.

“We all want you to be okay and to take your time to be okay,” Brian resumed, trying and failing not to sound like a TV commercial for counseling. “But you gotta call us and let us know if you’re not coming in. Use the neighbor’s phone or something. Carl would definitely fire you if you gave him a heart attack.”

I had nothing to say to that. Silence fell, awkward enough that Brian checked his phone to give his eyes something to do. On a bad impulse I asked, “How long have you got till he expects you back?”

“Depends on how you’re feeling.”

“Tell him I tripped down the stairs and had a concussion and you had to take me to the hospital.”

That startled a laugh out of him, like a flash flood crashing over a desert. He went to make himself some tea.

I've stuck the two of them in a situation which may or may not be melodramatic, but which is terrible for them both. I love Melanie more but I think I feel worse for Brian, who's actually a geniunely nice guy.

Why, hello there, blog.

Haven't posted in a while. I've been writing - I've just been recording my progress offline, so I haven't seen much reason to post.

I think instead of the daily this-is-how-much-I-did post (I've more or less been tracking by week anyway) I'm just going to post a teaser every Friday. When I actually have words, that is.

Anyway, I had two things to note that entertained me but probably aren't interesting enough to entertain anyone else.

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First, I've taken to mindsplatting on Notepad in an attempt to straighten out my nonexistent plot. It's sort of like talking to myself on electric paper. Here are some gems:

- "bahahahaha maybe Order is getting tired of how Orderly things are in the real world because Chaos is off babysitting. THIS IDEA MAKES ME TOO HAPPY."

- "SFDKLGHSDOF;IHEWO;FN THIS IS SUCH A NONSENSICAL CONCEPT
screw it. i'm just going to write and let these two do whatever the eff they want.
BUT THEN I HAVE NO PLOT SDOLFHSOHFSKBFSKDJFBS."

- "BAHAHA I JUST CONTRADICTED MYSELF"

- "he's doing it because I DECLARE A BOUNDARY SUCH AS THIS ONE TO BE TOO BLACK-AND-WHITE FOR MY UNIVERSE."

- "WHAT IF WE ARE ALL DISTRACTED BITS AND PIECES OF ONE GIANT MIND WAAAAAAAAHHHHH"

I like to pretend I'm sane and rational when I talk to other people, but really I get a kick out of yelling at myself incoherently.

In all seriousness, though, this method is super helpful in that it helps my freewriting technique - so I can spit out words without thinking too hard/getting distracted from the content by the words I use (writer/editor's rule-of-thumb: big concept issues take precedence over word-level/prose issues in early drafts). This is something I've been struggling with for the last couple of months. I've been trying so hard to make my writing coherent to people NOT inside my head (always a worthwhile goal, of course) that I kept getting blocked and wasn't able to just WRITE anymore. Which is a huge issue when I'm only on the first draft.

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The second thing is that I was wandering around Tv Tropes and made some entertaining discoveries. In general, I'm not a fan of black-and-white dualities: Good vs. Evil, Light vs. Dark, Order vs. Chaos, etc. I think it's silly for something to be utterly In The Right and something else to be utterly In The Wrong, partly because it removes the opportunity for narrative tension (what if the good guy does something Wrong?), partly because it ignores characterization, partly because it simply isn't true to life. My story in particular is a subversion of the Order Versus Chaos trope. (Not going into detail, partly because that's what the story's for, partly because I haven't hashed out the details yet. I'm not yet 100% sure whether it's a subverson, inversion, or aversion.)

That said, I love love love complimentary/foil characters. My main duo is pretty much Red Oni, Blue Oni played straight. I started laughing at myself when I realized this, because my notes-to-self contain a lot of yelling about how NO DUALITY SHOULD GO UNCHALLENGED. I don't really know why I love character dualities so much when World Order dualities drive me nuts, but I'm hoping it doesn't result in a weakness in characterization once the story's actually written.


Speaking of. I should probably get back to that. The writing thing. /random babble

Thoughts on process and confidence

I've been taking my writing a lot more seriously lately.

Originally, I started this blog with a sort of experimental tone. What would happen if I tried to write a novel? Was I capable of devoting the time? Over the last year, I've succeeded in cementing my schedule so that I have the time to write, even if it costs me other things. I've started to take it as a given that I'm going to finish this book, and that it's going to be enough of a gem for me to send to agents. I'm not entirely certain when this change took place.

On the one hand, it's a good thing, because it means I'm developing the discipline and confidence that I need as a writer. On the other...well. Since I started drafting, I've spent a horrifying amount of time staring at a blank Word document in utter panic, thinking, Oh my God I have to think of Perfect Words where are they why are they not in my brain. That was why I started hand-writing.

The thing is, I like writing longhand. It's more permanent, so I'm forced to think my words out before I commit them to paper; it's slower, so I have the time to think out my next sentence while I'm writing the current one; and, as long as I take my time and write neatly, I can take an aesthetic pleasure from the form of the words that counteracts the automatic, cringing Oh my God it isn't perfect. The fact that it's a bit slower to read as well as to write keeps me focused on the sentence-level instead of the plot-level (serious plot-level thoughts need to happen in plotting-time and revision-time, not while I draft). It also helps that I know I have to type it eventually, so this is nothing more than a draft.

Unfortunately, I am also writing at half speed.

I've been bouncing back and forth for the last few days, and I've finally decided to write the entire draft on paper. (I have an entire journal I set aside for drafting anyway, when I wasn't sure what my process would be.) While this will make for much prettier words and a much less intimidated me, it also means I'll have to take a lot more time out of my day to work. (Thank goodness notebooks are more portable than computers.)

For now, I'm going to keep track of my progress by word count - 1000 words a day, 5 days a week - instead of by time spent. Keeping my word goal the same as if I were typing for 2 hours a day runs the risk of burnout/constant-falling-behind, but I really don't want to take twice as long to get this thing drafted. In the meantime, some reminders to keep me from going nuts:

1. It took JK Rowling 5 years to write the first Harry Potter book (although of course she was plotting a whole series). None of my favorite authors were published before their late 20s/early 30s. I HAVE TIME my goodness.
2. I can always, always, always rewrite sections...but if I do nothing but rewrite, I'll never finish.
3. There's a good chance, as is the case for any writer, that I'll never gain anything but my own enjoyment by writing. If that's the case, I better take the opportunity to actually enjoy it.