I promised to get back to these posts, and I had a specific request for the differences among high fantasy, epic fantasy, and low fantasy. When I talked about fantasy, I discussed the various tropes and methods that can be used to categorize fantasy into different sub-genres without actually spelling out definitions for any of them.
This was deliberate. ( Read the rest of this entry » )
Originally published at Erin M. Hartshorn. You can comment here or there.
Originally published at Poise and Pen. You can comment here or there.
I’ll leave you with this little diddy to bring you into the homestretch. Europe – The Final Countdown
~Amber
- Thu, 18:51: The 6pm hour is NOISY. Neighbors sitting around under the windows talking. Kids running and yelling. GO IN AND EAT DINNER, Y'ALL! Jesus!
- Fri, 07:57: The power went off for two hours. I still think running all the functions of an apt. building in Maine solely on electricity is stupid.
- Fri, 07:58: Oh, well. At least now there is oolong.
Originally published at Poise and Pen. You can comment here or there.
Only one more Thursday after today to finish your Writo de Mayo goals. Anyone hyperventilating or feeling woozy from the pressure?
~Amber
I was going to do a big post about Camp NaNoWriMo, but Nicki wrote about it so much better already: Off to Camp.
This post, then, simply serves to say that I am joining in the fun this summer; I’ve signed up for both June and August. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I’m writing epic fantasy this year, or that I’m writing in a world where music and magic are inextricably intertwined. My plan is to start writing on June 1 and keep going until I either finish the series or have to take time off to write sequels to other books (like my next cozy mystery!).
I plan to keep up on my regular posting; don’t worry about that. 
If you’re a writer, are you heading off to Camp NaNo this summer? What summer plans do you have, writer or not?
Originally published at Erin M. Hartshorn. You can comment here or there.
Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun," (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.
The artist is Richard Anderson.
- Mood:
pleased - Music:the sound of thunder and the hum of the refrigerator
- Wed, 18:09: Two dudes in the parking lot under my window talking about creative ways to kill seagulls with razor blades. I'm reaching for my sword now.
- Thu, 06:08: Went to bed early & got up early. Again. I almost never see 6am unless I stay up for it! At least it's peaceful right now.
- Thu, 06:10: I've just decided to do an hour-by-hour log (as best I can, anyway) of the noise level so I can figure out my best hours to get work done.
- Thu, 06:26: I'm hungry. Thankfully there is actually milk to put on my strawberry Shredded Wheat. Yesterday's experiment with Greek yogurt didn't work.
- Thu, 07:05: My Soul in Ink http://t.co/gAAKZyyp
- Thu, 07:11: #UFYH Got up much earlier than usual, remembered to take my morning medications, ate breakfast, and made my bed. Not a bad start to the day.
- Thu, 07:20: Cherokee Girl http://t.co/pxnStf7z
- Thu, 08:02: The 7am hour is quiet until the last few minutes when the kids are waiting for the school bus.
- Thu, 08:19: I totally get that. / RT @seananmcguire: Sleep is apparently for people who don't have pissed off Maine Coons.
- Thu, 08:36: This Morning's Scribbles http://t.co/gEtDGTCB
Effie May Parker was certainly dead. And that was the problem.
And I have no idea why this story has to be told in the dark, who Effie May Parker is, why she's dead, or why the fact of her being dead is problematic. I guess I'm going to have to write some more to figure it out.
I woke up this morning thinking about one of my favorite Charles de Lint books. The Dreaming Place isn’t one that usually leaps to most peoples’ minds, if they think of his work at all. I think it’s shelved as YA and I only found it through diligent library trawling. It’s been years since I actually read it. It’s just one of the stories that’s somehow become a part of who I am.
The first book of Charles’ that I ever picked up was the Newford anthology Dreams Underfoot. I read it with my jaw hanging open and tears in my eyes, especially “Ghost of Wind and Shadows.” For the first time, someone was describing the world the way I see it and interact with it. It was as if he were inside my head, telling my story better than I ever could and in ways I wouldn’t have dared.
I’m not old fashioned. I love Story any way I can get it. I happily embraced ebooks, especially when we lived in a tiny apartment and had no room for the hard copy editions. Plus there’s the whole instant gratification thing going on. But I make an exception for Charles de Lint books. Slowly - very slowly, as money is crazy tight - I’m gathering them all in print. They are treasures to me. Part of my soul given tangible form.
- Mood:
nostalgic
Ten years ago, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh.
It wasn’t Platform 9 3/4, but it might as well have been. My life changed the moment that train pulled out of the brick archways and into the rolling green countryside beyond London–it was just beginning to be autumn then, and the trees were full of crows. I remember thinking about bird magic, auguries, every story I’d ever heard about England and Scotland. I was a tiny thing, a maiden in all but the technical sense. I knew, as the old novels say, nothing of the world. My EuroRail photo looked absurdly, hilariously, preposterously like an illustration of Snow White. I had a bacon sandwich. My mother was with me, a psychopomp in knock-off Prada sunglasses, bearing me across the wall and into the life I didn’t yet know I was in for. It was the first time I wanted something with that desperate, pure fire–and made it happen, by myself, with will and work. After all, if you grow up loving fairy tales and King Arthur and saints who battle monsters, you want the British Isles the way some kids want boyfriends. Edited to add: is that a silly reason to want to go to a country? Yep. Is it a direct outgrowth of the complicated relationship of American culture to British culture? Yep. Was I 21 years old, pretty silly, fully of inchoate dreamy nonsense and trying to learn how to be a real person? Absolutely. In fact, a big part of that growing up was going to a place I'd dreamed about and figuring out what reality there was like.
I lived there for something over a year. I came back to America for stupid reasons–but that’s what you do in your twenties. Make stupid decisions while meaning so earnestly well.
My interviewer in Finland asked me: you’ve written about everywhere you’ve lived but Edinburgh. Where is Scotland in your books?
I laughed a little, pressed my lips together as I always do when I’m thinking, looked out the window of our car at the swans nesting in the golden Nordic estuaries. This is what I told her:
A poetry professor once told me that you can never name the thing you’re writing about. If the poem is about death, you can’t say the word death. Poems about memory shouldn’t go on about the thing itself. If you’re writing about grief, you can’t actually say grief, or sadness, or even tears. If you want to talk about love, love is the one word you can’t use.
Edinburgh is the thing I am a poem about and do not name.
Today, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh. It was Platform 7. It’s just beginning to be summer now, and the fields are full of chartreuse flowers. The old churches spring up out of them like strange, huge blossoms. The train rushes over a stream so full of swans the current is pure white.
I think about bird magic again. Auguries.
I am no longer small. I know something of the world. Maybe not much of a something, but something. I have made things with my hands and heart. I look a bit pugnacious in my passport photo, like I still have something to prove. I had a bacon sandwich. My husband is with me and this time I am bearing him across the wall, to show him this object that sits at the bottom of my mind, a grey stone city with a castle and a mountain, a place that was once wholly full of fairy fruit and temptation and the rich mess of becoming bigger, becoming grown. That fairy fruit made everywhere else look dimmer for awhile. My goblin city, that swallowed me whole. I think it took falling in love with Maine to fix me–before then I always had the idea that of course I’d go back, that somehow, somehow, this was where I’d live when I could choose.
I’ve been near tears most of the morning, riding north through sheep and cattle and chapels and flowers. When you love a place, it’s hard to leave, and harder still to come back. You hope it will be proud of you, of all you became when you left to seek your fortune. You hope it will be as you remembered; you hope you are still as it knew you.
You hope it will forgive you long neglect, lines in your once-clear face, a hard blue edge of cynicism.
O goblin city, I hope you will forgive me for never writing a book about you.
Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.
Did the exercise bike for 32 minutes, wrote 27 words on my WIP, unraveled a baby blanket, and started Season 1 of Breaking Bad.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,
Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...
Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!
- Mood:
mellow - Music:Depeche Mode - Lilian (Album Version)
Originally published at Poise and Pen. You can comment here or there.
Eight more days. The end of the month is in sight. Are you going to finish strong or fade away? You belong to the NaNoLJers so you’re going to finish strong!
~Amber
- Tue, 12:08: Then & Now http://t.co/TX4MdB0G
- Tue, 12:47: @walkingthehedge I think it only polite to tell you that I linked something you wrote in my blog. http://t.co/6dMI0chz
- Tue, 12:56: For some reason, even though I have it written down in my day planner for tomorrow, I thought my doctor appointment was today.
- Tue, 21:10: My Music Nook http://t.co/IhEG1c2H
- Tue, 21:12: Ye gods. Neighbor kid is yowling like he's being murdered. He's actually fine, just not getting his way. His mom is yelling even louder.
- Tue, 21:15: The next person to stand out in the parking lot, yell cuss words, and rant at the top of their lungs will get hexed.
- Wed, 04:44: I wasn't feeling well so I went to bed at 9pm. As a result I'm up and sunsy at 4:30am. Oh, well. At least it's quiet for now.
- Wed, 04:54: Going to bed abruptly means I didn't get my tea set up for the morning, so now I have to fumble around groggily instead of pushing a button.
- Wed, 05:02: And the gods said "Let there be oolong." And there was oolong.
- Wed, 05:03: There were just now two ravens flapping around the parking lot under my window. It's too early in the morning for omens, damn it!
Originally published at Poise and Pen. You can comment here or there.
I’m not feeling witty and I’m starving. So here’s a generic check-in for today. 
~Amber
Okay, I don’t feel quite the level of angst that the subject of Edvard Munch’s painting seems to, but I still feel some, especially when it comes to my writing.
Of course, every writer experiences angst of some sort when it comes to their craft. Is my writing good enough? Will the editors like this one? Even best-selling authors with a vastly successful track record must feel some of this when they’re working on a new project. Maybe this one isn’t as good as the ones before? Will this one find a home? Will this one even sell?
My own angst generally comes down to this question: what in the world have I written? And where can I possibly send it? It actually comes down to a question of genre… and the fact that I have no idea what genre many of stories fit into. For example, my story “Teh K1ng in Y3ll0w” is nominally a Lovecraftian pastiche, but it’s also a caper story and a comedic piece. Where would it go? It wouldn’t go to any of the major horror markets (unless they have a remarkably flexible editor), but it wouldn’t go to any humor markets either. So… What do I do with it?
Some of my mixed-genre stories have found homes (see my Bibliography page), but most of them sit in my files, waiting for that special market, the place that will take the sort of story I tend to write. Major markets, especially SFWA and HWA qualifying markets, tend to be genre-specific: Analog, for example, is geared towards hard science fiction. Asimov’s is a more flexible, but still expects science fiction primarily. Fantasy and Science Fiction is, well, geared toward fantasy and science fiction. It might be a good home for “The X of Doom” when I finish that one, but, again, “Teh K1ng in Y3ll0w” probably won’t work there.
So: Sigh.
When it comes to novels, I think I’m in better shape. Novelists like Tom Holt, Christopher Moore, Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman have all written the kind of humor-focused genre-crossing novels that I write, so if I can honestly compare my writing to theirs, I’ll be in good shape. It’s just my short stories that are homeless.
For now.
During our move I stumbled across my first pentacle (pictured on the left). I was twenty-three when I made it. The stone is red sandstone. It came from the platform where Allen and I stood to get married. I don't even remember what the runes were supposed to represent. And glitter? The only explanations I can think of for doing that might be a) it was due to the books I was reading and/or pagan crowd I was running with at the time, and/or b) I happened to have a tube of glitter glue in my craft kit. I would never use glitter today. (Well, maybe black glitter. Maybe?)
When I made this pentacle I was new to the concept of paganism. I'd begun reading books on paganism to help me handle the abilities I've had all my life. The only books I had access to at the time were Wiccan and I thought that was all there was to paganism. Enough of what I was reading made sense and resonated with me that I shrugged and accepted the parts that didn't. Even the sweetest apple has a blemish or two, right?
Other pagans I met back then seemed to fall into two camps. They were either all glitter, rainbows, love, and light or they were hardcore, goth, vampire, and scary. The two didn't mix well. Somehow I resonated with both and neither. Hence, I had friends in both and caught flack from both. I didn't know which team I was supposed to bat for and it seriously glitched my proverbial wiring. We're talking massive identity crisis, here.
The stone to the left is me thirteen years later. I don't know what type of stone it is and would be seriously grateful if somebody could tell me. This stone I picked up in the Maine woods shortly after I uprooted myself from the lands of my ancestors to start a new life. Notice there are no markings. I don't feel the need of any. The black spatters are wax from when I was Sealing a spirit jar. I'll remove them as soon as I find WTF I did with my trusty Goo Gone. Or maybe not. I kind of like them there.
Thirteen years later and (I hope to gods) much wiser, I have learned to embrace the Sacred Interstices. I dance in the Between and call the Shadows my home. I self-identify as a hedgewitch. I've learned to do what makes sense to me. I answer only to the gods and spirits with whom I work. I walk softly and carry a really big stick with what I hope is dignity, grace, and compassion.
In the past five years I've read a lot of material written by and for non-Wiccan pagans and magical practitioners. I've learned to sort the gems from the rubble, and that what might be rubble to me might be another person's gem. I've met mages and heathens, warlocks and shaman, and all manner of people both online and in person. I've learned from all of them and learned to more-or-less get along with all of them. I still occasionally get criticized. Sometimes I have some criticism for other people, though I try to keep it respectful.
I've grown a lot in my first thirteen years. I'm very excited to be on the Path to another thirteen years of growing.
Blessed be thy Road, no matter what it is.
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