Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Ballard, WA. Thursday. 10:30PM.

Dear Internet,

Major life news of the past unholy amount of time since I’ve updated:

 

College!

I am attending Goddard College, pursuing an MFA in writing. I am writing short stories, plus comic scripts. Comic scripts are both interesting and frustrating to write. For one thing, I am unsure of how much panel designation to write out and how much to leave to the artist. It’s something I’ll end up developing as a work with artists, I expect.

Speaking of, I’m working with this awesome dude to make a minicomic. I will report more later, and it will be awesome.

As a super-rad bonus, my prose short story “Iron Henry” will be appearing in this Spring’s Pitkin Review. You can pick up a copy of my and other rad writings from Goddard for a mere $12.

 

Podcast!

Trade Secrets is the podcast I contribute to! Hear me and some other geeks natter on about comics. It’s like Oprah’s book club, but for comics, and with a lot more dumb jokes.

If you’re not sure where to start, here are a couple of my favorites:

Ep. 3: Locke and Key by Joe Hill

Ep. 4: The Unwritten by Mike Carey

Ep. 19: Invincible by Robert Kirkman

Ep. 20: Adolf by Osamu Tezuka

 

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for actual updates. For reals.

Love,

Anne

*image credit Richard McCoy via http://www.universetoday.com

Here’s another excerpt from one of my Paradiso interviews. This one hits particularly close to home for me; I’ll let you know why at the end of the interview.

Early Life

I’ll start like Dickens: I was born. I was born in Dayton, Ohio. My first event that probably did influence my entire life happened when I was about 6 weeks old. My parents put me in a large double bed, and I was a very very strong baby at the time—unusually so. I was unhappy about the situation: I dug my heels into the bed, went over the side—at this point it was a very high double-bed, fractured my skull, and I was not expected to live through the night. I don’t know if it resulted in me being left-handed, but probably stuttering throughout childhood. I had my first-grade teacher tie my arm to my side in order to change me to the right-handedness, and that was very traumatic. I hated school. Especially 1st grade, and especially Miss Peacock, that was her name. I never forgot her. You know, it’s amazing how we never forget our terrible teachers. And she was kind of a short, dumpy woman with dyed red hair, you know, awful. And I had learned to read pretty early in my life, and she did not…it wasn’t according to her method, so… Oh, it was awful.

I was so bored, but things picked up throughout my school life, I guess. I was a shy child, backward socially because of the stutter. I overcame the stutter by going into drama in high school. I found that if I could pretend to be somebody else, I never stuttered. It was only when I had to represent myself, as in a book report, that I would stutter and get very very red, and shake just like a leaf, you know, just like that. But if I could be Mary in the Crucible, suddenly I could be just this whole different persona, and I never stuttered, and I could do monologues, everything. And that was a revelation to me. So when I, in my working life when I went into the computer field, the medical computer field, I helped develop an algorithm to detect heart arrhythmias, like for a bedside monitor and other heart equipment…I found that when I gave presentations, if I could just pretend to be somebody else and visualize, in my head, that I could speak before one person or a hundred people. It didn’t matter. I could not—and I still can’t, I have a hard time standing up in front of people representing myself. I always have to imagine somebody else or I start to stutter. And it still comes out when I am either very angry and can’t get the words out—if they come out, they stutter—or if I’m very tired. But that was probably the thing that influenced the stuttering.

I followed several directions in my life. I became much more introverted than I already was, um, and writing. You don’t stutter when you write, you know, so I figured that’s what someday I will do. And it was a long, circuitous route before I actually became a writer. You know, I’ve always written throughout my life, but before I became a published, recognized writer. I even have a fan club. So…but…um, I guess that’s probably the short and sweet of it.

Marriage

I married when I was twenty-three years old. I was married for 33 years before getting divorced in 2003. And then packed up my stuff, the most important things, and headed from Spokane to Little River, CA, which is south of Mendocino, which is on the coast of Northern California. I wrote for about a year, and then met my current husband online, corresponded. That’s really a different way to meet people, but that’s what’s happening now. You just have to be really careful, because people can be anything they want. He was real consistent in his emails—how he wrote, that’s what I watched for. Any inconsistencies, you know, that like covering up a lie, or something that was said two weeks ago and I didn’t remember…I saved all of that and would compare. I was really very, very careful that way. So we got married, and it’s been less than two years now. Our second wedding anniversary will be November 8th. And it turned out that we got married at a very magical time. How we got married—in Mendocino. And at that time, heaven aligned, there was a full moon, there was, um, I don’t know if it was Jupiter or Mars that lined up, but it was a very rare astrological event. And then on top of everything there was a wonderful storm off the coast of Mendocino. Lightning, thunder, lots of drama. And it was just fantastic. If I were in Scotland or Ireland at the time…you know, it felt like I should be at one of the standing stones or that something significant was really happening. I mean, it was—we got married.

Part Three: Paradise

I think paradise can be inside or outside or a combination. I think that when you find your soul place to be, where you belong, when you’re…I think there’s probably degrees of it. When you find peace inside yourself, when you happen to be surrounded by people who you love and who love you, that’s Paradise. It’s paradise whether it’s a shack in Mexico, or a mansion. I think ****** is a bit of a Paradise.

There’s some places that I’ve been to in my life like Citra, Portugal, where the air just is spiritual. There’s something spiritual about it. Italy is another place. Jerusalem in another place. All of those are places where I could spend time. There’s a town, Sienna, that I’ve never seen, that I’ve heard I’ve gotta go see, in Tuscany. The pictures just look like paradise to me, on Earth. There’s places that aesthetically I just feel so…pleased. To stand in them. To walk in them.

I grew up in New York, I never felt that about New York and I got out of New York as quickly as I could and never, ever went back, not even for a summer. New York is not my paradise. It is some people’s paradise, but it is not mine. There’s places outside of New York that are quite beautiful, but living in the city… I like  visiting there now.

So I think that Paradise has more to do with your soul and your comfort zone, if I can use that hackneyed term, but where you are inside yourself and who’s around you and how you allow them to treat you…since separating I feel much more at peace and that this is a Paradise, for now, than I felt when there was someone in my home who I wanted something from I wasn’t able to get. And I wasn’t able to get because he wasn’t able to give. And it took me a long time to get to that because he could give it for a while. But then I always kept seeing he withdrew it, and it felt like he consciously withdrew it, like I was being punished. And I have come to realize that that’s not what it was. He’s not really that mean. He truly gave as much as he could, and yet he was depleted and he didn’t know how to get more, he wasn’t able to take from me. To replete himself, to energize himself, and he would just withdraw and withdraw and withdraw and it would take a while for me to convince him that he was withdrawing and to come back. And it was just too draining over the twenty years to do that every six months to a year. And so I feel much more energized just by the energy around me, and by not giving so much of my day to…people.

In my novel, Freedomland, I write about a dystopian future in which society is controlled by colorful animated advertising that displays on people’s technological implants.
One out of two…check.

Here’s the explanation from the creators, alt.CES.

Day 7: 3,000 words.
Day 8: 300 words.

Sigh. Days with work AND class are rough. It’ll all even out somewhere.

Plugged away and wrote 1,000ish words, now I’m going to bed.

Horrible prose sins I have comitted:
*unnecesary said tags
*locomotion writing
*ill-placed lengthy flashbacks which interrupt the flow of narrative.

BUT! I am aware that I am committing these sins, which is important. Plus, you can get a NaNoWriMo merit badge for padding your word count, so that’s something.

There once was a girl from Seattle
Who refused to give in to death’s rattle
When it came to her prose,
So she said, “I suppose
that I’ll write a lot of really craptactular scenes using just the sort of terrible clunky prose that I’m carefully editing away from in November Girls, but it’s all okay because I’m up to par on word count.

Five hundred-ish words.
A day filled with homework, but
no class tomorrow.

Wrote over my lunch hour*. Stayed up inadvisably late to finish my word count. Today was a class day, so that made it harder.

Total word count: 1,670. I am right on par.

*”You writing a paper?”
“Novel.”
“What, in here?” (vague expression of panic, as if novel-writing were a sacred activity to be carried out in monasteries or on giant oak desks, and having it in the staff lounge is blasphemy.)
“When the hell else do I have time?”
“You can focus?”
“…sorta.”

It is time, kids. Time for what, you may ask? That most wonderful time of year, and I don’t mean when the drug stores put out Christmas decorations, because that happened yesterday. I mean NaNoWriMo. It’s time for me to sit down and work in quantity, busting out a 50,000 word novel in a month.

I did it last year and it was fabulous, and gave me the seed of November Girls. This year, my mission is writing the sequel, November’s Child. The events of the story take place seven years after November Girls. I’m going to write it as a standalone novel as much as I can, at least for the initial draft.

Why embark on such madness? Especially when I am actively revising November Girls? I thought about that one a lot. And I decided that I could a) have some revisions done by Dec. 1, or b) have some revisions done AND have a draft for the sequel by Dec. 1. When I think about it that way, there’s really no contest.

Here’s my favorite explanation for why you should do NaNoWriMo (from the website, www.nanowrimo.org):

“If I’m just writing 50,000 words of crap, why bother? Why not just write a real novel later, when I have more time?

“There are three reasons.

“1) If you don’t do it now, you probably never will. Novel writing is mostly a “one day” event. As in “One day, I’d like to write a novel.” Here’s the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It’s just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists. The structure of NaNoWriMo forces you to put away all those self-defeating worries and START. Once you have the first five chapters under your belt, the rest will come easily. Or painfully. But it will come. And you’ll have friends to help you see it through to 50k.

“2) Aiming low is the best way to succeed. With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere. With high expectations, everything you write will sound cheesy and awkward. Once you start evaluating your story in terms of word count, you take that pressure off yourself. And you’ll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and a ingenious plot twist there. Characters will start doing things you never expected, taking the story places you’d never imagined. There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst the crap, there will be beauty. A lot of it.

“3) Art for art’s sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and “must-dos” of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.”

My silly, secondary goal is to post daily to this blog, which may be anything from an excerpt to a word count update to me writing “I am not sleeping and I want to beat myself over the head with my laptop until I pass out.”

Wish me luck! Tomorrow, it begins!