world-building and home-making

Google just prompted me to find a domain name that matches my blog title and "link" it. What? I'm just older than the internet and it's really starting to show these days.

So the last two weeks became an unofficial break from writing and while I've appreciated the time, I know I need to get back into the swing of things if I'm really going to finish this book. But part of the reason I haven't written more recently is because I've hit the point where most of my planning landmarks have been reached. It's not that I planned for the book to end at this part but I'm much more fuzzy as to what happens between now and the end. So in an effort to kick-start myself again I've been doing some needed world-building the last couple of days. I really enjoy world-building and there are a lot of resources around to help with the process. I've been compiling a list of questions in a google doc to answer in context of Orsandum as well as what I'm currently referring to as "Elsewhere" - which is where most of the story takes place but it doesn't really have an official name as it's largely wilderness. Since very little of the story, at least thus far, takes place within the nation of Orsandum I'll admit that I hadn't fleshed the country out much so it's fun to go back and think about basic things like where they get their water and how they handle waste. I don't think I'll ever be an effective city planner but the exercise is needed and fun.

While poking around the internet for world-building helps I discovered a tutorial that I think every writer needs. Like, how had I not heard of the My Places function on Google Maps? Rachel gives a pretty good step-by step of how to access and use this function which basically allows you to create your own maps using Google Maps. I couldn't find the function the way she described it but the post is a little old so I think a few things may have changed. I ended up googling "my places google maps" and wound up finding this - it looks like the program has been moved/adjusted since she made the tutorial but this is what you're looking for. From here you can follow Rachel's instructions pretty exactly. This is mind-blowing for me. I try drawing maps sometimes, to have the visual while I'm writing, but my sense of size and distance is super skiwampus so proportions are impossible. This feature is so useful, whether you're working in the real world or a fictional one. The layers feature allows you to create your own locations and terrain markers and anytime you make a shape it'll tell you the length around and the square footage which is super handy. I realize as I'm typing this that this probably isn't particularly exciting to most people but I think anyone who writes will understand the glorious gift that this is!

I'm giving myself this week to work on world-building and character design [as we're meeting new people at the moment] but hopefully the actually writing will proceed soon. People say that doing something for three weeks creates a habit but I am here to tell you that writing for three months did not make this process automatic for me. I don't think the struggle of writing ever really goes away. Either you decide that it's worth it/you enjoy it or it's not particularly for you.

Okay, so this last thing isn't writing related but it's a project I did last week that I'm so satisfied with that I have to share. I make random crafts when the mood hits me and a few months ago I discovered a tutorial for a woven rag rug that I was instantly dying to try. I got the needed fabric soon after and it proceeded to sit in my closet until last week when I took it up again.

It's a pretty simple design and the first step of ripping the sheets into strips would work really well as stress therapy [though I don't advise doing it when your around other people who are occupied as tearing fabric is really loud].

My three sheets

I'd been introduced to the practice of tearing fabric in order to obtain a true edge in my sewing class two years ago and for some reason the process really amuses me. It does result in a rather large pile of string and random pieces though, which is part of why so much fabric is needed for a relatively small rug.

 I made my loom from a cardboard box which was probably the biggest hassle of the whole thing. Cutting cardboard is not hand-friendly. The tutorial recommends placing the fabric in 6-12 piece bunches in each notch but I honestly don't see how you'd be able to fit them, even if your strips were 1" wide as opposed to the 2" that I did. I settled for 4 strips to a notch and I don't feel that the end result suffered any.

Once you've got your notches filled you take one piece of your fabric and begin to weave it through the secured strip bunches - over and under and so-on. Once that strip runs out you attach another to its end and keep going until you get from one end to the other. I personally found it easier to hold the "loom" with the secured strips running vertical so I could weave back and forth rather than up and down. Once you get to the end you tie off the weaving strip and then tie the ends of the bunches together, trimming them down to the desired length when you're done. I eye-balled mine because I've never been one for terribly precise measurements. Also, I figured "it's a rag rug - it shouldn't look too neat."

This was my end result:

feet for scale

It currently resides at the kitchen sink [excuse the mess] and I'm getting a serious kick out of seeing it there.

 I love touches that make a place feel more lived in and when we move somewhere new pictures are always the first to come out and get hung up but it's nice to add something else to make the apartment feel homey. Bonus: because it's made of sheets I can just throw it in the wash when it gets dirty!

spam, poetry, and a book review

I bought some Spam at the grocery store yesterday and for those of you who are aghast at the thought of anyone intentionally purchasing this product, you may be happy to know that somehow it didn't make it home with me. I have no idea what happened to it, honestly. It probably didn't get bagged or something. Which actually makes me a little sad because guys, the Spam cans have the cutest little knight on them!

see?!

And now he's lost somewhere when I'm sure he was so excited to finally be chosen. I let him down.

Last week I went to a poetry slam for the first time in my little life and it was an experience. We were first...exposed...to a short story written by one of the regular attendees and it was disturbing to say the least. The author started her reading by saying she wouldn't be offended if people left - always a good sign. I won't go into details - to spare you and my own memory - suffice to say it was incredibly graphic and I'm grateful the friend I went with was willing to share her headphones with me. The rest of the slam went more to the norm and there was a pretty good variety of topics and styles, many of which I enjoyed. They had a guy there who was working on a composite poem that he would then read at the end of the night as a summary of the evening. We didn't stay that late but I thought it was a cool idea. They hold these slams every Thursday night and next week they're doing a short story slam that I'm looking forward to checking out.

This week I've got a book review! I actually read this book a few weeks ago but it was for a book group I've become a part of and we just met last night and I liked a lot of the comments that were made. I wasn't going to review this book originally but our conversation last night pulled forward some themes and ideas I thought were worth sharing.

The book in question is Remake by Ilima Todd:

It's a dystopian book set in a world where the population has been crippled by a disease that surfaced years ago. Nine lives in one of the Freedom Provinces where humans are born in "batches" consisting of ten males and ten females [for population control] that are raised androgynously in a special facility largely isolated from the rest of the province. At the age of 17 they are taken to the Remake Facility where they are able to choose whatever and whoever they want to be for the rest of their lives. These make-overs includes all physical aspects from hair, height, skin tone, teeth color, to gender. These "batches" are raised solely in the sense that they take certain lessons. Family units do not exist in the province where the emphasis is on doing whatever you want as long as it doesn't directly infringe upon the rights of another citizen and gender is considered an accessory rather than an integral part of a person's identity.

The topic of gender and families is central to the plot and Nine's own character development. She struggles with most of the decisions she needs to make regarding her upcoming Remake [other decisions aside from appearance are required, such as occupation] but none more than gender. Nine wants to be brave like her best friend Theron who has acted as her protector since they were little but before any of them make it to the Remake Facility their transport crashes into the ocean and Nine becomes separated from the rest of her batch. Through the ensuing chapters she is introduced to a society that exists outside of the Freedom Provinces and seeks to live according to family structures where gender identity is still considered a vital part of a person.  In the end, Nine has to choose which world she'd rather live in and who she ultimately wants to be.

This is the author's first published work so there are rough patches in writing as well as story logic but I'm going to refrain from listing those here. While imperfect, the book touches on a lot of topics that are worth the read  - more so for me because they are rarely explored in fiction.

One of the women in this book club is friends with the author and she shared with us that Todd's personal catch-phrase for this book was 'brave like a girl' and I can see why. For the most part, Nine struggles with which gender to choose because her entire life she's been told that gender is arbitrary and doesn't mean anything. If someone tells you that and then makes you choose between the supposedly arbitrary things how would you make a decision? Nine ends up leaning toward changing her gender to male because she is chasing bravery and courage which she has seem evidenced most often in Theron, who is male. It's a shot in the dark for her but it reflects her impression that perhaps men are naturally more confident. A big part of her journey throughout the book is discovering that she has strength and courage within herself, as a woman. Hers may not be as confrontational or showy as Theron's but that doesn't invalidate it.

After washing up on an island after the crash, Nine meets what I call the 'comparison cast' - those that are living lives almost completely opposite of what you find in the Provinces. One of these is deaf and I love Todd's treatment of this character. So much of the time handicapped characters in fiction are 2D stereotypes that are present to create a sense of guilt or duty in the main character. The only important thing about them is their disability and their potential to be the catalyzing inspirational background character. The deaf character in Remake is refreshing because she does not exist solely to provide a point of guilt or inspiration. In fact, while her handicap is a point of interest for Nine, who has never met someone with a handicap and has a hard time understanding why this girl is fine living this way, but other than Nine's own growth around the information, the handicap is hardly mentioned. This is awesome because people who live with handicaps are so much more than their disability and Todd does a beautiful job of representing the deaf community - people that live full lives regardless of their missing sense.

Okay, this post is getting entirely too long so I'm going to wrap up by saying that I do recommend this as a read. It's not my favorite and I have a list a mile long with questions and complaints regarding structure and style but the ideas in this book are well worth looking for. The second book is scheduled to come out in October this year and it's projected to be a trilogy in all.

- small rant to follow -

Remake will never be a best seller because it broaches topics that a lot of people don't really like to talk about but I think that makes its effort all the more commendable. I've seen a lot of hate in reviews, criticizing the book for being "narrow-minded in its definition of what constitutes a family" - people claiming that it discriminates against everything from single-parent households to gay couples. Having read the book, I just want to make it clear that this is not the case. In the Freedom Provinces people don't even know what a family is, at all. Nine had literally never heard the terms of mother, father, sister, and brother before. Batches are 'raised' by a series of individuals whose job it is to feed and teach them but these kids almost never see the same person twice. The contrast that Todd is trying to emphasize here is the importance of family period compared to a complete and utter lack of family of any kind. Alright, rant over.

the big five-oh...oh-oh-oh

That's right everyone. 50,000 words. Today's the day.

While I'm pretty stoked to be hitting this milestone [I mean, I wrote all these words?! Where's an interrobang when you need it?] I am nowhere near done. It's occurred to me over the last two months that this story has turned into an absolutely beast and I have no idea what the word count for this first draft will cap out at. Only edits will tell if I end up cutting most of them to prune the story down or if it will become some sort of series. My fingers are crossed for the former but I'll have to let it play out before I know for sure.

At the moment, I'm having a good time torturing Percy and trying to figure out how much more fleshed out another character's appearances need to be since we get most of the lead-up for the overreaching conflict from them. Decisions decisions.

I picked up Anne of Green Gables yesterday to satisfy the random urge I've had to reread it. I haven't read this book since I was little and I never finished the series though I've seen the mini series [which is amazing]. Anne is shelved in the children's section so, honestly, I was expecting a good story but with language suited for children. My memory was way off. Guys, I am having such a good time revisiting this classic! I'm loving Montgomery's descriptions, especially of people and it's impressive to me, in retrospect, how absolutely accurate the casting was for the mini series. They got these characters so spot on that I can only believe they were born for the parts.

One of the biggest surprises for me was the level of the vocabulary, not only in Anne's characteristic speech, but throughout the narration as well. I feel like language like this is less common in children's literature in recent years and it's got me wondering. Did children on average use to read at a higher level or are parents less involved in their children's reading now so they are less often available to teach and explain words they don't recognize? Learning words through reading has always been more instructive and long-lasting an education for me than those lists you'd have to memorize in school. If it's true that we aren't challenging children with new words as much in the books they read as they used to be are we doing them a disservice? I don't agree with injecting a story full of long and intimidating synonyms just for the sake of sounding pretentiously intelligent but as much as a good book teaches us something about people and life, isn't it also a prime opportunity to teach language?

I suspect most of these questions will go unanswered but I do know one thing for sure, I need this series in my personal library. Because it's amazing and because I want my future children to be exposed to literature like this. Where the heroine is different but not in the "oh, why am I so much more beautiful than everyone else? it's such a burden. I just want to be plain" crap way that we see so much in literature right now [I am looking at you YA]. Anne is lovable despite of and because she is so flawed. I think some people are afraid to write characters as flawed as she is but I think short-changing your characters at the start like that limits the amount of growth you can get out of them.