Dear Two(point)Five Readers,
I’m moving. In my efforts to re-brand myself, or rather, correctly brand myself I have moved to Tumblr. Expect a lot of bumps, bruises and constant changes the first few weeks. I spent two days picking a theme and I’m still pretty sure I’m going to change it in the next few days. I will also be going to a regular dot com, but this change will happen within tumblr so you should be automatically redirected when I become CarrieBriggs.com until then…
The Author
I made the realization the other day that I have lost a dramatic amount of motivation on my novel due to all of the short stories that I’ve been working on. I was having trouble wrapping my mind around characters and situations and it frustrated me. So I started at the beginning. I began re-reading from the first word everything that I’ve written to this point (sort-of). And it’s working!
Sometimes it’s a matter of starting at the beginning to push you through those stuck points. A friend of mine Barista was telling me that she’d gotten frustrated with her blogging as she felt that after reading her old stuff it was so much better than what she was writing currently. Reading my older (starting points) had the opposite effect on me, I too felt it was better, so I was encouraged knowing that I am capable of writing like that. I just have to unearth the motivation. In looking back I can see my strengths and weaknesses and I’m slowly getting rejuvenated about connecting with my characters and storyline.
I am trying to learn that balance of being able to leave the novel behind and still peruse random short-story adventures. I feel like a slow learner. It doesn’t help that I recently picked up Steven King’s book On Writing, he’d published two novels by the time he was 26…really? I’m behind! But he also didn’t seem to take a 10 year sabbatical from the craft. I’ll catch up Mr. King, I’ll catch up!
I am also looking into branding myself. Going live as a dot-com to grow my readership from the two of you, to hopefully four or more! I’m going to attempt to commit to writing more often, even if it’s brief, and try to use my resources to my advantage. I’m going to attempt to reign in my A.D.D. hobby habits and stay more focused. I will not be distracted by facebook, or google games, or youtube, or all of those other awful things that were created for procrastinators like me!
It’s the way that there is still Winter hanging on the branches somewhere, even if it is only in our imperfect memory.There is that beautiful moment in which you try to re-tell all of the lovely shades of white and blue and brown and that odd color that is the color of shadow but yet the color of nothing, only to find that there is not a way to tell it without messing it up and making it somehow less lovely than it is. That is why I never write of you.
I want them all to know the shades of your eyes, the blues rippling like tidal waves over other blues. I want them to know that they are the pools of joy which I find myself swimming, they are the waves that I will drown in on the days when they turn gray with self-doubt. I want them to know, but I will fail them so desperately.
I want the world to know of your laugh and the perfect lips that it falls from. I want to describe the way that you throw your head back and how something in your face turns back the clock to carefree times as a teenager, or when we first met in the park. I want them to know how I so desperately wanted to kiss those lips then and I how I still crave nothing but their taste now. But I would never do any of it justice.
I want to be able to say what it’s like to crawl into your arms, how there is no place safer or warmer or truer than that place. I want to show how it is my shelter and it is the place that I fear the most when I loose myself to the demons inside my head. But there is nothing that can evoke such emotion except for you.
This is why I never write of you. I write of he’s and him’s and she’s and her’s, but never of you. It is because I love you the most that I cannot put you into words. The way that you tear me apart and piece me together. The way that you free me and keep me grounded. I will not try because I fear I will only disappoint your perfection like that of the snow clinging still to the branches somewhere deep within my soul.
“The person who brings a story to you will take away two from you.” – Irish Proverb
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
I have been haunted this week by a story. It started as a very simple thought, “I need to write a fantasy piece for that literary journal I talked to at DragonCon last year.” And with that, I let the marble loose. It bounced around for a few minutes, I don’t remember any other ideas that it brought up or stuck to, to be honest I don’t know that there was another idea, but it started. It formed around creatures, something I’ve never written about. It moved towards changing pre-existing ideas of readers, how to recreate a creature that’s already in someones mind. And on it rolled. I am also breaking another one of my standard writing styles and I’m writing in first person.
*A note about writing in first person. In my opinion this should be done nearly never. It is rarely done well but if done well can be very impacting. My suggestion to new writers is to stay as far away from it as humanly possible, this also usually my suggestion to myself, but there is something in this character that merits her voice. *
I am very excited to see what is to come of this piece. I won’t worry with word count or editing down, I will simply tell the story until the story is done. I owe it to this character, to Raelia, to not leave the whole of the story untold. I suppose there will be many nights to follow where I lie awake in my bed writing on the dark pages of sleeplessness that hang over me. Though I wake tired the next morning there is something in me that is at peace knowing there’s still more to put on paper.
He wrote her songs while she slept. His simple melody, her protection from the cold. He sang her words that her spirit drank like water, and some made her dance like wine. He wrote her songs with her head buried in her hands, lost in indecision about the climate and where to move come fall. He listened as she mumbled about colder weather and thicker blankets; he smiled and tucked his words in her hair behind her ear.
She felt his mouth on hers while she slept, it felt like a whisper, a prayer. It spoke of midnight skies and the taste of something bitter, and the words bled into ink. She felt his skin move over hers, waves across the water. Salt on her tongue. She dreamt of his song and the sound of gunfire in the distance, and around him she built a barricade from the world.
*about the invisible letters we compose in our heads to people never meant to read them. they are the beautiful in their brokenness, and sometimes need to be printed anyway.*
I always whisper ‘I love you’ just after I hang up the phone. Mostly because I know that there’s no getting over you, and I’m tired of pretending that I am. I think of you in the stillness where I don’t have to wear make-up or the look of contentment. You untie my heart as if it were made of ribbon and lace and there in the darkness it slides to the floor. You tell me not to say the things that I mean, the things that you say; a stab of guilty pleasure.
I hear the pause between the stalling and the goodbye. It says the thousand things that dwell between us without a sound. It says that you still mean more than you ever wanted to mean. It says that I care more than the indifference printed somewhere else with someone else’s name on it.
I am nobody lost nowhere without time and space to say the things I really ought to say. I’m too busy cooking lasagna and washing sheets stained with indecision. I am busy filling cups with ounces of things that I don’t care about and fail to believe in; indulgence. But that’s how we got here in the first place. Eve and the apple and you.
You are poison. Sweet and passionate poison. My addiction. My vice. You are everything that is bad in me bringing out everything that is best in me, and I am tortured by the images that never existed. It’s easy to hate a nobody, to move on to somebody whose skin rises to your touch, yet you stay playing words over my body. I rise and fall, a marionette doll, tethered to your broken hands. I lie.
I say goodbye. There’s a pause before the click. “You too,” you say. And I dance again. Lost in a nobodies world that I thought that I knew.
I’m a cheater. I’ll admit it! The last post you got was from ages ago, I never posted it, so it’s new to you, but it’s old to me. I was planning to come home and be productive today, give you something fresh, but it seems that my body has other ideas. I’m suffering from a killer migraine like headache in my sinuses and eyes that I have been told is step 1. in catching this strep throat business. I just got off the phone with my husband who sounds like he’s been hit in the face and is blaming me for getting him sick too!
On top of this I’m editing for a magazine to get it ready to publish before going out of town to go snowboarding this weekend. It’s a busy busy week, but we’ll make it. I hope that amidst the madness and the light that seems to be burning through me I’ll get something new to all of us, for you to read.
Until then, I pray for a cup of darkness and some house elves to be productive so that I don’t have to be.
“There are pieces of you in my coffee.” She said softly as she shuffled through the kitchen in slippers and a robe.
She’d been finding pieces of him everywhere for a while. She never expected to see him at all, and as she wandered half-heartedly through life, he began to turn up more and more. She wanted him to be whole again, but for now the pieces would do.
Last week she found him in a pillowcase that had been at the bottom of the chest, forgotten. She nearly screamed as it fell from the folds and floated about the room for a moment. She closed her eyes and imagined she could see it caught on the wings of something magical, made whole before her eyes as she took in the faint scent that lingered there before being sucked up into the air vent above the bed.
Yesterday she found pieces of him in the hand of a stranger that graced her skin as they passed on the train into the city. She gasped as the fingers moved over the back of her hand like a song. Her eyes darted to his young, kind face as he looked at her, apologies pouring from the desperate seas behind his black framed glasses. She smiled wistfully at the eyes that didn’t match the touch and let her mind float away to the places where the hands and eyes matched perfectly.
Nearly a month ago she found pieces of him in the bottom of a puddle on the walkway leading to her front door. The sun was beginning to set and as it hit the puddle it shimmered for a second; perfect lines in a shade of fading gray and his eyes caught hers. She stood bent, gazing for a long moment lost in a time that he looked at her with fathoms of something that was shaped like love.
Today he floated about in her coffee cup. As she pressed her lips to the rim she took him in. It was the salty sweet that lay on his mouth the first time that it found hers so many years before, under a star-lit sky. There in her worn-out slippers and bathrobe she sewed him back together in her mind. She laced him up with the good parts of him, the parts that smelled of sweet earth and felt of a strangers touch. She sat in his recliner starring down at a half empty coffee mug and spoke in lovely, short phrases to the pieces of him that she’d never have again.
Meeting new characters is similar to meeting new people. Sometimes you make rushed judgement, sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re not. Often times the characters of your imagination can be far more engaging than a chance encounter in the real world. After all you can ask burning questions and explore their psyche without seeming very strange and invasive.
Yesterday I met Walter and Ian, the once dynamic duo who now suffer from the normal pains of old-age and reside in Long Mountain Assisted Living Facility. I love them both! I’ve been entertaining them throughout the day and even though little has gone to paper, I’ve gotten to know them better, and allowed them to tell me their secrets. Sometimes I find that this is of equal or greater importance than making words fly across a page.
So…who have you met lately?
“I used to want to fall in love with the hero, then I figured out that loving the villain could be so much more fun!”
This is the statement that literally came flying out of my mouth about two hours ago before I crawled into my bed for a nap. I was thinking about the fight of good verses evil and why it is that sometimes a truly evil character is the most appealing to me, and this is what I said. Followed by “I wanted to be rescued by the prince on the whit steed, now it’s the punk on the black Harley.” When in all reality, I hate motorcycles. But for the sake of a good analogy…
There is something about the way a villain moves that can lull you. I’ve spent the last six months writing villains and now I find myself writing a different kind of villain. Either way the cookie crumbles, I’m in love. If you are as I once was, afraid of villains and their motivation, afraid of how it makes you feel to indulge them, listen to a helpful piece of advice given to me in a conference back in September.
“No villain does what they’re doing because they know that they’re wrong. A great villain is evil in it’s truest form when they believe from their soul that what they are doing is right.”
So maybe it’s time to fall in love with the bad guy, take him home to your parents and watch them squirm. Proverbially of course. Allow the villain to bring out that dark side in you, allow yourself to be wooed, you never know what you might discover!
