Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

I officially reached the 50K mark on Tamlin last night, just in time to claim an official NaNoWriMo win today. The novel itself is not finished, but it actually is getting close. I am in the part of the story that I think of as the Let's All Go to the Underworld! part. It has maybe 10K left in it? (Which probably means more like 15-20K because it's me and I am a champ at underestimating things.)

What is really amazing to me is that I still want to write this story. I think about it all the time. I wish I was writing it now! (I need to decide if I want to go there when I still have Thanksgiving preparation chores to do. Sometimes writing spoils me for anything productive!) When I finish this, it will be the first NaNovel that I actually do finish, sadly enough. The Midhavens novel I was writing needs a complete rewrite (much like Tamlin did) because I've changed my mind so much, and I was writing another fantasy novel that I need to decide if I want to finish or not.

But next up is the prequel to AMC, which was going to be my NaNo project until Tamlin spiraled beyond being a Haunted October story and into firm novel-length territory and demanded two months to write.

I'm going to keep entering my word count till the end of the month so that I can have the data and will ramble at some point in the near future about what I learned from this experience. Because that's what NaNo is to me: a reason to prioritize working on a big project for one full month and the opportunity to learn what works for me and doesn't as a writer. Interestingly, based on word count data, my habits as a writer have changed since the last time I did NaNo, which I suspect is the result of disciplining myself through a humanities MA and Master's thesis. But more on that later.

This is cool too: A couple of weeks ago, I posted offhand to Twitter about doing NaNo and mentioned the writer's club I was starting at my school. A few days later, I was contacted by a journalist from the education website The 74, wanting to interview me for an article she was writing about teachers using NaNoWriMo with students. I checked in with my principal to make sure it was okay to talk to her, and he was thrilled and gave me the green light. Well, the article is online! I'm about halfway through, rambling about tea and the culture of persistence and the importance of giving opportunities to write to kids in disadvantaged communities.

We had our first snowfall last night. Around nine o'clock, we began to spot the first fat snowflakes among the rain, and by eleven o'clock, it had changed over to all wet snow. It was sticking a little on the ground by the time we went to bed around 1 AM, but when I eagerly peeked out the window this morning, I was disappointed because it had all melted already.

In the mountains, however, there is quite a bit on the ground. Bobby is currently pacing around the house waiting to be picked up by a friend to go up to Jay Peak, where it's estimated they got about 6 to 7 inches (15 to 17 cm). They'll "earn their turns" by hiking the mountain and snowboarding down. Power to them! That sounds like a lot of work, but Bobby is over the moon.

At his colleague's house about 15 minutes north of us, she posted a picture on Facespace with about two inches (5 cm) on the ground, so it seems we just missed it being cold enough to stick, which isn't particularly surprising, since we tend to be a couple degrees warmer here in the valley than in the surrounding areas.

Yesterday, we went to the matinee show of Vermont Vaudeville. We loved it. The show was held in the beautiful still-undergoing-restoration Hardwick Town House. It was hilarious. I think they cross-pollinate a lot with Bread and Puppet; I recognized some of the actors from B&P shows.

It was a really miserable day yesterday: in the mid-40s F (about 4C) and this constant, omnipresent, drizzly rain. We decided to pack it in for the evening. We'd had a stupendous and large lunch at Positive Pie in Hardwick, so we grabbed some Chinese food at the Wok 'N' Roll in Newport and rented three movies from the video store.

We moved up here for a variety of big reasons related to lifestyle, ideals, and emotional health, but we constantly discover little things that we love and never expected. Having a video store is one of them. An old-school, locally owned video store, not a Blockbuster, certainly not a RedBox. Bobby and I love movies, and one of our favorite ways to spend an evening is seeing a movie in a theater or renting one at home. Yet neither of us are particularly wild about streaming movies. The reality is that we live in the middle of nowhere and have satellite Internet, and the nights when you most want to watch a movie at home--when it is raining or snowing--are the nights when the satellite Internet is least reliable or, during storms, may not work at all. We also like having the cases to hold in hand, to read the reviews and the blurbs, look at the cover and the stills that have been chosen, see if the movie was presented at any festivals or won any awards, etc. Discovering we had a video store up here was an amazing find for us.

During October, we rent mostly-to-all "scary" movies. New England Video has a special where you can rent three non-new releases on Saturday night for three bucks and keep them for three days. Since we're expecting poor weather this weekend and three bucks for three movies is an amazing deal, then we rented three scary movies. Last night, we watched one called Frozen--no, not THAT Frozen--about a trio of college kids who get stuck on a high ski lift after hours. It was the stupidest thing ever! It appeared they were citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (I will avoid using the term that Vermonters use for this particular type of tourist from that particular state), skiing/riding at a fictional resort in Massachusetts, but there managed to be man-eating wolves? It was awful! But of course, the awfulness is part of the fun for scary movies a lot of the time. All the same, this wasn't the kind of awful that I recommend watching.

We've rented a few this month that I've really liked. ( Dawn's 2016 Haunted October Movie Recommendations )

So speaking of Haunted October, my own Haunted October is going well and so not-so-well at the same time. It's going well because I am still hooked on the story and write at least a little of it every day. I don't think I've had a 5000+-word day, but I've had a handful of occasions where I manage a few thousand in a sitting, which is good. But it's nowhere near being done, which looks like it won't be ready to post even part of on Halloween (since I don't like to post unfinished work), and at this point, it also threatens my NaNoWriMo aspirations, since I'm not going to put it on hold to start something new. So at this point, I probably need to just call it "Tamlin" and forget about the Haunted October piece. I can't bring myself to be disappointed in myself, however, for missing a self-imposed deadline because of my enthusiasm for a story that has been in my head for years.

Last night, I finally got to some sinister supernatural monkey business. Yes, JUST LAST NIGHT. I still have a lot of story to tell.

Well, when it rains it pours, in a good way this time. Some of you might remember a few weeks ago when I had mad deadlines for things and was biting my fingers till they bled (how I react when stressed out!). Both being due simultaneously meant that they were both published within the past two days.

My article "Fictional Scholarship: How the Peter Jackson Films and Fandom Archives Make Tolkien Fan Fiction Writers into Competent Critics" is out in Mythprint 52:1. It is a shortened version of my Mythmoot paper (which will eventually be available for free online in the proceedings) but does introduce some new data and expands on some of the points I couldn't really delve into in my Mythmoot paper because of time. Unfortunately, I don't have a link for this one, but Mythopoeic Society members will get it as part of Mythprint. There were no strings attached on this article, so I can reprint it wherever and whenever I want, and I will post it on the Heretic Loremaster in a couple of weeks. I just want to give Mythprint the courtesy of having it first for a while.

And my article In a Stone House by the Sea: The Founding and Governing of the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild is available in Signum University's Eagle. (Here is the entire March edition of the Eagle.) The timing on this was perfect because, believe it or not (and I am still having trouble believing it), the SWG's tenth begetting day* is tomorrow.

*Just like an Elf, the SWG has a begetting day and a birthday because I set it up on March 15 and then chickened out about doing anything with it until later in the year, having been utterly unqualified to start anything of that scope, even as I imagined it then. Uli pushed me in the summer to try to actually, um, get people to join, so I count the end of July as its birthday.

Finally, I wrote an essay, We Are Fëanor? Thoughts on Reading Moral Ambiguity into the Characterizations of the Fëanorians, which I posted to the Heretic Loremaster and also Tumblr. (Also a reminder that heretic_lore_feed will display HL posts on your friends page. I don't use the HL very much these days but it [and the entire Midhavens site] will be getting a facelift and some renewed attention once my MA is done and then I hope to have regular updates from me and People Not Me.)

So there is this m-type thing going around everywhere (EVERYWHERE!!1! okay, I'm being melodramatic a bit ...) that asks you to post the first line of your last 21 stories. This seems interesting and also mindless enough to do after spending the afternoon out in the sun digging in the dirt. (Which is better than out in the dirt digging in the sun.)

I'm just going with Silmfic because I'm honestly too tired right now to figure out how anything original I might have written would fit into this chronology. I'm sure there's original stuff in there. (I know there is.)

( 21 First Lines! )

Before I call it quits for the night, I want to wish a very happy Mother's Day to the moms on my flist! I'm not a mom (being a pet owner and teacher don't count, even though well-meaning people try to bring me into the Mother's Day umbrella for both!) and have no intention of being one because y'all do a job that I am just not cut out for doing. So I admire what you do and send a shout out to all the smart, creative, and cool moms reading this! :) I hope you were generously treated today.

I am rather blue and blah at the moment; it is pouring rain outside (at least it's not snow?*) and the wind is howling something fierce. I'm wrapping up my contribution to the B2MeM review award grand prize banners, trying to think of how to represent mithril seasonally, and feeling like wasting some time but not on something completely fruitless. Anyway. There is a rather interesting discussion going on over of Oshun's LiveJournal (it's f-locked, so I won't link) concerning B2MeM, which morphed into the inevitable discussion of format preference that sometimes feels to me like it is one of the great insurmountable dichotomies of our age. Sharks or Jets? Bears or Packers? Grunge or rap? (Yes, I spent my formative adolescent years in the '90s.) New York-style or Chicago-style? Daily prompts or omg-anything-but-daily-prompts-for-the-love-of-god-please?

* Never mind.

What I find interesting about this annual discussion is what it reveals about us as writers. ( Creative Navel-gazing Ahoy )

village_of_geckos and her boyfriend left this morning after visiting since Monday afternoon. What a great time we had! I miss them already! Monday, we basically chilled and went to Arooga's for dinner. Tuesday was our big day: We spent the day in Gettysburg, which is about 45 minutes northwest of us, and had a firepit at night. We went through the museum, hoofed all over the battlefield and town, had dinner and beer at a local microbrewery, and climbed the tower on Culp's Hill. Last night, we had a massive cookout and crab feast with my parents. In between, we managed to solve all of the world's problems and catch up from the past three years since we saw each other last in Ireland.

I just sent off my first unit of lesson plans to my principal, so that's water under the bridge, although I'll still probably be working on materials (especially graphics, since my work laptop doesn't have Photoshop) over the next few days. I'm hoping to get ahead and stay ahead. I'd like to be able to show up at work on Monday and print out the materials for the next two weeks. How awesome that would be.

I've been "writing"--mentally, of course--quite a bit lately. Original and fanfic. I'm not quite to the point of putting anything to paper, although I'm considering just diving into the AMC prequel, t'hell with being prepared. After all, I didn't prepare at all to write AMC; might as well keep with the spirit, eh? I have a couple of chapters on the prequel from years ago. I'm trying to discipline myself into making room for my own time again. What a concept! I've backed off a bit from certain commitments I've taken on in the past few years, given up entirely on some and moved others lower on my list of priorities.

Speaking of AMC, Bobby is reading it. I am still not sure that was a good idea; it is very long, and he's still never made it all the way through The Silmarillion. I've been told it stands on its own quite well; I suppose this will be the test of that. Last I checked, he was at the end of Chapter Four and was--like most people who read AMC--liking Carnistir the best. He told me that he liked it, but he would.

I have registered for my fall grad school classes. I'm starting later this year, which I hope will help and give me a chance to get lesson plans and materials created well in advance of when they're needed. I'm taking two classes: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the History of Religion. The first class is an eight-weeker; another good thing, as I'll only have one class for half of the semester and will still earn six credits.

Okay, now for some random pictures, mostly butterflies, a coupla sunflowers, and one random Phil.

( Pictures of Stuff )

A few years ago, I made a statement that got people quite unexpectedly riled up. I said that not much exciting tends to happen in my stories, plot-wise. Ho boy, did people jump to defend me against myself, arguing that stories like Another Man's Cage were actually quite involved in terms of plot and very exciting in that regard. At the time, it surprised me, as the relative lack of plot in my stories has always been, to me, self-evident. In retrospect, I don't think I was as precise as I needed to be in commenting on the plot of most of my stories and therefore brought the ensuing brouhaha upon myself. My point was more about where my stories arise from: They arise from character, not plot. The plot that develops is incidental to the characterization rather than the other way around.

( People and the Things That Happen to Them )

We got a little bit of snow last night. Carroll County did its usual horrible job with the roads, which made Saturday morning errands a little hair-raising ... and incomplete, when we hit an untouched road and decided not to chance it in our small, decidedly not-made-for-snow vehicle.

Because of the snow, though, Bobby wanted to go snowboarding. He's always wanted to learn snowboarding and even purchased the equipment a few years ago before my employment situation, followed by my student teaching internship, thrust us into penury. This year, he purchased a night club pass, which gives him unlimited use of Liberty Mountain after 4 PM. (As of today, the pass has paid for itself, so it was definitely a good purchase.)

I went with him today, to sit in the lodge and drink hot beverages and play on my computer and read frivolous novels. I wasn't getting a good wi-fi signal, so I started looking through old and unfinished stories stored on Pengolodh the Laptop.

Back in 2007, I participated in NaNoWriMo. I didn't enjoy working on the story, though, even though I went into the project with passion for the world and its characters; working on the story actually made me lose that passion ... not good. I didn't feel like the story was good at all. After NaNo, I never touched it again. It was a bad time in my life; I was still with the WAU, working out of the Baltimore office, doing passive-aggressive things like wearing intentionally mismatched clothes to work and wrapping the lei I was given for Employee Appreciation Week around the miniature tombstone that I keep on my desk. (That's still there, lei in place ... my students love the story of why I have a tombstone with a lei wrapped around it on my desk!) I wasn't at my nadir yet, but I was quickly sliding toward it. I think that's probably why the story was, I thought, unsuccessful.

I'd all but forgotten about the story. Tonight, I found it on my computer and thought, "What the hell ... the worst that happens is it's so awful that I don't finish reading it." I'd written 85 pages, so it was pretty long, though still far from finished.

But when I started reading it, I actually ... liked it. A lot. I felt that old passion for the world I'd crafted (not my usual o-fic "Midhavens 'verse") flame anew. I was worried that I'd forget how I'd planned the story to go, since I almost never write these things down and have zero memory for plotlines, but as I read, these details came back to me.

I find myself suddenly and inexplicably excited about this story. I probably won't be able to work on it for a while--I start back to school in two weeks and B2MeM is nigh--but I can play with the characters in my head in the meantime ... and I haven't had characters in my head for so long that dust in my head makes the backs of my eyes itch. And I feel like things have come full circle: from the point where I knew that the job and path in life I'd settled for wasn't something I could tolerate for much longer, to the point where I do feel like my feet have found a road they are content to travel.

I've unfortunately had a lot of practice with forced non-creativity, with the past three years an example of that. It's always an interesting experience, and after a while, I become almost convinced that I'm not really a creative person anymore and have gone suddenly "normal." It's not as upsetting as it sounds; being non-creative is more blah than anything actively unpleasant. It's like the old conundrum of treating depression: Many depressed people don't perceive that they're depressed, and the depression snuffs all motive to work against the depression. When I'm non-creative, I don't perceive that I'm not creative either. It's not like I feel the lack of creativity; life just becomes a lot more literal.

Of course, there are glimmers that there is something beyond the tidy bounds of the life without imagination. During my first year of school, I was rabidly writing poetry in lieu of longer pieces, memorizing them during scraps of time I could steal and writing them down later. During my internship, my mentor assigned me to write a model essay for one of the freshpeople's compositions, and an hour into it, there I was, pouring my heart out on the keys with tears on my face. (I was writing about my Uncle Wodie and his illness and death when I was a teenager.) There was that old familiar sense of submersion beneath the bare details of life.

I do wonder, though, during my bouts of forced non-creativity, if the muses will ever come back. I once accidentally trained myself to become creatively inspired by the smell of the rubber mats at ice rinks (that isn't as random as it sounds, I promise) and so tend not to believe that "creativity" and "inspiration" are these entirely nebulous, non-physical entities that bestow and withhold their blessings without any say from the writer--although it can sure feel like that sometimes.

Well, I got my answer on the question of muses. The day I handed in the last of my school assignments, I awoke in the night and proceeded to lie sleepless for the next hour thinking about the prequel to AMC. And today, I enjoyed a very non-productive morning where each sentence I wrote for my articles was punctuated by a two-minute daydream about the sequel to AMC. So it seems the muses are back in all their annoying, pointy-eared glory.

I am going to be tough on myself this summer. I have been tough on myself for the past three years in a way that is entirely contrary to my character; this will be contrary to my character too but is very much needed. I am prioritizing my creativity this summer. It's very easy for me to put the needs of others above my own, but I'm not going to do it this time. I'm going to write and paint and send out the stories for publication that I've been saying I was going to send out for publication for years now. I've made good progress on my goal, only a few days into it. I've rejoined Critters and submitted my short story "Hazard" to the critique queue. I've restarted my work editing the Help Haiti ebooks (no, I really have not forgotten that project), which will also serve to reacquaint me with the small details of the Felakverse so that I can--wonder of wonders--go back to writing some Silmfic. I have ideas out the wazoo for original fiction stories too: several short stories and two novels. This doesn't even begin to touch on the illuminations--medieval and modern--that are in need of completion.

It's a relief, to be sure. I've been noticing that the dysthymic swings have been getting deeper and longer lately. I don't know that it's correlated with the forced non-creativity (it could equally be the perpetual state of exhaustion I've been in since about February, or something else entirely), but I've been feeling pretty good these last few days. It does make me wonder.