Worry: A Habit I wish I Didn't Have

Worry is like running on a hamster wheel.  You go round and round in circles, but you never get anywhere.  

And yet, I worry.  Mostly, I worry about things that I cannot control.  And that gets in the way of things that I can control.

I can't control the fact that there's an accident along my way to work.  I can control the fact that I left a little late, cutting it a bit too close.

I can't control what my significant other does.  I can control my reaction to it.

I can't control how my mother is doing.  I can control my own health.  But not if my energy is spent worrying about hers.

I can't control whether someone buys my story.  But I can get it out there - submit it to agents.

I'm not big on resolutions, but here's one: I'll try to focus my energy on those things that I can control.  And let go of the things I can't.

Photo Credit

“Hamster on wheel” sualk61 @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

Where We Come From

I've been quiet for the past week because I've been working on a photo book.  Several years ago, I collected family photos, some of which go back more than a hundred years.  I finished it and sent it off last night.

So, as is my habit, I look at everything, and I mean everything, as what it can teach me about writing.  And this photobook has something to do with Backstory, with where we come from.

Every character has a past, hinting at that past can tell you a lot about that character, what matters to them, what motivates them.  For instance, my mother is a nurse, I have a master's degree (education, if you must know) and my father went to college.  Of course.

But my grandfather didn't go to college and my grandmother went to business school for a year, I think.  Most of my mother's family were farmers – not the intellectual elite that I'd assumed we were.  Because that's what we are now.  We have a slew of teachers: art, music, science and special needs.  And education IS very important to us.  But would I have had anything in common with my great grandmother if I'd known her at my age?

Probably not.  She had been married and had 7 kids (one of whom died of disease in the nursery) by the time she was my age.  And I'm not sure she graduated from high school.

So, back to characters.  One of my characters lost her parents in an accident when she was a teenager, another used to belong to a gang.  The romantic lead is more than shy, he's gun-shy.  His family has money and a gold-digger had him going before he figured out what she was really after was the money.  Knowing this about them is essential to how they react and what motivates them.  I may never say what happened to them, in so many words, but their past is there.

What are the pasts your characters have to deal with?

Photo: I'm not sure who took it, probably my grandfather.  It's my aunt and my mom, as kids.

Sunset

Sometimes, you do the unexpected when you are writing a novel. Last week, as I was working on the latest iteration of Lawgiver, I realized that I needed to write a poem. I don't usually write poems.

But that's what the character needed to translate, so that's what I had to write.

This is a picture of a sunset taken at the door to my condo - run through Photoshop.

So, here's the snippet from Lawgiver:

"It's a poem, probably for the person in the crypt. And I'm also a translator, so I figured that I'd take an hour or two to work on it." With a smile, she settled at the table and lifted the parchment out, carefully.

The sun has set for me.

The last light has graced the world

And you are gone.

The breeze whispers through the trees,

The river rushes past.

And you are gone.

Our children cry

Their children sleep in peace

The stars wink into the dark.

And you are gone.

Su had to stop there, putting the parchment back into the box and closing the lid. She blinked back the tears and blew her nose.

SteamPunk - What Defines a Genre?

One of the stories that I'm working on - researching, right now - is a steampunk legend called Golem.

But what makes it steampunk?

Set in Victorian times? It's set in 1905, but in Odessa, Russia, not part of the British Empire.

New-fangled Tech? Yes, the MMC is a jeweler and he makes little clockwork insects. It's also in the Industrial Revolution.

Magic? Heck yeah. I'm researching Kaballah magic as part of this.

But a friend and I were discussing this in chat this afternoon and that doesn't really address the "punk" in steampunk.

The jist of our discussion was that steampunk isn't purely escapist - it may not be all dark, but there's a dark side to it. The RDJr. Sherlock Holmes showed the gritty bits of London, for example. And there are classes and class tensions in steampunk, unlike, say... Regency Romance (my friend's example).

Steampunk does not really pretend to be literature, but it's more than escapist fantasy. It addresses social issues, or the best tend to. Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series deals with very disparate creatures living together in civility and how hard that is. Meljean Brook's The Iron Duke deals with winning freedom from oppression and how, even whe they're free, it's not easy. There are still consequences.

All of this is making me want to work on that steampunk story set in Odessa, before the Soviet revolution. But first, I need to get this other story ready for my betas.

What steampunk have you read? How would you define the steampunk genre?

Photo: A Steampunk Pendant by Vaughn & Sean Saball Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license/by Vaughn & Sean Saball

Slinking back into Blogging

I've shamefully ignored all sorts of blogging, both here and at LiveJournal. And a friend yelled at me, because that's how she kept up with my life.

I've been thinking about web presence and what attracts me to a blog - what keeps me coming back. But also what I get from blogging.

So, I'll try to blog more often. I'll even try to keep to some sort of schedule.

Mondays - updates. Personal, writing, whatever.

Wednesdays - Photos and images. Mine, no one else's

Friday/Weekend - Musings. Writerly, Bloggerly, Technical, whatever

Interspersed, there will be snippets. I like snippets.

Happy Writing everyone!