erin

happy birthday margaret atwood, the slightly belated event

Last night this happened.

atwood birthday

Me, Chuck Wendig, Lev Grossman & a surprise Neil Gaiman celebrated Margaret Atwood‘s 75 birthday at the 92nd St Y and it was magical and amazing and I think I managed not to appear quite as nervous as I felt.

For the occasion I composed 75 Imaginary Birthday Cakes. I only read about 50 of them, but all 75 were hand written on cards and placed in a little box and given to Margaret Atwood.

Here’s a sneak peek:

atwood cakes title

atwood cakes

atwood cakes box

 

(The box smells like cake, scented with BPAL’s Eat Me: three white cakes, vanilla, and red and black currants.)

Someday I’ll share the whole list but for the moment I’ll let them remain mysterious.

Still can’t really believe I got to be a part of this marvelous event with such fantastic people. Grateful & inspired & delighted.

 

By erin, ago

nanowrimo 2014

I’ve been doing pseudo-NaNoWriMo this month, adding 50,000 words to the project I’ve been working on. (Calling it a project and not a novel sounds much more appropriate, it is, unsurprisingly, still not novel-shaped. I will probably not consent to calling it novel-shaped until I have to actually let it go out into the world and be a grown-up book.)

I hit the 50k mark yesterday, mostly because I wrote 7k yesterday. I’m not sure how I managed that and also today my brain is tired.

Here is my NaNoWriMo 2014 word count graph:

nano 2014 word count graph(I believe the orange days are when I hit 5k, 10k, 25k & 50k. I had a busy first weekend.)

I make a point to not re-read anything I write during NaNo so I’m really not certain how much work it needs but some of it was redrafting older bits, so it might not be completely terrible. I’m guessing it’s 35-40% terrible. I am going to go back over all of it soon to rectify some of the terribleness. (I over-use the word “slightly” like it’s my job.) But there’s stuff that works in there, and stuff that I probably wouldn’t have come up with if I hadn’t been digging deeper in odd corners of backstory to make that little graph go up. I am, as always, a sucker for progress in graph form.

I’m delighted that I managed to get to 50k now with so much of November left. I have several other things on the to-do list that I’ve been putting off that I now have time for.

Winner-2014

To those of you still NaNo-ing I wave little flags of encouragement for you. You can do it! There’s still a lot of days left!

At the moment, though, I might need to take a nap.

 

By erin, ago

happy birthday margaret atwood!

Today is Margaret Atwood‘s 75th birthday but on Wednesday, December 3rd I will be at the 92nd Street Y with a number of other lovely people to help celebrate this illustrious occasion.

I have been locked away in my writing cave and declining event invitations but I said yes to this one because Margaret Atwood. I am delighted to be a part of it. And also my friends Lev Grossman & Chuck Wendig will be there, so it is bound to be a fantastic evening.

By erin, ago

happy hallowe’en

clue

 

Happy Hallowe’en, Blessed Samhain & a Merry NaNoWriMo Eve!

I am taking a somewhat Twitter-specific internet hiatus for the rest of the year, though I won’t be around much elsewhere, either. I will blog if there are blog-worthy things and I will do an end of the year post in December.

I am sort of doing NaNoWriMo myself. I’m going to attempt to add 50k to the draft I have. It’s probably going to involve word count math to get my progress bar to work properly. There are links to NaNo-related things in my post from last year. To those about to NaNo, I salute you.

I cut off most of my hair yesterday, shorter than it’s been in awhile. My head feels lighter. Maybe it will make it easier to fit more ideas in there.

halloween haircut

I realize that this is likely not that dramatic because most of the pictures of me on the internet involve equally short hair but it really is much shorter than it was yesterday. (Owl talon moon by bloodmilk, of course.)

So tonight I am going to have bourbon and mini Butterfingers and watch Hitchcock films and tomorrow I am going to retreat into my lighter-feeling head for a good long while so I can sort out what’s in there and figure out how to translate it into words.

By erin, ago

october things

pumpkins

The end of September went by very quickly because my new niece decided she wanted to be a September baby and not an October baby as scheduled so she was early, but she is also adorable. I have already started buying her all sorts of books.

One of my very favorite authors from when I was young passed away yesterday, Zilpha Keatley Snyder wrote a great many books but my favorites were The Headless Cupid and The Egypt Game. I loved The Egypt Game so much I used to build temples in my backyard. I should do that again if I ever have a backyard.

I will be at New York Comic Con this weekend but I am not doing anything official. I will be flouncing around in a corset and wandering aimlessly and looking for the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab booth and possibly buying comics. If you see me, feel free to say hello.

This upcoming Monday is October 13th, which is of course the anniversary of opening day of the circus. To celebrate I thought I might do something I rarely do over on Tumblr & retumble some of the gorgeous circus-inspired stuff that’s floating around over there. (True confession: I never look up circus things because it makes me weirdly shy and also just looking turns up good things and bad things and for every thing I’m glad to see there’s usually something that makes me sad so I just don’t do it. But I peeked the other day and there’s really too much gorgeous not to share.) So all day on Monday I will be retumbling circusy things on my tumblr page. I’ll try to remember to tag things, I’m bad at tagging.

I haven’t been apple picking yet this year. I shall have to rectify that soon. Mostly I am writing a lot and wondering why this year insists on going by so quickly.

By erin, ago

station eleven

STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel comes out today in the US & Canada, and I believe tomorrow in the UK, which makes this both STATION ELEVEN Day and STATION ELEVEN Eve depending on location.

I loved this book.

LOVED.

I have post-apocalypse fatigue and I still loved this book, because it’s so much more than that. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, because simply describing it would never do it justice.

This is going to be one of the stories I carry in my imagination for the rest of my life. It will come to mind again and again and again in theatres, in airports, in Toronto in the snow.

Please read it.

Once in a very long while a book becomes a brand new old friend, a story you never knew you always wanted. STATION ELEVEN is that rare find that feels familiar and extraordinary at the same time, expertly weaving together future and present and past, death and life and Shakespeare. This is truly something special.

– Erin Morgenstern

By erin, ago