flax-golden anniversary

This week, flax-golden tales is one year old.

This is a flax-golden tales anniversary post.  I might add a photo of a cupcake to it later, once I get around to baking cupcakes. The cupcakes are for my birthday, tomorrow, but I can share.

For anyone who might be new to the blog or hasn’t clicked over to the informative flax-golden page, flax-golden tales are photographs by my lovely & talented friend Carey Farrell accompanied by original ten-sentence short stories by me. New tales have been posted every Friday since July 10th, 2009.

You can read the entire archive here. They are also posted on dreamwidth.org.

To date, there are 52 tales, in 520 sentences and approximately 6,800 words.

I really didn’t know what would happen beyond the first two or three tales, and the evolution and diversity of them has been a pleasant surprise.

I had considered stopping after a year, but Carey keeps taking fabulous photographs, and I think they’re still a good flash-fiction type exercise for my brain, and they’re great fun to write.

I’m going to keep them going for at least another year. After that, we’ll see.

It’s hard to choose, but so far I think my personal favorites are:

buoyant solidarity

in tandem

boo.

&

excerpt from a notebook found in the woods near what used to be I-93

Do you have a favorite tale? Inquiring minds want to know. And if there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to know about flax-golden tales, now’s the time to ask.

new office

Months ago, the boy asked me what I wanted for my birthday.

I said I wanted a new desk chair, because I’m boring. Also, because I spend a large amount of time sitting in it, and the one I had lacked any real back support.

Somehow that turned into maybe also getting a new desk. So we had a planned before-birthday excursion to IKEA to spin around in chairs and see if any of their desks would fit the studio.

And the day before said excursion, my iMac decided to be cranky to the point of being worrisome, especially considering it’s my primary writing computer and no longer covered by AppleCare.

So, even though my birthday is not until Thursday, I have a brand new home office.

Old version:

Apologies for the glare. This was, I believe, my dad’s desk from high school, painted over several times.

New version:

We actually found an IKEA desk that fit perfectly, including a shelf that runs along the back of the drawers that collects all the cords and protects them from cord-gnawing kittens. My new chair is fabulous, and I cannot even tell you how shiny & wonderful the new iMac is, it’s amazing what only a few years difference in technology makes. I keep scrolling on any screen that will scroll just because the mouse has touch-screen-esque scrolling.

So happy happy early birthday to me, especially since I’m going to be glued to this spot for the foreseeable future.

We moved the old desk out into the hall for now. It has been claimed already.

flax-golden tales: overgrown

overgrown

I tried cutting them back at first. I broke three pairs of garden shears before I gave up. I didn’t even know I had three pairs of garden shears.

Every vine that I cut grew back, sometimes splitting into two or three or more, curling around chairs and tables and up the walls. Leaves sprouted back instantly, bigger and brighter and greener than the ones I’d managed to rip off.

The ones near the floor are too thick to cut with anything. The thinner ones are so high now that I can’t reach them, not even standing on what’s left of the couch.

By last night I couldn’t find the door.

This afternoon the electricity went out.

At the rate they’re growing, I’m guessing the skylight will be covered before dark.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

re-visioning

This post is going to be about revising. It will not be anywhere near as good as this post about revising, but I figured I’d give it a whirl anyway. I’ve gotten fairly familiar with how this process works for me, and as you all know by now, ’tis the summer of revision around here.

I started with my agent notes, both e-mailed and scrawled in my almost-illegible handwriting from a phone call. I read them. I re-read them. I highlighted specific things that really jumped out at me.

I talked to two of my dearest betas about it. I wrote down what they had to say. I read & re-read.

I pulled out my old notebooks, ones that dated back to ’08, and looked for things that I hadn’t used that I might be able to work with now. I pulled out a couple of pages worth of notes.

I took all of these notes, from agent and betas and the 2008 version of me, and transcribed the stuff I found most useful into a new notebook.

I started adding snippets of new scenes, bits of dialogue, hypothetical questions.

I made a gigantic timeline. I got a dry erase board to hang by the desk. So far it just looks cool and office-y, but I’m sure it’ll come in handy later.

I had more discussions with betas. I started having revelations. I began pulling possibilities from lists of ideas.

Now, I’m taking all of this stuff and developing it into full scenes. I’ve hit the writing stage, the really writing stage, after several weeks of this pre-writing process.

So far, I have not once looked back at the previous draft.

Why? Well, I already know what’s there. What I need is what’s *not* there yet, so I’m finding those things elsewhere, in notes and conversations and daydreams and at the bottom of cups of tea.

So I can take the new and layer it back over the old.

I’ve come to realize that I need to see it in my head as a different book, first. I have to find the shape of the new draft before I can mold the old draft into it. I can’t just go into the old draft and start pushing it around and filling in holes.

I have to develop the new draft and then work backwards. I need that picture, that vision of the new version, in order to get there.

This is how I revise. I have to get to the point where my brain can see where I’m going, and then it’s just a matter of writing to get there.

That’s not to say I know exactly how to get there, there are still hic sunt dracones parts of the map, but there is something resembling a map now.

I just got this beautiful book of Jerry Uelsmann photography. He does these gorgeous layered photos, made with multiple negatives in a darkroom, nothing digital.

It’s amazing stuff, and being in the head space that I’m in right now, it’s reminding me of how I revise. I’m finding new images to layer over the old ones. Not to obscure what was there before, but to elevate it into something else.

stuff no one told me

Invariably, whenever I go on internet hiatus I find something upon my return that reminds me why, though I may take occasional breaks, I do truly love the web.

This time around it was this blog: Stuff No One Told Me

Marvelous illustrated life lessons by Alex Noriega, and the blog is fairly new so it’s easy to catch up on all of them.

monday miscellany

Stuff accomplished during the week of no internet:

  • Finished three (3!) paintings. One is off to its recipient already, another is waiting for payment & the third is available on Etsy.
  • Got rid of my stupid summer head cold that I had hoped was allergies but was really just a head cold. I don’t get sick that often and that’s twice this year already, bah.
  • Went through two old notebooks that contained two years worth of novel notes, and pulled out several pages worth of possibly useful stuff.
  • Transcribed the possibly useful stuff into a new notebook.
  • Made strawberry frozen yogurt.
  • Sort of figured out the structure of the new draft. I think. Maybe. I have to see what it looks like when not scrawled on a spare piece of paper in magenta Sharpie.

So, not the huge dent in revisions that I’d wanted, but still productive. Am revising-o-rama this week, and I feel better about it having gotten the paintings out of the way.

Also, this weekend I bought a gigantic (2’x3′) dry erase board. I am a nerd, but I am a happy nerd. Hopefully it will help with structuring and time line and such. The kittens were disappointed that it did not come in a box. But it does have four different pens! And it’s magnetic! Oooh, I should get magnetic poetry for it.

Um, anyway.  It’s hot & humid out and the Kitten Flop Barometer is at Heavy Flop. Tessa is heavily flopped over the printer at the moment.

Back to notes and time lines and coffee for me.