Three Places I Find Inspiration

 Happy New Year!

On this New Year's Eve day, I'm busy crunching year-end financials in preparation to go to quarterly tax-reporting. Author finances, however, are not the topic of the week at the SFF Seven. Instead we're discussing a much happier topic: sources of inspiration.

The two are somewhat tied together for me as I've spent the last two weeks refilling my creative well. I finished my revision of ONEIRA (final title to come) on December 15 and sent it off to my editor. Since then, I've taken a break from writing work - very unusual for me. The time has been consumed largely by Christmas prep, travel, visiting family, and doing business like the above crunching of year-end financials. Looking at this, I've realized that I've been relying on passive well-refilling: hoping that if I simply leave the creative well alone, that the vast water table of the universe will seep in and top that puppy off for me. 

And, to some extent, that's true.

However, I'm realizing I haven't been following my new tenet of aggressively refilling the well. That would mean finding ways to actively pour juice into that well. And that's where inspiration comes in. What are my top three?

Media

I'm putting a lot under this heading, much like my sibling-under-the-skin, Murderbot. One thing I have been doing is a full re-read of this excellent series by Martha Wells. Reading books - particularly brilliantly written ones by authors I admire - is a great source of inspiration for me. I also include listening to music under this heading. While road-tripping, I put my music library on All Songs Shuffle, which unearths interesting stuff I haven't listened to in ages. A Cat Stevens song - The Wind - turned up, so now I'm diving into a full Cat Stevens song shuffle. What an amazing songwriter, to communicate so much in so few words. Finally, I love watching movies for inspiration. I got a great idea just the other night from a movie and now I'm sizzling to write this series. Though it will have to wait, the sparkle of that excitement adds to my overall feeling of creative flow.

Nature

I'm fortunate to live in a beautiful place. My desk overlooks a spectacular view and my morning walk with the dog is replete with huge skies, distant mountains, and beauty of all kinds. I say I'm lucky to have this - and I am! - but I also sought out this place, because being outside in a beautiful place is super important to me. Just living here refills my well.

Silence

Longtime readers probably know that I'm an advocate of silence for creative flow. By this I don't necessarily mean the absence of ambient sound, though it sometimes means that for me. I'm talking primarily about the silence of the mind, the emptiness that allows creativity to flow in, that enables us to hear the voices scintillating through the veil, telling us their stories. Taking time off from the "noisier" parts of my life has been invaluable for that. 

Huh... Turns out I've been doing better at aggressively refilling the well than I thought!

Best wishes for an inspiring 2024 for us all!

My Consumption: Entertainment not TB

BROM: Lost Gods (a novel with illustrations)

Man, I love some of the topics my fellow bloggers choose.

"Books vs Comics vs Movies vs Games"

Yes, please. I'll take a bushel from column A and a tower from column B and...

It should be no surprise I love books. Hello, author here. Historical fiction, spec-fic, romance, gimme All The Books. Movies, I prefer action flicks but I won't turn down a good sci-fi. Mysteries and magical-realism? Yep, my ass is warming the seat. As for games, I can't call myself a "gamer." I'm more a Cribbage and Quiddler kind of gal. I've never played D&D (Gasp! I know! I think I lose my fantasy-author credentials for that.) Video games? Uh, no. I don't have the skills. Or the patience. Or the dexterity.

Now, comics...comics....~rubs hands with glee~

My love of comics/graphic novels comes from the evolution of learning to read. As ankle-biters, we start with picture books. Big pretty pictures and a dozen or so words per page. Comics have more pictures and about the same number of words on the page. I went from The Littlest Raindrop to Archie to Classics Illustrated. My Flash Gordon (the movie) comic survived traveling the world and my childhood. Asterix & Obelix taught me German. Monstress shares a shelf with Sandman and Snow, Glass, Apples. I really want to build out my mythology collection with more non-Western sources. (If you have suggestions, drop them in the Comments, please!)

I'm the fangirl who keeps checking my favorite webcomics to see if/when they're going to end up in paperback. So yeah, you could say I like comics. I am in awe of the talent of the artists, the colorists, and the letterers. My not-so-secret author wish is to collaborate on a graphic novel series. (Yo, Universe, puttin' it out there!)

Then there's the middle ground between the novel and the graphic novel: the illustrated novel. Has the word count of a novel, but way fewer pictures than a comic. Regardless, the illustrations are amazing. The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits and The Child Thief are glaring across my living room at The Fairy Bible.

So, uh, there you go.

Hope you all are staying healthy, washing your hands, and practicing physical distancing. We like our readers and want you to hang around for a long time.

For Love of Books We Didn't Want to Read

We're supposed to talk about books we didn't want to read and then ended up loving and I've got nothing. I'd like to tell you it's because I know my own reading tastes enough that when I don't want to read something, it's because I bloody well know I'm not going to like it and to this point, I've been right. 

Everything I've read that I did not want to read I really didn't like. A few, I detested. The rest were entirely mediocre. I turned into a DNF (Did Not Finish) reader early in my career as a reader - the first book in Stephan Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series cured me of pushing through a story I hated. From that point forward, I figured out that I'd know whether I' be able to stomach a book within the first several pages. Thus began my habit of lurking in the aisles of bookstores reading and flipping through the first couple of pages. 

So it turned out that everything I was forced to read for high school English classes I knew I wouldn't like and only a few who surprised me into appreciating them. (Albert Camus, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad - Shakespeare, even.)

Am I sorry I read any of the books school made me read? A few of them, yes. I was a teenager. I did not need to be reading depressing books. I had a lock on all kinds of angst of my own. I didn't need all these major downer books adding to it. Most of the books, though, I am glad I read. Even if I didn't actively enjoy them. I mean, honestly. Who *reads* Shakespeare? That's not how you learn to appreciate the genius of those texts. It's only in performance of them that you appreciate exactly what Shakespeare did with meter and rhyme to imply stage direction and action.  

If you asked which of the writers I most learned to appreciate as I grew older, I'd say James Joyce - just for the beauty of his words and images. That The Dead was turned into a movie with Angelica Houston in it that mesmerized me helped a lot. NOTHING HAPPENS in that movie. Nothing. And yet. The words were so gorgeous. So I guess that's the story of the book I hadn't wanted to read that ended up pleasantly surprising me - a story I didn't think I actually had. 

You see, I think my brain is melting. I think we might be unexpectedly and sort of accidently be buying a house. O_o Stay tuned. Cause I have no clue how this roller coaster is going to get us back to the safety of solid ground. 

What I want to know is which book (if any) cured you of reading all way to The End in a book you don't like. 

What I Hate: How Long You Got?

Holy horse feathers. Whose idea was it to make me think back to high school AP English? That class taught by the dude wearing suits from the year I was born. That teacher who liked to get aggressive and tell me I wasn't the best writer in his class. That class where it was all I could do to not shout back that so long as I stayed in his class I'd never get any better as a writer, either.

Woo. O_o This will not be a pretty stroll down memory lane, y'all. So you know how Vivien doesn't have time for hate? S'okay. I picked up what she set down and I have ALL the detestation and loathing. Not for individual books. Much. I mean to this day I don't see the point of Catcher in the Rye or the book about the idjit kid who shoves his best friend out of a tree. On the other hand, there were books I really, really liked. The Plague. A Clockwork Orange. I still have a soft spot for The Most Dangerous Game and The Lottery.

No, here's my hate-rant.

We were instructed to read privileged, long dead white male authors. As if there were no other perspectives on earth. No other views of the world or how we exist within it. How do I know the authors were privileged? It's all in their bios. They all went to college, which in the time(s) most of them were writing meant privilege. I don't mean to say we shouldn't have read some of these guys. Some of them were brilliant writers. Give me Mark Twain any day. But why not Harriet Tubman? Would it have killed anyone to ask us to read a black woman's words? To let us catch the most fleeting and horrifying glimpse of her world? Would anyone have been scarred forever to learn that the white, European male perspective isn't the only one on earth? Apparently it would have because books by women or people of color weren't even offered as options on the alternate reading list.

It took until I got to Evergreen State College for someone to begin pointing me at literature by people who didn't look like me. The Color Purple by Alice Walker is still etched into my head. So are some of the really contentious discussions we had around the themes of the story.

Here's the interesting thing. The discussions in AP English classes were boring. No one got heated. In fact, there was actually precious little 'discussion'. Yeah, yeah, here's what the book was about. Sure, cool imagery, bro, but a sentence with 123 words? Really? Isn't there a drug to help with that? But once discussion turned to something like The Color Purple  in college - those discussions were ANIMATED. No one was bored. I think it was because our worlds and our perspectives had been challenged and we were unsettled by it. We had to talk it out. That, to me, is what makes great literature. If a book can shake you up *just* enough - then the book won.

A Book Problem

Uhm. Hi.
My name is Marcella. And I have a book problem. Maybe more than one book problem. I mean. Look. It was one thing being a book addict when buying books mostly meant going into a bookstore, right? After walking out with more books than three people could carry and vowing to never set foot into a bookstore again without someone - ya know - responsible along, I could control the addiction.

But then E-readers, amIright? It's like the Universe conspired to hand book addicts a new improved way to sneak binge their substance. Even if e-reading isn't the quite the same tactile experience as the much harder to conceal dead tree versions. So there's that.

Add into it that I can't tell you how big my TBR pile is anymore. It - uhm - escaped me. No, I have a good excuse! Hush. You know about the living on the boat thing - and that while that happened all of my books went into storage. Yeah. They're still there. In boxes. The boxes are actually in my bedroom now, but I can't take the books out and pile them up in teetering TBR towers cause we're in temporary housing, right? So I sneak out one at a time, read it and then tuck it back in. All while adding new books to my digital TBR pile, AND when my B-day and the holidays roll around, clearing out my book wishlist with dead tree formats, well. I have no idea how big the TBR pile is. I don't even track the books I read on GoodReads any more. I found it was changing how I invested in a book knowing I had to write up something about it.

Yeah. Still a book addict. There's one cracked open beside me while I type. Craft book, but a book nevertheless.

My goal for the coming year (our lease on this place is up in November and we'll be looking for a longer term lease option in less of a cliff-dwelling type arrangement) is to actually unpack and sort my physical TBRs.

Dunno that there's any help for the digital ones. Kindle seems resistant to file organization. At least on my dinosaur of a Kindle.

But yeah. That's my story. I have a book problem.

PS: Happy Friday the 13th! Remember to superstition safely! Also, fewer than 100 days until Halloween, y'all. Break out the spooky.