There's No Place Like Home

After I graduated from high school I went on a school trip to Costa Rica. We spent ten days touring the country. We spent time deep in the rain forest (and I mean deep: it took an hour by boat to get up the river to the town where we stayed), we went to the middle of the country in what is known as the Arenal region, we went to Monteverde and then we ended up on the Pacific side to spend two days on the beach.

It was a fantastic trip. I had a lot of fun and I really liked being exposed to a different culture. And it was beautiful. 

A few days after I came back, my family went on a camping trip to a place about two hours from our house. As we were driving, I realized that as beautiful as Costa Rica was, I still thought those mountains, the ones I had grown up in, were more beautiful. 

When I was younger, I wanted to write stories that were set in places like New York, France, and England. I have never been to any of those places. I used to want to leave but in the past few years I've begun to realize that the Northwest is my home. This is where my roots are.

Black and Gold is set in a fictional place that didn't exist until I made it up in my head. But it is real to me. The places there look like places I have been in Idaho, Washington and California. 

Idaho is beautiful to me. I seen a lot of it when I drive home from school. I love the mountains, the rivers that rage white in the summer and flow between frozen snowbanks in the winter. I love the rolling farmland of the Palouse. I love the sagebrush and the tall grass that decorate the southern desert and the foothills of Boise. I love it all.

People give Idaho a lot of grief, calling it Iowa and what not. Some of my native Boiseans make the distinction between being from 'Idaho' and being from 'Boise', as if the latter separates them from the stereotypical Idahoan. But I don't care. I am from Idaho. 

This love of place is something my characters share. It is not just their country that they love but the land itself. Both find it beautiful.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is this: if you love your home, don't be ashamed. Write about it. There is no better writing material than authentic experience and you experience your home in a way you don't experience a distant city. 

Here are a few pictures I've taken of Idaho:

No place is perfect. Idaho has a winter that holds on longer than we think it should. It has a summer that ends with an August that roasts in the triple digits or suffocates us with the smoke of forest fires. It has trouble making up its mind what kind of weather any given hour will have. But it's home.

Thank You

Thank God for the people who love writers. 

It's easy to love the writing produced by writers but that falls under the label of 'loving reading' or 'loving books'. But writers do not sit quietly on bookshelves or on night tables. We are, of course, human beings just like you.

Except that we are difficult. Neurotic. Moody. Prone to sitting in a room alone with the door closed and abstaining from human interaction of any kind. This is not typically considered 'normal' behavior. (The definition of normal is a debate we can have later). 

I am difficult. I talk too fast and say things I shouldn't more often than I am proud of. I am neurotic. I have at least a dozen characters vying for space in my brain every day and sometimes old characters resurface for no apparent reason. I am moody. When my over-analyzing brain turns from fiction to reality, it drags me into a freak out session that fully embodies the definition of the word irrational. 

I am aware that I am all of these things. I do my best to accept them. I don't always succeed. It is those times that I am incredibly grateful for people who love writers. Friends who don't care when I'm in a mood or talking too fast to understand or just feel like talking because I've spent too much time in my own head that day. On days like that, there really is nothing better than knowing someone who is not a figment of my imagination also thinks I'm funny and worth talking to.

So, to those of you who love writers enough to hang out with us, thank you. Thank you for putting up with us and reminding us that the real world is sometimes better than the ones in our heads.

Clarity

Sometimes I wonder if I am crazy to enjoy writing as much as I do. When I'm revising, I have to remind myself of how much fun I had writing the first draft. But even when I think about writing something new, sometimes I dread it. I can't recall the reasons I love it.

Then I start writing and I remember. There are a thousand reasons I love it. Tonight, the top one is that it clears my head.

It sounds strange, I know. But going to live in a world that I've created and thinking someone else's thoughts makes my own thoughts less tangled. And let me tell you, my thoughts tangled makes me a basket case of nerves, crankiness, and general moodiness. I can think about why they've gotten tangled but that only makes it worse.

But when I write, all of that fades. I feel like myself. I feel like I know my own mind again. And there is nothing better than that after a day that went from bright and clear to murky and tangled in the space of half an hour. (Don't ask me why, because I haven't got the slightest idea). The important thing is that I am here now. And I am writing.

Ambition

Ambition is a strange thing. I always value ambition in other people. By that I mean, I like people who clearly want something and work to get it. A lack of ambition is terribly unattractive. 

But when it comes to my own ambition, I admit, I'm a little shy. I mean, some of my ambitions are fairly common and I have no problem talking about them: own a house with an office I can cover in bookshelves, always have a dog (I can't decide if I want a husky or a German shepherd first), drink coffee, etc. All of those are achievable.

My big ambition is to publish a book. Sometimes, it even occurs to me to dream about that book doing well. The biggest pipe dream is that so many people will buy the book I don't have to have a job to support my writing habit.

I don't like to think about that because it seems so arrogant. Who am I to think I can write a book anyone besides me would want to read? That's the thing about the stories I write- I write them because I would want to read them. 

A few days ago, I was revising Black and Gold, listening to Disney music because that's the playlist I listened to when I wrote it over the summer. I reached the end of a section and just sort of stopped. And then I though Why not this book? 

God knows it's nowhere near ready to be read by anyone other than me and maybe my mom (because my mom is awesome). But it could be ready. I could make it good enough. That is an incredibly arrogant thought, because I am haunted by all of the bad writing that I have done. The amount of bad versus good words is still heavily skewed toward bad, trust me. But I couldn't shake that thought.

Ambition is a strange thing. It makes me want to hand my book to a stranger in the hopes that they'll fall in love with it, even though I know they're more likely to throw it back at me.

But maybe, just maybe, one of those strangers won't. 

Revision and Christmas

Congratulations to those of you in college who, like me, made it through the semester! I'm pretty excited to be done. Honestly, until yesterday finishing the semester was more exciting than the fact that Christmas is in two days. 

Now I have time to read for fun again. I just sat in one of the big leather chairs in my parents' living room yesterday and finished a book I did not have to write an essay on or relate to another book. It was glorious. 

In other exciting news (well, exciting to me), I have come up with a title for The Stupid Book: Black and Gold. Voila! Today, after I finish writing this, I am going to drink my tea and work on some back story for a couple of the characters. Then, probably tomorrow, I will begin revising in earnest before school starts again and homework eats away my time. In my perfect world I'd be finished with one complete revision before January 11 (when I head back to school) but more realistically, it'll be more like a 75% revision. Still, revision is going to happen.

But I have a title and I have time and I miss my main characters. It will be fun.

I hope you all enjoy spending time with your family and friends. To my fellow students, I hope you enjoy sleeping in and being lazy as much as I do. Eat good food. Laugh. And have a very merry Christmas.

Elizabeth

Updates

Hey there, those of you who are reading this. It's been a little while since I posted anything. School, NaNo, the usual distractions. 

I am only three days behind on NaNo due to more school related writing I had to do. So not that bad. It'll be easy to double up over Thanksgiving break. 

Today I wanted to write about something specific and not related to NaNo at all, though. I don't know about the rest of you but sometimes, I get something in my head and I can't let it go. Not just like I think about it and obsess about it but like I can't let it go on in my head so I have to say it out loud, either to someone or by writing it down.

I'm of the belief that this is a particularly writer-ly trait but correct me if I'm wrong. Because it feels like when I have a scene in my head that I simply have to get out because it is driving me mad. Only this is different because it's about my life and I can't just let it sit.

The problem with it being real life is that I have no control over how the other characters react. I don't know what they're thinking. I just know what I'm thinking and what I think they're thinking (that was a lot of thinking for one sentence). And I don't want to say it and have anyone look at me like I've lost my marbles. 

So do I write it down? Maybe. But it's much harder to admit uncertainty/doubt/worry/guilt when it's mine than when it's a character. But do I say it?

I haven't come up with an answer, so I guess I'll do more of that thinking thing. I've heard it works. Usually.

Four Days Left

NaNo WriMo is almost here and my big goal for today is to figure out how my story should end so I can finish up my outline for it. It's called Out of the Ashes. I wrote the first two of this trilogy the past two Novembers. This is the last one and it's going to be the best. How do I know that without having written a single word of it?

Easy. I am a better writer now than I was last year. I wrote The Stupid Book, which taught me a lot. Every story does, of course, but I learned a lot this summer. Besides, Ashes is the finale. The dramatic ending to the story of two sisters. *does excited squealing happy dance. It involves a lot of hand flailing.*

My friends, I am sorry in advance. The unique madness that comes from writing in a mad dash amid school and not being a hermit can be frightening. Especially towards the end of NaNo, when I inevitably fall behind and end up writing in a mad dash to finish before November 30. I temporarily lose the ability to think things all the way through before I say them. While it can be funny, it can also be mean. So I am sorry.

But it is a wonderful feeling, to be consumed by a story. I am never happier than when I am writing and it is going well.

Still, living with a writer who is in the midst of writing can be a challenge. Give us our space, lend a half-attentive ear when we need to vent and when we try to avoid the writing, tell us to stop being stupid and go write. Seriously.

Because the only thing harder than NaNo is not getting to 50,000 words. Trust me.