writing skills/profession

Muses, Inspiration and Actually Writing


“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” -Madeline L’Engle (author of A Wrinkle in Time).

night-dogs

I created this mock cover from a photo I took of our backyard but I didn’t use my pen name. I am not ready to unveil it. The title is working only, but the inspiration comes from the area I live in and from Rob’s work.

I never wonder if I was meant to be exactly where I am or if I could have written as I am had my life not taken the many different turns that is has over the last decade. I don’t wonder because I know that I would not be writing if they had not. Oh, maybe little things. Possibly professional papers even. But the fiction would never have developed to the point where it is and sometimes it is so good that it even impresses me.

I am about 130 or so posts from 1000 I realized the other day. A 1000 posts is a lot of blogging. I am toying with the idea of hanging it up when I hit it and coming back in another form. What would depend on where I am at professionally and personally, but I feel a change coming. 

In the meantime, where I am, what I read and some of you, gentle readers, continue to inspire me.

Friday


I am too tired to properly update on the holiday. In fact, I hadn’t any real plans to post live again until June, but a lot is going on and this usually drives me to write.

First, I have a pen name. It came to me after much thought and back/forth right before we left for the mountains. It combines a distinctly family name, which is also my dad’s middle name, with my maiden name. I will unveil it when I have my author’s website completed and up, but I am pleased with it.

The idea for a pen name for my fiction writing self has been stirring around for a while in my mind, but a speaker at the writing conference I attended finally provided me with a tangible reason to write under more than one name. Branding. When I am Ann or anniegirl, people who read are sure of what they are getting, but my fiction is dark, twisted and not particularly mainstream in a chick lit or even a straight high-brow lit kind of way. Therefore, my alias will brand my fiction. Readers will know what they are getting.

Second, we arrived home to yet another job offer for Rob. The same job he has been offered twice before – the long term project that would have taken us to Houston is now beckoning from England.

“How many times does opportunity have to knock?” Rob asked.

And I agreed. I read Paulo Coelho’s Brida and The Alchemist over holiday (along with three other books – I was tearing up the pages) and the second book deals almost entirely with following the signs the universe will show those who make their wants, needs or desires known to it. Coelho wrote an interesting fable about listening, trusting and having faith in one’s personal legend.

I don’t know that this job is Rob’s personal legend, but I have felt for a while that it is a sign and a step towards it. But more on it as it develops.

Finally, illness stalks the family once again. Rob’s younger brother was in the ICU as of Sunday night. He is chronically ill and had taken a turn. He will not live to be an old man and probably not a middle-aged one either (he is sixteen years younger than Rob) and though it isn’t a surprise, and Rob and he are estranged, it is unsettling. And it is a reminder.

On my side of the family, Nephew1 is quite ill. Deteriorating lung disease (or syndrome – it’s hard to know because my youngest sister was conveying the information and she is not bright). The doctors had been treating his breathing difficulties as asthma for a while but it turns out incorrectly.

“They told me I could die, Grandma,” is what he told my mother.

We may be making a trip to Iowa this summer after all.

The Fine Line


Found a wonderful discussion via Dawn at She is Too Fond of Books a while back about whether or not authors are morally responsible for their characters. While the morality part is a bit silly, in my opinion, it brings up the fine line of whether or not I, as an author, borrow too much from my real life. 

It would be fair to say that since moving to Alberta, many of my story settings have taken on local and regional themes, and that my characters are different aspects of me. Who I was. Who I am. Who I would like to be. Rob can attest that he is most definitely the inspiration for my male protagonists. He is my muse and, fortunately, he is okay with that.

There is that little disclaimer on works of fiction that says something like “any resembelance to persons living or dead is strictly a coincidence” and I have always felt that they are bullshit. I don’t know how a writer cannot leech from their own lives even when writing fiction. Our imaginations are the sum of us. Or mine is anyway. I guess I shouldn’t speak for all writers.

My current novel is more than a little bit borrowed from life. The setting is where I live. The characters have their genesis in Rob and I and people I know through my daily life. Naturally, I have stretched and redrawn, but the faint outlines remain. 

The memoir is, of course, based on reality but there is an air of creation to it because it filters through my perception and memories have a way of embellishing themselves with no help at all.

So people expect fiction to be completely fresh without taint from the author’s life? Are there writers who can do that?