For those of you who actually click through to my whole blog, you’ll have noticed that we have a spruced up theme for the new year, complete with a breathtaking family photo from Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail for inspiration.
It’s also been a good year for progress on assorted writing projects. Aside from the 30ish letters sent this past month which included progress on my collaborative Modern Epistolary Novel Project, I’ve workshopped 20ish pages of Dragon’s Midwife with my writers’ group, and got some useful feedback that I’m eager to get back to, as soon as I finish those last few tricky climactic scenes in the first draft. (Does anyone else have trouble beating up on their favorite characters? I do!)
And finally, I also submitted a flash fiction piece to Three Minute Futures, which was good fun. Brevity is not my natural inclination, so a story in under 600 words was a great exercise. Results come out in early April.
Plans for March include finishing the Dragon’s Midwife draft and starting revisions. Hoping to have a nice thick binder of material to scribble all over on the plane to Florida!
Earlier in the month I mentioned that I’d signed up to participate in A Month of Letters, and it’s been a very enjoyable experience. I’ve had a lot of fun with all the variation possible in this challenge – hand making cards, using my old-fashioned pens & inkwells, picking out fun valentines, and using stationery I’ve been hoarding. Not to mention hunting out new mailboxes and buying fun stamps. Did you know that the USPS currently has Harry Potter stamps? They’re awesome. (Also, it turns out that there are an awful lot of sci-fi/fantasy letter writing fiends. There are Whovians and more all over the Lettermo forums!)
USPS Harry Potter stamps, subset
Challenges like this are theoretically all about the numbers (though this one has the added bonus of really fun correspondence to read!), so here are my numbers for the month:
_4_ international letters
_3_ letters with enclosed surprises
_21_ hand made cards (valentines, mostly!)
_2_ postcards
_3_ Austen-style letters, written with a dip pen and sealed with wax
_2_ fan letters
_2_ birthday cards
_1_ wedding congratulations
_2_ thank you notes
_6_ replies to correspondence from friends and Lettermo participants
_2_ new pen pals
_5_ valentines I didn’t make by hand
_3_ letters by fictional characters (counting one still to be finished)
Teeny valentines for coworkers and friends
One of my favorites was taking author Mary Robinette Kowal up on her offer to write to one of her characters. I had a blast borrowing names from further up the family tree and writing as an amateur glamourist traveling on the Grand Tour. I can’t wait to see what Lady Jane Vincent says in return!
Curious? My letter went something like this:
Sunday 16th February, 1817
To Lady Jane Vincent
Dear Madam,
I hope you will forgive the presumption I have made in writing to you without an introduction or mutual acquaintance, but I found I simply must express my deep admiration and near boundless curiosity about your remarkable work with glamour.
My name is Miss Margaret Carter, of Boston, Massachusetts. Being fortunate enough to have parents who deem travel imperative for a lady to be considered accomplished, I have been touring Great Britain and the Continent with my cousin, Miss Millicent Townsend, as extensively as events have allowed. Though I am myself but a garden variety artist – a lily of the valley, perhaps, quite far from an heirloom rose or tulip varietal – I can appreciate exemplary work when I see it. Your work on the Prince Regent’s underwater mural quite took my breath away when Minnie and I had the opportunity to view it. I could almost believe we were standing in a glass dome under the waves while the fish performed a gavotte around us.
Until such marvels are possible, which I sincerely hope they may be one day, the work you and your husband do stands in most admirably.
And here we come to my curiosity, which I hope you do not find burdensome to satisfy. First, what manner of study did you need to undertake to portray the light and movement underwater? For the fish at the market look nothing like their living counterparts, and a set of scientific prints is equally dead. And secondly, might I inquire as to the kind of knotwork you employed for their schooling? I have been attempting a small sort of glamural that incorporates moving lines of poetry, but have yet to make the words scroll as I wish, and would appreciate some hint in that direction if it is not a secret between Sir Vincent and yourself.
My thanks for the time and attention you have already given to a stranger, and please accept my best wishes for the success of your future artistic endeavours.
R2D2 mailbox from the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. Photographed in Boston by David Heiniluoma, Jr.
Despite the eternal frustration that is slow postal delivery to my neighborhood in Salem, I really love getting snail mail. There’s something really exciting about opening up the box and seeing a postcard or a letter that a digital inbox just doesn’t convey. Maybe that makes me a temporal leftover, but apparently there are a lot of people that feel the same way, one of whom is an author I admire, Mary Robinette Kowal, whose Glamourist Histories I read with great glee.
A few years ago, she started the Month of Letters challenge, wherein participants mail one piece of actual mail every day that the post office is open, for the entire month of February. It corresponds (ha!) perfectly with a month in which one would potentially be sending valentines anyway, and is a nice manageable month if one isn’t running February school vacation week programming. (Which I am, but oh well.) This year, she upped the game by offering to write a character letter back to anyone who wrote to either of her two main characters from the Austen-era Glamourist Histories, and that’s what made me decide to go for it. I probably won’t manage a letter/postcard/package a day, but there are a few people with whom I do keep up a written correspondence, and I’ve owed a few of them letters anyway (looking at you, Devlin!). Because who can turn down the opportunity for a letter from Jane, Lady Vincent? Not I.
(This is a brilliant idea, by the way, and crazy generous of her time and attention. I’m impressed.)
So if you’d like a letter/note/postcard/light shippable curiosity from me, drop me a line here and let me know! (If I don’t have your address already, you can leave it in the comments, which will be screened so it doesn’t go public.)
The following bit of fluff was written for my good friend and co-conspirator, Devlin, and rather giddily spun off our archaeological epistolary adventure. The formal excuse for writing it was a writers’ group exercise in telling a story through letters or emails, but this particular pair of highly unusual library assistants prefers to leave each other notes on the backs of discarded card catalog cards, tucked into the split between the desk and the paneling of study carrel A23.
Hazard Pay,or, Assorted notes left in Carrel A23
Dear Clara,
Have misplaced the secret entrance to the royal academy library. Please advise.
Ren
– – – – –
Dear Ren,
On alternate Thursdays it has a sudden maritime mood. Did you try looking behind the Nelson biographies?
Clara
— – – –
Dear Clara,
Tried the Nelson biographies and got doused in a wave of grog. Think it may have spread into the poetry aisle. Suggestions?
Ren
– – – – – –
Dear Ren,
Wear a raincoat next time. Also, grog’s not so bad, but don’t let Keats at the port, he gets morose and starts a several hour monologue about the nature of beauty. Whitman can usually snap him out of it, but watch out. He has wandering hands.
Clara
– – – – – –
Dear Clara,
I do not get paid enough for this. The library entrance is hiding in classical mythology again and won’t open until all the scholars that want to access it answer three riddles. I have already rescued two of them from being eaten by the sphinx carved into the end of the stacks. Also, my favorite leather jacket is now missing a sleeve. What’s next, velociraptors?
Ren
– – – – – –
Dear Ren,
I suggest swinging by the 12th century and stocking up on chain mail. Sorry to hear about your jacket, but you’re too skinny for the Indiana Jones look anyway. At least it didn’t eat your hat.
Stay away from the paleontology section until the new moon at least.
…I’m serious.
Clara
– – – – – – – –
Dear Clara,
Found your satchel halfway up the travel section. Decide to go backpacking on the Giant’s Causeway again? Hope you remembered your sweater this time. Left your satchel safely under sewing and notions. Meet me in Astronomy behind the Kuiper belt later?
Ren
– – – – –
Dear Ren,
Wondered where I’d left the satchel. It didn’t have a pocket full of rose petals when I left it, though, I don’t think. Been sipping that grog with Robbie Burns again? You don’t really need his kind of help.
And yes, but not the Kuiper belt, it’s freezing there. Last one to Verne’s complete works has to wrestle the kraken.
Clara
– – – – – – –
Dear Clara,
Joke’s on you. I brought Keats’ port to the kraken last week and now that thing thinks I walk on water. See you at 20,000 leagues.
The second draft of “Fish Girl and the Kapok Spirits” is going well, thanks to some very thoughtful comments from my raft of first-draft readers. Apparently I need to get rid of some ‘and’s, some exposition, and punch up some of the drama in the key moments. This is all extremely doable, so I’m feeling pretty good about it. Editing is really tough for me, as I suspect it is for most authors. I fall in love with a story the way it stands, and some of my favorite passages don’t neccessarily translate well out of my head and onto the paper, so I’m working on telling myself that the more I treat my short stories like my poetry, where each word has to carry more weight than its body size, the less it hurts to get rid of the ones that don’t carry their load. “Fish Girl” was already a short work for me, so finding the excess and filling out the thin spots is a definite learning experience.
Also exciting news on the modern epistolary project with the delightful exDevlin. I love collaborating with authors/friends whose style and creativity I admire, and I think this one is going to be a fascinating endeavor and hopefully a fairly unique concept. Her Clara and my Ren have the skeletons of some wonderful characters, and it’s going to be a blast working with her to flesh them out, along with the world in which they live. (I’m half-hoping to convince her to incorporate a little art into this project too, though that’s definitely a conversation for much further into the planning process.) But the good news is that this project is getting off the ground, and looking like immense fun, so stay tuned.
Sea Dreams and Time Machines 