ieva melgalve

So. At the first glance, St.Petersburg really screwed my writing because for the whole 3 days I wrote nothing useful and Monday wasn’t better. I sincerely hope that I’ll recover today (but don’t count on it). But it was the first time I used metro. I also spent several hours scribbling unrelated notes in my [...]

Have you been pondering what new and exciting could you write (while procrastinating on your WIP that has stalled a bit)? Well, I hope you haven’t, but I have. So I found an excellent site for instant prompts in all genres, all styles imaginable. It’s an upcoming deadline tracker from Duotrope’s Digest. Funny, serious, queer [...]

These days when I am in self-imposed silence on Vega, are eerily productive. I slacked around most of the day and then I wrote a crit long overdue and thought a bit about that YA novel I intend to write for NaNo. I dropped by their forums and found some “if you don’t know everything [...]

I don’t know whether I ever had a dream like this; I opened a book written for me and read a host of those “inspiring” quotes, and every one of them said, keep writing, keep exploring, there is something to be found and that something is so beautiful.

long time no see. I even thought you’ve lost me. Could you uncover your face? Tell me where it hurts? I know it hurts, I know I bleed, but I don’t know where have you wounded me. If I knew, I could put a patch on it, stitch it up, put it down. Are you [...]

I am surprised and delighted how stuff from my childhood… or, sometimes, the present-that-feels-like-childhood seeps into the story, rendering it richer, at least for me. Today, it was heather, one of my favorite wild flowers, and heatherbell honey my father recently brought for kids – it is very dark, rich brown and tastes more bitter [...]

Whenever I start writing somewhat deeper than the upper-professional-cool level, there is this fragile being from my childhood coming up, peering through the icy layer of my everyday self. That tiny thing that is prone to crying and prone to feeling sad and lonely, that little one who needs to be touched but has no [...]

A week ago or so, one of Latvian news agencies released an article mentioning “Evil Bank” (they misspelled a name of Evli bank and never corrected it). This got me wondering about Evil Bank – well, not exactly the taking-away-your-mortgaged-house one (this would be so overdone) but a Bank of Evil. Imagine, if you could [...]

Yesterday late, my daughter crawled in the bed and fed me a handful of Haribo bears. I chewed them slowly, thinking that people love Haribo candies because they are like human souls: for a while, you can chew them and they spring back to normal with only light scarring (but if you put enough force [...]

Today, this is what I am listening to. I’ve been humming this song for years, and for years I have felt that it’s a great gap in my cultural education that I hadn’t even heard one of most precious (or so they said) Latvian musical pieces, “Melancholic Waltz” by Emīls Dārziņš. This morning, clicking away [...]