ieva melgalve

I spent, well, most of last 27 hours playing board games (I lost miserably, but that’s not the point here, ok?). During a light six hour sleep this morning, I suddenly realized that while it is next to impossible to create a good novel out of a board game (at least the occasions when I’ve [...]

There’s this funny difference between notes I write on computer and notes I write by hand. The ones that are on the computer is something that will, at some point, evolve to a text intended for others (I’ve never been able to keep a private diary on a computer, I just can’t see the point). [...]

I just hit a slow few days in my NaNo novel (normally, I would have stopped writing altogether at this point, but not with NaNo). So at first I tried some tricks and then realized what it was really about. So the tips part. 1. Figure out whether everything is too easy, then change it [...]

The benefits of NaNoWriMo Not surprisingly, every November somebody (a lot of somebodies, actually) starts sniggering and/or demeaning the whole event. Sometimes, it’s fun and to the point (I just set this as my desktop background), sometimes it’s plain mean and condescending. So that got me thinking, not really about stopping writing but about the [...]

I have been doing well, this far, on Newil. It took a lucky combination of my night owl nature and lil one’s kindergarten that started on November 1st, so now she goes to sleep at a more predictable time, and I have an hour to write after both kids are asleep. It doesn’t sit well [...]

I have quite a bit to do at work (of various kinds) and am spending more quality time with my friends and family than usually. My writing suffers a lot from it – I haven’t done anything for almost a week. This has the most curious effect: I feel depressed, sad and lonely more often, [...]

This morning, I woke up remembering something I’d thought of while half-asleep (but when? For the past few days, I’ve been sleeping in odd times and places): Vega needs a different, more horrible ending, more to the point: a profoundly different ending, so much so that it has to be rewritten for all the characters [...]

Yesterday (well into the bittersweet celebration of finishing “all flowers must live”), I muttered (or at least loudly thought), “It is really about the fact that every time something dies inside you, you start killing things around you; and no amount of illusions is going to heal that”. Of course, I had no idea about [...]

I just had a perfect afternoon (even if slightly un-scheduled) with an Australian poet Emma Jones. Nothing beats meeting somebody and hitting it off right away. I think if I’d read any of her poems beforehand, I would have been so shy (I gather she’s a really, really good poet), so, in a way, it’s [...]

There is this point in planning, and writing, when your perception shifts, picking up more and more clues for the book you are writing. I sit in my kitchen, reading Oliver Sacks (who seems to be giving me really good pointers about the mystical part of Newil), and somebody out there, in the darkness, listens [...]