ieva melgalve

Yesterday, I was to my local NaNo kick-off party. Our ML & friends had done a magnificent job, making a lot of giveaway presents (I especially love the calendar for November and can’t wait to look at the quotes in the little pockets).
Also, I had a nightmare tonight, reminding me that the Bloodless are actually (by all parameters) devils, so there I was, trying to draw any and all holy symbols I could on my door in order to scare them away. Also, it seems that I can still recite Lord’s Prayer by heart, at least if I’m scared out of my wits in a dream. Go figure.

Today, I’ll do my best to be a decent mom, cook something tasty for my family etc.
And figure out some little details about NaNo writing technique. I’ll get to that.

I’ve done almost zero planning for more than a week, but at least I am at the very happy stage of getting ready for writing when everything seems to contribute to the novel.
Ie yesterday I stumbled upon transhumanism, which seems to pretty much deal with the main conflicts in Newil. (I am, yet again, dumbfounded by the fact that despite this being a prominent movement and right into my line of interest, I hadn’t heard about transhumanism before. I am trying to convince myself that it’s due to vastness of information out there, not my own denseness.)
I don’t have any conclusions about the whole transhumanism thing. My guess is that, like most social movements, it is advocated by geniuses and self-serving, arrogant jerks, as well as genius self-serving arrogant jerks, and it would take a bit of time to tell them apart. For now, I’m satisfied with them posing good questions (and giving funny answers to them as a bonus).

Today, I was really glad that I’d already bought a pencil to replace the one my son has used up (my guess is that he’s chewed off 2/4 of it and wrote less than 1/4, but yeah), and a heap of stickers for NaNoWriMo (the smart part of me says “come on, you don’t need *stickers* to motivate yourself to do your daily writing goal, but it’s the silly part who chose to go for NaNoWriMo again, so my guess is that the silly part will be the one doing the actual writing while the smart part goes silently bonkers)…
(pause for breath)
..anyhow, so I head out of the shop and see the Moleskine 2011 calendars and I’m so glad that I’d been to the cash register once and it would seem stupid to return a minute later with another purchase, besides I still have to decide whether to go with my beloved Pocket Daily Black cover (the one that has served me well this year) or probably the Red cover one (I don’t like the color though) or that cute but (for me) impractical Mini calendar. If they had Mini Daily calendars, I would probably succumb… but looking at some days when my to-do lists take all the page, probably not.

I will keep using my Pocket reporter’s book for long-term planning though (I have devised a system to plan somewhat realistically over longer stretch of time).

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, even though I actually communicate with people more. I would think that writing is a drug for me but… is it really something I am “addicted” to, a sort of psychological flaw? Or is it that we all tend to feel worse when deprived of something that is important to us in the deepest sense? Or probably it’s both; the long habit of writing something every day (and feeling bad about not doing it), and the lack of fulfillment that only writing can deliver?

November is coming though, and even though I feel tempted to chicken out of NaNoWriMo, I know very well that this is the way I normally feel during the last two weeks of October. Of course I’ll be there, and I’ll be writing. Perhaps even more hungrily than I normally do.

Working in advertising has its benefits. One of the most pronounced is a skill I didn’t have before: the ability to come up with a workable idea within pre-determined boundaries in a short amount of time.
Today, I met a comic artist who would very much like to draw something (but not a 180-page monster like Flowers, which I fully understand); we talked about what he’d like to draw, and here I am, two hours later, with a story that fits all the parameters and probably even fits the length he thought would be good for starters (around 30-40 pages). The length of the thing is the only criteria I am not certain of, having zero experience with actual comics (ie finished ones, not just a bulky script). If I’m really really good, I might finish it until November. Provided this slight fever I’ve been developing turns into a normal “working from home” illness, not an “unable to work on anything except my last will which seems really necessary at this point” thing.
I even have the title of the comic. “The Orb of Dreams.” Yeah, slightly cheesy, but hey, gotta name it something for the purposes of tagging it.

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 to earn it. (I’m not saying “deserve”, but “earn”: to touch deeper, to revolt, to create questions instead of shrugs). I have just a vague idea of what this ending would be and how would they arrive to that, but my guess is that the answer is already hidden within the story, it needs to be excavated carefully.

And instead of light fantasy (“lots of stuff happen but everything ends well because people are decent beings”) it should be dark fantasy, possibly even horror (“given the nature of people, the only miracle I know of is that we are able to get by without eating each others’ brains for breakfast”). Probably adding more POVs, more sex (wouldn’t be that hard, considering there was no sex in the original version), more death, more betrayal and sorrow.
The dream has ended, babes, and the fun will now commence.

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 that when I started writing the story. Also, this simple summary doesn’t fit the story precisely; and you would probably have to be either immersed in the story or slightly drunk, or both, to draw this conclusion. But it’s a simple semi-philosophical idea that is, very literally, expressed in the story, and seems true to me as well: true, just like “flowers” feel true.

So here’s what I think about a story and it’s philosophy (word “philosophy” being rather loose here):
1. You don’t have to have this philosophical morale in the beginning to have it in a finished piece (and, probably, for some writers it is better not to have it).
2. Any story that feels true, most likely, has this philosophical thing in the background. (You do know that feeling of a “true” story–the one that makes you think that this actually happened, even if it clearly hasn’t.)
3. Genre, style and plot, the presence or absence of it, doesn’t matter at all. You can have an action-packed thriller that clearly has deeper roots even if you don’t dig for them (I’m thinking of Jeff Abbott’s “Fear” here, but could be many other authors), and you can have highbrow literary fiction so shallow that a mouse wouldn’t drown in it.

This morning, I finally wrote the final two pages of Flowers. I rather like the ending (with a gently jarring, unfulfilled note), and all in all I am obviously way too happy about this comic. Especially considering that I have little idea what to do with it later.
But for now, celebrate! (With another long, long day at work, I guess.)

Here we go. The past week is catching up on me eventually, and I have very little choice in what to do. I guess my mode of operation will be “to hang on until I can’t hang on any more and see what happens then”. This has actually worked quite fine before, so probably it’ll be OK.
Flowers are approaching the finale slowly (I have two pages left, and they seem to stretch forever now). But it feels like a good, solid work this far, so I’m quite happy with it.
Planning isn’t going as planned. (Horrible pun intended.) It seems that I either have to figure out a good way to plan a culture without bogging it down with unnecessary details (ie details that have no emotional resonance in me, or any relevance to the story), or just switch back to character planning which seemed to give me good ideas.
Also, there’s that writers’ group I have to attend to. So the very necessary time off will have to wait.

My Trusted reader and friend Russell arrived in Riga on Friday, and this is the first day when I actually have enough time and energy to post something. He’s just as great in person as in e-mails and Skype (really, need I have worried?).
Also, I have almost finished the Flowers (will restart working on it on Monday), and it’s time for more plotting for Newil. I updated my profile with the novel synopsis (which isn’t that good yet, but might help me to remember what I actually wanted to write about). (And it’s so late already! Guess it’s the time to figure out where to put the kids while I’m working.)