ieva melgalve

I’m working steadily on my NaNoWriMo novel, and here’s one thing that I think I have learned from writing Vega: I am less afraid to confront my characters with the reality of my novel’s world. I think that I myself am always a bit reluctant to press on the reality, question it, study it harder. [...]

Now, when I finally started writing my NaNoWriMo novel, I found out that having short chapters is way more inspiring for accumulating wordcount. Telling to myself “I added wrote 1200+ words to a chapter that I’ll finish a day after tomorrow if all goes well” doesn’t sound as good as “I wrote chapter 9 today”. [...]

NaNoWriMo has started for me an hour ago. Two hours ago, I didn’t have a clue what to do. I thought I knew the first scene, but after that, everything was blank. Then, I sat down to sort my wordcount sheet and suddenly realized that I have to start earlier in the story, and suddenly, [...]

I’ve spent several days not caring much about whether I do what I’m supposed to or not, and it’s been catching up on me, slowly and politely at first, like an avalanche. I get some things done but out of my priority list, I haven’t resubmitted the story I think would be fine for resubmitting [...]

After the slacking weekend, I am currently working on: – rewising a story, – a non-fiction article, – another short story I’m really excited about. I’m a bit confused about NaNoWriMo plotting because the software just doesn’t feel like the perfect solution for outlining, but I don’t have a better solution. I’m strongly considering index [...]

When I was a child, I had a theory. The theory went that all the events in the world were pre-determined (I don’t remember whether it was by God or by causality, or by a weird combination of both) and the only thing that we can alter is our perception of these things, our attitude. [...]

This has been a big day for me. I wrote a lot, especially the Keyman (who won’t be Keyman after all, but that’s beside the point), and did some 500+ words on Vega, and arrived at the short sharp understanding of what my NaNoWriMo novel will really be about, something that has bugged me for [...]

Yesterday, I met a Latvian writer friend (well, he’s actually a poet but he is considering writing prose once he “figures out how”) and we shared a half an hour or hour in a mutual “oh and I read this book, it’s a *bible*, I tell you” and “I’ll give you that one to read, [...]

On public transportation, it seems that working on a netbook is the best choice (because it’s easy to prop it on my bag and I can forget about the fact that I’m in a tram until somebody starts leaning over my shoulder and begging me to type faster because he has to get off soon… [...]

The name of this post comes from that yucky cold and gray thing that was attached to kids’ magazine. I never gave it to kids (it’s too gross and, most likely, dangerous to the lil one) but today, I ended up playing with it for ten minutes or so, shuddering with perverse pleasure. I just [...]