ieva melgalve

My short story, The Siren’s Song (complete with a Latvian translation for the mighty audience of Latvian readers) is now published in A Cappella Zoo Spring 2010 issue. It’s a magazine of magical realist & experimental writing. Go ahead and purchase it if you can afford it–judging by this review, the short stories and poems [...]

I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while. First, NaNoWriMo. Some days, I didn’t have enough words to write a letter, much less a blog entry. When I did, I rather wrote a letter. The good news is that I got my words done on a steady pace, and I’ll get the 50K by the [...]

Yesterday, I scrapped all Chapter 11 words (not that there were many) on a premise that “that was just too boring”. The realization that it’s dead boring kicked in when I started procrastinating by making edits to Siren’s Song. I mean HELLO, me and editing out of free will?

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 [...]

Vega got 697 words with a lead for today, so it’s fine. I’m trying not to dwell on how far behind on my weekly goal I was: today, a new week starts, and I hope it’ll be a productive one. Even with the things I must do to keep my RL moving forward… I need [...]

I spent most of my day editing The Mermaid (who is siren now). How comes I always have to make a violent cut? In this case, the ending was cut altogether and replaced with something very different. Oh well. (I’m too exhausted to think right now.) I guess I’ll still tweak something when I pick [...]

I’m at some breathtaking point in my writing where I feel my head spinning and for the third day in a row, I’m promising myself not to write today and give myself a break. Yea right. Well, zero words written this far. However what I promised myself was doing some outlining and some rounding-up of [...]

Today I finally called one of my old friends. Here’s a snippet: – Listen, you’d know… can somebody die of epilepsy, and can her doctor be sure she’ll die in given amount of time? – Ummm, I don’t think so. You don’t die from epileptic fits unless it’s an accident. – No? But I found [...]

Being loved is all right as a motivation to succeed; but well, let’s face it, people who love me will not change their feelings just because I succeed (or fail). Besides, success is a big scary thing and not every big scary thing does you good. Being hated is way more powerful; people expecting (and [...]

This is how the Wordle for my story-in-editing, Mermaid’s Song (yea, the title will most likely get edited too), looks from wordle point of view. I’m just going to edit half of the just‘s out and see if I can find better words for those nondescript ones that keep repeating. No thesaurus-bonking, just a little [...]