Kristin Cashore's Blog, page 26

Word treasure hunt on a square-rigged ship: What is a moonraker?

What is a moonraker? Also called a moonsail, a moonraker is the small sail, sometimes set in light winds, above the skysail.

What is the skysail? Used in a favorable light wind, it's the light sail above the royal.

What is the royal? Also used in a favorable light wind, it's the small sail above the topgallant sail.

What is the topgallant sail? It's the sail above the topsail. Sometimes divided into upper topgallant sail and lower topgallant sail (depending on the era of the ship).

What is the topsail? It's the sail above the course. Sometimes divided into upper topsail and lower topsail (depending on the era of the ship).

What is the course? The sails that hang from the lower yards of a square-rigged ship, now usually restricted to the foresail (the principal sail set on the foremast and the lowest on that mast) and mainsail (the lowest and largest sail on the mainmast, pronounced mains'l).

So, what is a moonraker? It's that tiny sail six or even eight sails up. Generally only used on tall ships built for speed. I enjoyed flipping through A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian (by Dean King with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes) to figure it out.

More info on square-rigged ships on Wikipedia.

Apocalyptica Face Paints

So, my sister, codename: Apocalyptica the Flimflammer, has given me permission to share some more of her face painting. Please note that she owns these pictures; feel free to link to them but please do not gank them.



Barn.
Blue jay.


I asked Apocalyptica why she likes to face paint. She said a lot of interesting things in response, and I thought the following bit might resonate with the writers in my audience:

"...And I do it because it's such a challenge to take an image in my head and put it on a body, because there's all this stuff in the way...eyebrows and noses and a mouth, and the surface curves and won't cooperate...usually I start out with a certain inspiration and then I actually start to work with the body and it completely commandeers my process. Like that caribou I painted was supposed to be a scrabble board, but my leg objected. And the fruit bat was originally going to be a floral pattern based on a piece of fabric I bought. So I like being limited by the odd surfaces a body provides, because it produces surprises and there's a built-in respect for the body as the boss of the mind instead of the other way around. But it's also extremely frustrating. I am sometimes quite happy with my final product, but the first half of the process is normally awful and I feel like I will never make it work and I should just give up and take a shower."

(The caribou.)
(The fruit bat.)
Also, a passenger pigeon. And for the grand finale....
Here's a picture of an actual
Malayan snail-eating turtle...
and here's Apocalyptica.
Thanks, sis, for sharing your pictures and your process :o).

Kittens! And Other Links for a Wednesday Evening

YOU GUYS. Over at Written? Kitten!, every time you write one hundred words, YOU GET A PICTURE OF A KITTEN. (Thanks, S!)

Over at Teen Librarian Toolbox, I really like the post "Dear Media, Let me help you write that article on YA literature." It begins, "Recently, there have been a voluminous number of articles written about YA literature. And they are mostly wrong. So if you are a member of the press and given this assignment, I thought I would help you out a little.  But first, let me start by telling you why I am, in fact, qualified to help you out. Credentials are important, something these articles always seem to lack..." (Thanks, R!)

As a companion to her recent blog post, "Some things to consider when writing fat characters," Rebecca Rabinowitz has written "Some things to think about when writing thin characters."

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Pardon me for a minute while I copy and paste everything I've written in this blog post so far and GO GET ME A KITTEN.

*flops*

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Okay, I'm back. Over at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, I like Cathy Butler's "Sir Gradgrind and the Great Amphibium; or, a Peripatetic Defence of Fantasy."

On my writing desk:


And my plan for the evening:


Happy Wednesday :o)

Street Art in Amsterdam

Rebecca Stead texted me this picture she took near a canal somewhere-or-other in Amsterdam (I have explained before about the sense of direction we both share) with the comment that it immediately struck her as a topless Graceling cover. Publishers: get on it.

The Most Commonly-Spoken Language in Each USA State Besides Spanish and English

I really like this map! (Thanks, B.) Super interesting.


From mentalfloss.com. Image credit: Ben Blatt/Slate.

Also, for them that's interested, the other day, to my astonishment, I wrote two and a half pages. Or, as I emailed to a particular group of interested friends, "tuna half pages." There are certain dictation errors that I encounter so frequently that at a certain point I give up correcting them and they enter our lexicon as a kind of code. My correspondents, who are usually not dictating, use them as much as I do. (And now I've remembered one of my favorite (of my own) blog posts, about dictation errors, angst, and Prufrock ^_^.)

I wish you all well on this Wednesday.

Scrabble Complaint, Stuff, and Things

Graceling now exists in Norwegian. Yay! ----->

Published by Cappelen Damm and translated by Carina Westberg, whose excellent translation questions spurred my recent post about how Seabane Isn't Real.

This is another randutiae post. Ready?
I really like Rebecca Rabinowitz's short post called Some things to consider when writing fat characters.Some recent words my Scrabble app has rejected: Bearthin. Adjective. The particular degree of thinness of a bear coming out of hibernation. Trocheey. Adjective. Adjectival form of "trochee." Meowlion. Noun. Really, isn't every lion a meowlion? Evebait. Noun. Perhaps a sexist synonym for "apple." Unshovel. Verb. Arguably if a walk is unshoveled, someone or something has unshoveled it. I would go so far as to say I've spent entire mornings unshoveling the walk. I did recently have the satisfaction of changing "otter" to "garotter," but I lament the lack of style points in Scrabble. I feel, and have always felt, that it should be more like figure skating, in which the technical and the artistic scores are combined. And you should be able to argue your opponents into accepting words that aren't really words but should be. That is the kind of Scrabble people play in heaven.My sister, codename: Apocalyptica the Flimflammer, sent me the link to this really lovely video about a woman in Japan named Ayano Tsukimi who makes life-sized dolls of people in her village who have died or moved away, then sets them up around town.Writing update: I continue to write at least one page a day of the new book. It continues to be awful. Last night, a friend asked me specifically what I meant by that, and with his help, I determined that (1) the book itself is awful, (2) the experience of writing the book is awful, and (3) awful things are happening to the people in the book. We did determine that the people themselves aren't awful. I guess that's something (though it does make it worse that awful things are happening to them). :)

Friday Randutiae

An unexpected change in my weekend plans leaves me with some time this afternoon for blogging a bit of randutiae...
My dear friend Amanda MacGregor recently wrote a piece for Modern Loss about what happens when the experience of traumatic loss collides with the way we use social media. She writes that following the sudden death of her father, "Thanks to social media, his death was old news by the time I found out about it." This piece brings up some questions it would benefit us to think about – like, what is lost when a person who's grieving doesn't even have the privilege of telling their own bad news? Check it out.At School Library Journal, Lauren Barack has written a great piece called "LGBTQ & You: How to Support Your Students," about the importance of the school library to the young LGBTQ community. That smiling library assistant in the photo is, in fact, my dear friend Amanda MacGregor, who wrote the Modern Loss piece – she is just popping up everywhere, that lady :o). Amanda is one of a number of library assistants and librarians interviewed in the piece.If you've been around my blog for a while, you may remember that in times past I flew through the air with a touch of unease, the daring young lass on the flying trapeze. In case my mother is reading this, don't worry, Mom, this isn't a segue to the announcement that I'm on the flying trapeze again. My feet are firmly planted on the ground. However, my dear darling trapeze school, TSNY Beantown, currently situated in the Jordan's Furniture entertainment complex in Reading, is looking for a new home! Do you know of anyone in the greater Boston area who might have a suitable space for an indoor trapeze rig and an interest in supporting the aerialist arts? If so, please contact Christine De Souza or Hailey Dodge at TSNY Beantown, 781-942-7800 or bostoffice@trapezeschool.com. TSNY Beantown provides something extraordinary and unique.My time is up so that's it for today, but here's what I'm looking at on my desk these days:

#WeNeedDiverseBooks

Check out the conversation, today through Saturday: #WeNeedDiverseBooks

Here some ways to participate: http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/post/83943947418/we-need-diverse-books-campaign

Here's the Tumblr: http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/

Just for a taste, here are some wonderful entries coming from the Oakland library (thanks Sarah!): https://twitter.com/oaklibrary

The We Need Diverse Books Campaign; Also, Writing Frustration

I want to start by boosting the signal for a series of online events about to take place in support of diversity in children and YA's literature. This is partly in response to the recent BookCon debacle you can read about here, but also stems from a lot of recent and growing online conversation about the appalling lack of diversity in the field. The online events will take place over three days, starting May 1, and more info is at the WeNeedDiverseBooks tumblr. Visit the site, make a sign, get involved, spread the word.

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So, I've mentioned I'm starting a new book. Care to know how it's going? I'LL TELL YOU. Starting this book is like someone's walked up to me and said, "Hi there. We've decided it's your job to build a zoo. Here are your materials," then buried me under a mountain of sand, let a few tigers loose, and walked away. Or something. See, this is the type of imagery I'm coming up with. I AM HAVING A TERRIBLE TIME. For example, today I have been "about to start writing" for approximately 8 hours. I haven't managed a single word. And I know it's not over, because yesterday, recognizing what was going on, I made a rule that I have to write at least one page every day. Today isn't over until I write that one page.

What happens if I don't write the one page? Nothing in particular – I don't punish myself, and I don't even generally make progress rules like this unless nothing else is working – but here's the thing. The only way for me to start to feel like I'm writing a book that means anything is to get some words on the page -- enough words that I start to sense what this thing is now that it's on the page. I know what it is when it's off the page. I feel good about my book plan. But when I try to turn the book plan into words on the page, those words don't feel like my book plan, they feel like nothing, like I've stepped into this dimension of nothing. The only way for them to start feeling like something is for me to keep choosing to step into that nothing and add more words.

If I don't write one page today, it means I've added one day to however long I'm going to feel like this. Which would be crummy. Whereas, if I write the one page, even if it's stiff and awkward and not at all what I'm aiming for (which is likely), I will experience the relief of knowing that I'm one day closer to leaving this feeling of nothingness behind.

One trick I like to employ when this happens is to wait until late in the day to start writing. At least that way, I don't waste the entire day imagining that I'm about to start writing. Once the day is getting near its end, I HAVE to write, so I do. Hypothetically. I didn't think to do this today, but it's on the agenda for tomorrow.

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A final note, written a couple of hours later: I am relieved to report that I wrote my one page.

Notes from the Writing Room

A friend, knowing my usual one-book-at-a-time writing mode and understanding that at the moment, I'm working on three books, asked me if I've adopted a new way of working. The answer is no. I'm writing books the same way I always have. I start at the beginning of a book and write it through to the end. Then that book moves into the revision stage; over the course of however-long, my editor and I pass it back and forth and I revise it several times. While a book is in the revision stage, there are extended periods of time when either it's with my editor or we are giving it some needed space. During that time, I start the next book and write it through to the end. Rinse and repeat.

The reason I have three books in the works at the moment is that I wrote the first draft of one of them – the first one – really fast, but the revisions are going really really slowly. In the meantime, I've written a second book that's now also in revisions and is probably going to overtake the first book. I just handed a revision of the second book in to my editor and she and I are agreed that it's not yet time for me to take another crack at revising the first book. (Every book needs something different. That book needs a LOT of space.) So I'm starting the next book (#3) and intend to write it through to the end. :o)

For them that like numerical breakdowns: At any given time, I'm really only working on one book. For weeks or even months, one of the books will be my primary focus while I'm merely gathering information for the other two. Things come and go in waves. Back in May, I wrote a post about what my workday looked like and what my work life looked like at the time. Back then, about 85% of my energies were going to revising the first book, 14.5% of my energies were going toward planning the third book, and 0.5% of my energies were going toward the second book, which I'd just completed a draft of and was trying not to think about. Today, this week, and this month, I would say that 97% of my energies are going toward planning and starting the third book, 2.5% of my energies are going toward collecting feedback from readers about the most recent draft of the second book, and 0.5% of my energies, also known as "as little as possible," are going toward the first book, because it needs space. This pattern will probably hold until my editor gives me feedback for the second book, at which point I will need to switch my focus to its next revision. I am usually able to bring a project to a good stopping point before switching from one to the other; I usually have a sense of what's on the horizon.

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The new book I'm starting is a book I've been planning for years. Planning is fun and exciting but as I begin to near the actual writing, I am often filled with a sense of dread. This is because I've done this enough times now that I know what's ahead. Beginnings are the hardest part of a book for me. For weeks and weeks and months, I make little progress, my characters don't feel real to me, I can't figure out who they actually are, my plot feels stupid and hopeless, and I'm constantly overwhelmed by the weight of all the pages I haven't written yet. These feelings are not due to low self-esteem or pessimism; I would bet I'm going to be very happy with the book in the end. They're merely due to the realities of writing. You spend a lot of time at the beginning struggling to get out of the primordial muck, or at least, I do. That's just the way it is, and it's helpful to understand that it's just the way it is, but it doesn't make it fun to be stuck there.

I told some friends that now that I have all my ideas together, I wish I could just wave a wand at the ideas and the book would appear; instead, I will dive into this months-long, useless-feeling muddle. One of my friends, also writing a book, responded that she didn't know what I was talking about. According to these people she follows on Twitter, it only takes them three weeks to write a novel and the novel is amazing. Snorts all around. It's true that at this point in the writing, I tend to be hopeful and perhaps a bit over-optimistic (I need to be, or else I would never begin!), but at least I'm not delusional. I know perfectly well that a year from now, I will probably still be writing the first draft, and once I'm done with the first draft, when I look upon it, I will see that while parts of it are, in fact, exactly what I hoped they would be, other parts are a big steaming pile of crap. AS THEY SHOULD BE. First drafts are exactly that: drafty, and meant to be followed by more attempts.

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As I begin, I am collecting and consolidating all the little planny-comments I've been jotting down for years in a couple of different notebooks, on random slips of paper, and on my phone. I'm reminded that one should really be quite explicit when jotting down ideas for a book one will probably not be writing for a long time. Today I encountered the helpful note, "Remember the Bolsheviks!!!" Apparently I was very excited when I jotted this down. There were several exclamation points. Regrettably, I have since completely forgotten the Bolsheviks (nor does the book take place in Russia) so I have no idea what I meant by that. Another comment said, "Putting aside what doesn't matter, to push away what doesn't matter. Is this what I'm looking for?" Um. It's kind of hard to tell?

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By the end of my workday today, my new book plan was hanging radiantly on the wall (mounted on my usual handmade cloth bulletin board). I took a few pictures and sent them to a few concerned parties. See for yourself: my book plan looks like a badly-played game of Tetris. This is appropriate, as it sort of feels that way, too… fun and exciting, while infused with panic and a sense of doom.


And so it begins.

Godspeed to all writers :o)