Jennifer Freitag's Blog, page 4

Plenilune Colour Collage || Gold

Installment number two of my Plenilunar colour series...you'll notice below that I've done scarlet & I'm skipping orange.  Personally, I dislike the colour orange in most of its combinations + arrangements: it's literally the ginger stepchild of the colour spectrum.  Okay, hatin' on orange aside, orange is collected under the scarlet heading in Plenilune; there isn't so much hue differentiation there as we have here, so if you happen to really, really like orange, go back + read my scarlet post. 

(plenilune novel in kindle + paperback, via amazon)

usual disclaimer, all images used are from pinterest & none of them belong to me.  art is all about sharing, right??

|| GOLD ||

Gold.  Rich, opulent, & in high demand among anyone who is anyone in the Honours.  Gold is typically worn, whether as jewellery or goldwork embroidery, & is not usually made into things.  In the ancient world, if you didn't cut your wine with water, you were considered an alcoholic; in the Honours, if you start decking your halls with groaning tons of goldware, you're often considered tacky.  Gold retains its charm with rarity, & Honourfolk are aware of this.

the gemmy bridle glitter'd free,like to some branch of stars we seehung in the golden galaxy.the bridle bells rang merrilyas he rode down from camelot...
Gold is considered a good-omen metal, a physical embodiment of the element fire; as the "meteor" of colours, it can represent any of the twelve heavenly houses + their associated aspects of life, with the exception of the House of the Two Dolphins (which is associated with water + death, so not really gold's speed, you know?).

In my writing, I find that I use gold to evoke emotion as well as visual impression.  Memories + feelings are frequently elicited into the foreground of our awareness by something as simple as a particular scent (dior j'adore perfume always reminds me of one of my aunts, her house, & the early desire to be pretty + fanciful); colour can do the same thing, especially (I find) through writing it, which bypasses the eyes & goes straight to the mind, & isn't hindered by any material image.  I can link gold with a sense of richness,  a sense of nostalgia, a feeling of energy just on the verge of being kinetic...  Mercury's colour is quick to carry any notion I like.

share your thoughts!

Do you use gold?  Does gold represent anything special in your writing?  Tell us what you think!  If you make your own colour post, please link to it in the comments so we can all enjoy it!
HOW TO COLLAGE || I use the LAYOUT app with images saved off PINTEREST. That way I can arrange them however I want, & presto! I have a pretty collage. That's honestly all there is to it.

thank you so much for reading! i hope you enjoyed it.  see you soon!xoxo, jenny

Plenilune Colour Collage || Scarlet

If you follow me on Instagram, you know I love making layout collages of images.  It's an easy form of art & everyone seems to enjoy the results, so I've decided to harness the fun & run the colour spectrum, this time highlighing the world of my novel Plenilune + its accompanying stories.  Yes, I love monochrome, but my novels are where the colour's at.

(new to plenilune? check it out on amazon in kindle + honkin' fat paperback!)

just as a normal disclaimer, i want to point out that all of these images are on pinterest, & none of them belong to me.  i'm just borrowing their plumage.  enjoy!

|| SCARLET ||

Not a cheap dye to manufacture, scarlet is a potent status symbol, but it is also a visible expression of the choleric temperament, representing passion, energy, + power.  In Plenilune, it is prominently associated with the first + tenth houses, of Mars + Capricorn, & is subsequently linked with personal ambition + patriarchal responsibility. (Astrology is a real deal with these folks.) 

Scarlet is a life colour, & possibly one of my personal favourites to crop up in my writing.  It is vibrant, potent, + symbolically vivid.  Yes, I love to be monochrome, but I'm scarlet on the inside. (Love it or hate it, my writing has never been called drab!)  Even though I write prose (with the occasional dubious foray into poetry), I love the way poetry can lead you through a series of colour sensations, & I work hard to do the same with my prose.  In Plenilune, scarlet is one of the boldest colours to leap off the page, & I love it! 

share your colours!

There are more colours to come, but I'm curious to see what colours you utilize in your writing.  You can do the whole spectrum with images, or maybe just highlight a few favourites.  (It's also a helpful way to see which colours you tend to leave out, eh heh...)  
HOW TO  ||  I'm sure there are lots of ways to create these collages; mine is probably not the most efficient but OH WELL.  I use the LAYOUT app with images saved off PINTEREST.  That way I can arrange them however I want, & presto! I have a pretty collage.  That's honestly all there is to it.

i hope you enjoyed, & i'll see you next time!xoxo, jenny

My Highly Lucrative Way to Ring In the New Year

2016
For those of us of the internet generation, it's been a crazy year across the board.  Politics + pop culture have seen some insane disruptions which leave us youngsters scratching our heads.  And then many of our personal lives have experienced what seem like abnormally large setbacks too (it could just be the PMS effect, though: everything bad seems to wait to strike during PMS, & is magnified tenfold by hormones...).


I never have the urge to relive a year.  I'm usually scuttling in panic to get as far away from the last as possible - 2016 is no exception.  Lots of stress, lots of anxiety, lots of physical + mental pain.  No year comes without those, but 2016 seems to have been given a double portion.

so you can imagine my delight + relief to be able to close out the old year + ring in the new with such a wonderful culmination of 2016's agonizing, everlasting waiting

Roughly 3:30 New Year's Eve morning, Wolfgang Aleksandr plopped into the world.  I've got lots of funny, gross stories - like my water breaking basically like an enormous + hilariously-timed water balloon - but I'll try to keep those to a minimum.  Despite carrying nearly twice the weight I had with Filigree, Wolfgang turned out to be only three ounces heavier than his sister.  (I don't even know, you guys.  I don't even know.)  But that means my physical damage has been minimal, & my recovery is trucking along beautifully.

Mr. Squishy-face Wolfgang I is also doing very well.  There's a lot to learn when one is only a few days old, but he's managing.  He'll probably get to the last lawn cut of the season by next week.  Well, we might let it slide this once, since he was so obliging as to come inside of 2016 & provide us with an immediately viable tax deductible.  XD 

here's to being done waiting, here's to that new-baby smell, here's to squishy kisses + a brand new year

// obligatory squishy-face photos of the cubling <3
xoxo, jenny

December Wrap-Up & Excerpts

Thankfully, this December has not been like the last two.  On the whole, it has been enjoyable, maybe not productive, but not completely lacking in creativity (I wrapped 108 presents because I said I wasn't going to help other people wrap this year & I never keep my promises to myself...).

Christmas is over, & here we are in the latter days of the year + my pregnancy.  I am huge.  No, seriously, if I could show you without traumatizing us all, I would.  Wolfgang is carrying massive + low, & I am at my wits' end to clothe the bump without looking like a tent.  I am not Abraham, that I should be living in tents!  The last week or so has seen an increase in painful Braxton-Hicks + actual full-abdominal contractions, so while I have no idea how far away active labour + delivery may be, at least I know my body is moving in the right direction.  It's the only part of me that can move...


Between Christmas & Wolfgang, I can't boast a lot of writing, but I'll share a little of what I have.  It's one of my favourite things to do & hopefully you'll enjoy it.  Proceeding...

penslayer excerpts

To me he was like a light left on in Goshen.adamantine rewrite
 Dammerung set a supporting hand on the table; lingering light jumped off a gilt band on one finger. “You and I think alike in that, my dear,” he replied. The fingers and the band of light drummed on the blood. “But I am insatiably curious. Having got my head in the trap, I might as well squeeze in the rest of the way and see who set the thing—and for whom.”
 “Not expecting to catch an Overlord, I’ll warrant,” growled Goddgofang.
“I haven’t been caught yet,” said his father. “But you’d better catch Simon.”
 There was a sudden scuffle, the dark worsened, and I felt my organs float up through the roof of my skull before silence clamped down on my senses. ethandune
“My kin were gypsy-folk,” I explained. “Not servants. But I am part of Dammerung’s household because…because it is good to be so,” I finished, overcome with confusion and not knowing what for. The golden hair had fallen down again, covering much of the girl’s face except her mouth, turned in profile to me; I saw a faint curvature to it, like one testing a wound. For a long while Jennalaide said nothing, sitting so while my silence hung in the air…then, gingerly,“Because it is good to be so. I would have sworn in my wrath it could never have been so, not in the House of Cheval, not among the de la Mare brood. They carry the blood of my house on their heads, and all this wretched while I have hated them as only woman can hate, dying inside of the thirst of it. Then God Almighty laughed and shook the pillars of the heavens, and he threw down that devil’s cub to me. I thought he should have fallen like lightning, but—” her voice snagged on something sharp and ragged “—he came to me like rain.”ethandune
Dammerung straightened of a sudden and got to his feet. “Poor Simon! You want it answered and tidied up at once, for you are walking in the black and the white of youth.” He looked down at me with something inexplicably soft in his harsh, bony features. “One day you will learn that even justice takes time.”ethandune
"I may give ground, but I never back away."lamblight
"MY LORD, I AM TRYING. You are asking me to do a thing which Christ himself did not accomplish until after his resurrection!""Is not now after the resurrection?" Achim Funderberk replied coolly. And, when I bit my tongue to dull the sharpness of it, he smiled. "Then you should be able to do it."blueshift

a happy new year to you all! xoxo, jenny penslayer

Confessions From A First World Author

lookit me, i'm writing a blog post!

If you have been a writer + on the internet for any length of time, you've probably noticed a distinct clique has grown up around the concept of "writers."  Typically we're introverted, bookish, possibly nerdy folk who for some immature reason think "how to build a bomb" is funny in our search history.  Lots of people around me pin gobs of writing-related quotes on Pinterest, they scour the internet for inspirational images that kind-of-sort-of resemble characters that they may-or-may-not mean to write one day, & they read copious amounts of books.

I will be one of the first people to tell you that I think reading is almost essential to good writing, but here's the thing.

i am not a bookworm

 
This is true, & this is not a negative-brag post, as if I expected everyone to cheer me on in my negativity.  No, this is just a simple fact.  I have never been a fast reader, I have always been picky, & I have always been impatient.  By + large, I've always rather hated research - a source of personal dismay when I see so many of my contemporaries chasing after research like a duck on a june-bug.

For me, however, reading can be a real strain.  Not only does it take a lot to catch + hold my fancy, a book also has to go up against my inability to sit still for any length of time, lengthening the time it takes me to finish a book by ridiculous proportions.  I don't like reading for reading's sake; I like reading for the sake of the content/execution.  The number of books I read in a twelvemonth is so easy to keep track of that I've given up keeping track, because such a small number grows depressing after awhile when one is bombarded by the idea of the internet author scarfing down books by the fistful.

literary peer pressure is totally a thing

Here's a part of me which is not painted so glowy-white: I am susceptible to the self-esteem issues inadvertently imposed on me by people who can actually read at a decent pace.  This is (one reason) why I don't usually post book reviews, or even tell you what I'm reading (Old Paths by J.C. Ryle & Gone With the Wind by le duh Margaret Mitchell): because there's usually nothing to tell.  I read at a snail's pace, with all the frequency of Haley's comet coming round, & the maddening pickiness of my mother's cat who is half-starved & is too particular to eat the enormous array of options presented for her well-being. It's a wonder I actually read anything to completion, at my rate. 

the end

[there is no moral to this story. i wanted it to make you feel better about yourself if a) you happen to be like me, or b) are better than i am at reading & therefore superior.]

December || It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

i love christmastime.  

I used to think people who started decking the halls for Christmas right after Halloween were crazy, but now I don't mind because time goes by SO fast, I want to enjoy Christmas as long as possible.  (Yes, maybe you dislike the "rampant commercialization" of Christmas, but that's nothing new & that's living in a capitalist economy, folks!  That whole argument is not a fight I want to put a dog in because I'm too busy enjoying Christmas.)

Except...not?  The past three years have been horrendous duds for Christmas.  This is not something I like to admit because I'm afraid people will think I'm blaming them.  No, it's not their fault.  The past three years have seen some massive changes in my life, coinciding with Christmas, & they've just been really hard to handle - especially when they've been coupled with physical pain + depression.  Not really conducive to festive cheer! 

This year is one of those three, & while I'm working hard to push off the encroaching ennui, it's lingering there.  I haven't had any complications with this pregnancy (thank the Lord!), but in many ways it has been enormously harder than my first.  My body is just. plain. exhausted.  It's already begun telling me "no" to simple tasks, like picking up my daughter.  Very discouraging, when I have a month left to go! 

So, now writing = I can't even, & blogging = likely not.  I am glad I have the kind of "job" that I can just stop when the going gets too rough.  Right now, the going is really rough.  I've been dithering about posting this for several weeks, but now's the time.  I am in survival mode (translation: napping all the time).  This hiatus is unofficially scheduled to end or be punctuated whenever, as I may randomly conjure post ideas when I'm under no obligation to write them, & I may even get crazy + switch out a naptime with some writing.  Anyway, The Penslayer will show up in your blog feed if that's the case.

it's been nice knowing you O____o

YES! Your Shockingly Simple Guide to Being Impossibly Awesome

cait drews writes a 50,000+ word novel in 3 days

mirriam neal draws a practically perfect tiger, having never drawn one before in her life

It's REALLY ANNOYING, ISN'T IT??  You've all got at least one friend who can just do something that you consider impossible, & they get it right.  You're partly happy for them, but mostly you feel like an itty-bitty insignificant bug & no it's not their fault but gee you don't amount to much compared to their accomplishments, right?

can you ever measure up?
Well, no.  I've heard it said that "comparison is the thief of joy," & it is.  (I haven't yet conquered this problem, but I recognize that it's a problem.)  All our art is measured by our own level of achievement, not someone else's.  Even Peter, when he started pointing fingers at John & saying "what about him," got the clapback from Jesus, "what does that matter? YOU follow me."  All artists are trying to become "better," & even when someone is, from your point of view, impossibly better at something than you are, just chill: you're not on their road, & how you get along is what matters.

but can you get from bleh to impossibly awesome?
You totally can!  And I'm not even selling anything!  The problem is, we're looking at where we are & where they are, & the distance seems - is - impossible to cross.  I just can't write 50,000 words in three days.  I can't draw a peacock in full flight & have it look breath-taking.  For me, it is legitimately impossible & no amount of pinterest pep-talk is going to change that.

the incremental upward
Take any aspect of growth - exercise, art, spiritual improvement - & you can see right off the bat that punctuated equilibriums are rare if not out of the question.  I can't go from physically unable to do push-ups, to churning out thirty at a go.  Duh.  I haven't built up to that level.  I can't go from scribbling a few paragraphs every few days to buckling down + vomiting up a full-sized novel in the span of time Jesus was in the tomb.  Not happening!  I am not that kind of magic.  (if i was, i would totally be doing it right now) I can't go from struggling/failing daily with this body of sin to being holy as my Father is holy just like BLAM halo + all.  Like all human beings, I'm a progressive creature: sudden catapults into perfection do not happen.

The key.  ||  Stop looking at the far distance in relation to where you are.  Look at your art just as you would look at an exercise regimen.  Where you begin may be pitifully small, but at the moment that's all you can do.  The trick is to work + build + increase.

the impossible is only impossible because we want to be there now

And it just doesn't work like that.  You have to build up to it.  Cait Drews worked hard to teach herself how to "sprint" write, a process which took time, & now enables her to write lots of words for long stretches of time.   She built up to it.  Mirriam Neal had never drawn a tiger in her life, but she has taught herself how to "see" a drawing & to communicate an image through her motor skills.  She built up to it.

There isn't anything massively special about Cait or Mirriam (sorry, guys!) which prevents you from achieving the impossible too.  You have only to accept that you can't get from here to there in a shot: it takes incremental improvement to achieve.  

but once you've done it, look at what you can do! <3

NaNoWriMo Check-In + Ethandune Snippets

HAVE I BEEN ABLE to keep up with the daily wordcount?  Pfft, noooope.  Have I been writing?  Yes.  Am I content with that?  No, but I probably should be.  But you don't want to hear all my excuses because THAT'S BORING & probably you have excuses of your own which sound a lot better than mine (I'm still partial to mine, though).


You have twelve days until the end of Nano!  I want you to remember three important things & I am not making up their importance.

1.  if you finish nano with the 50,000 wordcount, you accomplished the goal of completing nano!

2.  if you don't finish nano with the 50,000 wordcount, YOU. STILL. WROTE. ON. YOUR. STORY. which means it's that much closer to being finished, & that is no small consideration.

3.  if you decide(d) to drop out of nano because it's just too much for a story which needs more time + care, you are exhibiting the mark of a mature individual in recognizing what you + your story need.  quickly-made trash is still trash.  do what's best for you! <3

ethandune

I always manage to write my novels in the season opposite to the one I'm experiencing.  Take Ethandune, at the start of summer, while I'm prepping for the holidays & it's getting into winter (by "getting into winter" I mean today wants to be a high of 78 because the sc piedmont is bipolar).  However, many years of writing in this kind of wacky dichotomy has made me better at compartmentalizing them in my head, so hopefully summertime Ethandune will not wind up in the first draft to have suspicious overtones of Christmas...

snippets

...like a wound which does not hurt until you notice it, the smell of the thing hit me two seconds after I realized what I was seeing. It was jumbled together at impossible angles; it took me another moment to see that it was no longer completely connected with itself.ethandune
All the rest of that day I had a grey, light-headed sense of being always on the verge of vomiting, but the vomit never came. Dammerung looked up as Goddgofang and I entered the sitting room; there was a sidelong glare of light over the chamber, muting everything, stinging my eyes. I heard Goddgofang’s voice coming from somewhere hollow. I saw the Overlord’s face, without moving, suddenly had a peculiar colour to it which felt like my stomach.ethandune
...with a sigh, he put down his book and hefted his lean frame out of the chair, eclipsing the glare into a cruciform shape and muting all his features into a halo grey. ethandune
He seemed a good deal older then, coming away from the leper’s bedside, than he had even when we had approached. I wondered if he was truly always that age, that peculiar blackened weight which had little to do with the silvered hair at his temples, and if he had a kind of off-hand glamour at most times thrown over the dark to hide the drag of it from our eyes.The lull came with us as we went down to the hall, broken by Goddgofang once, coming down behind me, with his father behind him.“Do you ever get used to it?” he asked quietly.And from above and behind on the stair, Dammerung’s voice in the dark: “No. You just get better at hiding it.”ethandune

Think Tank Followup: What Editors Have to Say About Editing

how do you edit?

I ASKED & YOU ANSWERED.  I'm a mental muddle when it comes to editing, so I was thrilled to get some awesome feedback on my think tank post for editing.  As promised, I'm going to showcase these answers & break them down as I've thought about them.

One thing I've found helpful when figuring out what to keep and what to cut, is to evaluate what the story would look like if you didn't have that scene. Would the story survive? Would it still make sense? If not, it's valuable enough to keep. If it's unnecessary, either cut it or alter the scene so it pulls it's own weight.
tracey dyck || adventure awaits

This is some of the best fundamental advice. Your story is made up of the scenes you collect + weave together, & people notice how odd it is when there is something extraneous included.  People save up the scene in their minds, waiting for the revelation of its importance...but the importance never comes - & that leaves a bad impression.

As Tracey pointed out, though, it isn't quite as simple as does this work or does this not work.  Oftentimes, scenes are obviously crucial to the plot; sometimes, scenes are obviously random & need to be hacked out.  But occasionally you'll write a scene which isn't quite what the story needs, but it could be, & you have to find a way to "alter the scene so it pulls it's own weight."  So your options are:

yes - it stays no - it goes renovate scene ugly crying

I actually love the process of perfecting, and changing words, paragraphs and scenes/characterizations and details to build a richer world and picture. If you need to edit as in CUT scenes, get a third-party involved.
Also give your writing space and then coming back and reading it to oneself as if it was a novel from the library. The flaws pop up strongly at you and often one can see what should be changed.
joy || fullness of joy

A huge help in editing is to leave it alone for awhile. While you are writing a manuscript, you are geared into conquer-virgin-territory mode: you're ploughing ahead into the semi-unknown, often leaving a battered trail behind you.  When you are done writing, give it a rest: let your mind wind down from ex nihilo mode.  Once things have cooled, you'll have a chance to go back & look critically at what you've written.  You're in a separate frame of mind, this time for editing + refining, not blazing a trail.  Don't underestimate the importance of this break.  You need space from your first draft to be able to assess it fairly, & it's very hard to do that when you're still gung-ho for the writing stage.

...All the same, you're always going to be the writer of that first draft, & you're unlikely to completely forget what it was like writing it.  Despite your best intentions, this can cloud your judgment, so having another person look over your work, with no prior explanation, to see if the story communicates itself rationally, is SUPER helpful in getting a day-old colt of a draft on its legs.

My biggest tip is to read it aloud to myself. This helps me catch repetitive words/phrasing, and make sure it's flowing properly.
mirriam || wishful thinking

What you may or may not have caught on to yet is that I am an abysmal writer.  It's true.  When I am writing, I am 99.9% blind to "what I've done," & focused on "what comes next."  So when I happen to go back & look at my writing, I've been known to find the most outrageous mistakes in grammatical construction, & even have missed a word or supplemented an entirely wrong word in the fever of my scribbling.  And this is only with the occasional glance back: I dread to think what I'll discover when I really sit down to edit. 

The problem is, your brain is really good at adjusting for mistakes when communicating to you.  Is a word missing, or a word duplicated?  Don't worry about it!  Brain's got it handled.  You won't even notice a thing.  But if you set yourself to reading out loud, you're much more forced to pay attention to the text & take care that the cadence is correct, you haven't used the same description more than once in the same page (*guilty*), you're dialogue isn't as stupid as a drunk squirrel on a highway, etc.  This is definitely an embarrassing exercise, especially when you flub up as often as I do, but it's also really helpful so here's some humble pie to go with that Thanksgiving dinner I hope you scheduled time for in the midst of Nano.


thank you, ladies!  your advice is phenomenal.  <3

Think Tank || Your Editing Tips!

IT'S HALFWAY THROUGH NANO & who wants to think about editing?   ...Yeah, I didn't think so.  But rather than thinking about editing your work-in-progress, I want to think about editing as a whole - & particularly how you confront it.

personally, i hate editing

I feel no creative gush while editing as I do when I'm writing a first draft.  Parsing, examining, patching up holes, trying to add more story to a flow that was so organic at the outset...not a lot of fun for me!  But editing has to happen because none of us can write a perfect manuscript on the first try.  Sad, but true.  Since I've got one eye on the market for editing tips anyway, I thought I'd throw out a forum for my followers.

share your editing tips!

Yes, do!  So many people have such beneficial insight into editing which I // you // others might never have thought of before.  I want to compile all your advice & put it together in a followup post.  Do it for science!  Do it for your children!  Do it for the future of the human race!  Also do it for me because I hate editing & I need help.