Nicole Field's Blog, page 31
January 5, 2016
The opening of my next novel:-
He was born in June 20th. Anna was there. She was the one who pressed her fingers against the glass of the hospital nursery as gently as if it was soft, delicate skin of the boy only hours after being born. She wasn’t standing close enough to the glass fog it with her breath, which might not have been there at all for the attention she paid it. Her ears were adorned with long, hanging earrings that glimmered and shifted in her reflection.
A long strung, brass pendant hung between her breasts. She wore a skirt layered on top of another skirt, with a long sleeve shirt covered by dark jacket and adorned with fingerless gloves and homemade scarf.
Melbourne winter had not been kind so far, but the temperature was controlled indoors.
“Are you related?”
A kindly nurse was smiling at her, the sort of smile that adults working with babies and young children commonly seemed to have. Another day, Anna might have found herself smiling without thinking of it.
Instead, she met the nurse’s eyes, then looked down towards the scuffed linoleum floor. Not into the nursery again. Her fingers dropped from the window, numb. “No,” she said hollowly. “Not family.”
She didn’t wait for the nurse to follow up with another question. Was she a family friend? Picking someone up? Was she visiting someone on another floor? Had she gotten lost?
Looking at her would just show well meaning confusion, so Anna turned away. She didn’t allow herself another look at the child. She didn’t know if he’d be named Peter or Michael, or Shannon or Sam. Those decisions weren’t up to her. She didn’t try to commit the features to memory, try to imagine his first days once at home.
The heels of her boots clacked dully on soft floors. She was in the elevator going straight down before anyone else knew she’d been there.
January 4, 2016
coldarrow:
altarsmoke:
Anyone else feel like Dark Mori is the...
Anyone else feel like Dark Mori is the ideal witchy wardrobe? So many pockets, so many layers, so much to enchant. I know it’s perfect for the climate where I live.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6
@polynbooks I feel like this is your kinda aesthetic
I seriously love any of the Mori girl variations, and these ones are gorgeous.
That middle one makes me want to write.
‘KINDRED SPIRITS’ BLURB:
‘Everybody likes everything these days. The whole world is a nerd.’
‘Are you mad because other people like Star Wars? Are you mad because people like me like Star Wars?’
‘Maybe.’
If
you broke Elena’s heart, Star Wars would spill out. So when she decides
to queue outside her local cinema to see the new movie, she’s expecting
a celebration with crowds of people who love Han, Luke and Leia just as
much as she does.
What she’s not expecting is to be last
in a line of only three people; to have to pee into a collectible Star
Wars soda cup behind a dumpster or to meet that unlikely someone who
just might truly understand the way she feels.
Hello! This is my short story for World Book Day in the UK. For now it will only be available in the UK, after Feb. 25.
I was feeling Star Wars-crazy when I wrote it, I guess, because it’s about two people camping out to see The Force Awakens at the first opportunity in their town.
It’s also about how personal and individual fandom is – even as fandom and nerd culture become more mainstream affairs. (Like, there are more of us at the dance now, but we’re still dancing our own way.)
I’m not sure what I was thinking, writing about Star Wars and Star Wars fans, because – even though SW is my foundational fandom – I’m sure I got something wrong. (I know it!)
It was written before TFA, so there’re no details about the new film in the story.
I have to say, I find short stories really hard to write. My brain tends to deal in novel-size transactions. So I’m nervous about this one and hope that British readers like it.
January 3, 2016
f2m turned out to be fantastic follow up reading for Delusions...
f2m turned out to be fantastic follow up reading for Delusions of Gender.
Written in first person, this book seems more like a memoir or autobiography than anything else. Although it was off to a bit of a rough start, with patchy chapters and scenes that both started and finished a little bit too abruptly, the story found its voice and went really smoothly from there. I really got to like the character of Skye, who became Finn. The story within the story of Finn’s great uncle Al was incredibly interesting, especially given that it gave us insight into the reactions of a family towards an intersex young man from two generations ago, but it was also incredibly relevant to the present story.
The parents’ struggles were real and authentic, without either one of them coming across as a ‘bad guy’ or antagonist. This was just another way in which the story read as an autobiography instead of a structured narrative.
The most interesting part of the book, for me, was that it was set after the age of eighteen for the main character. Finn isn’t at school, though he does live with his parents. He has a part time job as a dish hand in a Chinese restaurant. As the genre is littered with teens going through transitions and various other LGBT issues, this really stood out.
Shuddup.
Me in Jul '15: *surprise kisses from a friend*
Me in Aug '15: Okay, but, like, that's just a friendship, not going to get into anything serious.
Me in Sep '15: *spends one night every week with said friend*
Me in Oct '15: Okay, but that's just an aberration. I really am not wanting to start any new relationships.
Me in Nov '15: OMG OMG He said the 'R' word!!
Me in Dec '15: Hmm, I'm kinda curious about what being a unicorn for that couple over there would be like...
Me in Jan '16: Shuddup.
January 2, 2016
loranhale:
the lunar chronicles + name meanings
“Even in the...
the lunar chronicles + name meanings
“Even in the Future the Story Begins with Once Upon a Time.”
()(insp)
Let’s have a quick recap, shall we?
In Cinder, I found an incredibly fun book to read about a cyborg living in the futuristic city of New Beijing, sometime after the fourth world war. It’s also the story of Cinderella, just not how you remember it.
Scarlet introduced a new character and a new fairy tale. Cinder’s story lines were woven in (which was a good thing, cause the previous book ended on a cliffhanger!) but for the most part this was Scarlet and Wolf’s story, set in Paris, and deepening the oncoming war between the Lunar Queen Levana, and Earth. This is also the story of Little Red Riding Hood, just not how you remember it.
Cress was a young woman who was kept away from any contact from either Earth or Lunar, captive in a satellite by the thermaturge Sybil. After she gets free, she and her very not!Prince Charming, here named Captain Thorne, go on an expedition through the desert, blinding him and endangering them both. This is also the story of Rapunzel, just not how you remember it.
I often get annoyed by the little tag lines that novels have on them. They don’t seem to describe anything of the book within the covers and I find myself wondering if it was even read before the marketing department got their hands onto them. Not so here. This is not the fairy tale you remember, but it’s one you won’t forget, the back cover tells me, and it’s completely right. On all four counts.
Winter opens with a hallucination of the main character who won’t use her Lunar mind control powers at great sacrifice to herself. That’s right. Not only is this main character a person of colour, but there’s also a metaphor of mental health in the opening pages.
Very quickly, the book goes around to touch on the stories of all the characters who have come before, most of whom are on Captain Thorne’s stolen space ship, the Rampion, and he is only just getting his eyesight back. This book picks up directly where the last one left off, and it’s clear that Marissa Meyer has written notes on the back of her eyelids, or something, because not a single detail or hanging comment from any of the previous books is missed or neglected to be woven in as the story progresses.
I couldn’t believe my luck when I first saw how thick this final book of the series would be, but it’s soon clear that this is not going to be an easy ride for our heroes. Levana is in power, and she’s very good at making that power damn near absolute. For the first several hundred pages, this story becomes the story of everything that can go wrong will go wrong. When asked whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, I answered it was a fantastic thing, and here’s why: The battle and inevitable win against Levana is hard won but, ultimately, it’s the ending you expect. However, she’s been built up as this incredibly powerful figure through the whole series and if it had been any easier to defeat her, that would have been a disappointment or a sign of weakness in the writing. Even the final stand off between Levana and Cinder is drawn out to exactly the length it ought to be, with two near evenly matched enemies fighting hard until one finally overcomes the other.
The only thing I was a little saddened by was that we didn’t get an explicitly happy ending between Winter and her royal guard Jacin. At the same time, though, I loved that Marissa left bits and pieces to the reader’s imagination at the end of this tomb, rather than spelling everything out or having multiple endings on top of each other.
That doesn’t mean, however, that when I found out there’s a projection of a collection of Lunar Chronicles stories coming out in 2016, one of which being an epilogue for Winter, I didn’t start leaping in excitement.
Good Morning 2016
OMG the house to myself. :D :D And all I can do is think. And read. And listen to music while autocorrect turns the word into ‘myself’. Freudian, solidly.
I just woke up from a dream where an ex was incredibly cruel. Like, the kind of cruel I’ve seen him capable of being to others, but never to me. And then, upon realising it was a misunderstanding that had riled it, called down from upstairs that he really hated this nothing between us, that there was nothing between us. I called up he could fix that, and he said nothing in reply.
I dreamed at 3pm this afternoon because I fell asleep yesterday morning at 7am for three hours after the world’s most mind boggling and amazing twelve hours of being up and chatting with someone. Someone I did not expect to get along with that well. Someone for whom I’m the exception (again) because I don’t come across like a woman and she knows that because she doesn’t get along with women.
She is my best friend of 14 years’ wife.
These are the things I know about her:
She dreams epic dreams, and remembers them like I do. She gives out this vibe that people shouldn’t touch her, but doesn’t know whether it’s the chicken or the egg thing; she doesn’t want people to touch her, or other people don’t want to touch her and so she responds like she doesn’t want to be touched. I see my best friend as a quiet man; she was surprised to see him hardly talk. She does not experience jealousy, but occasionally envy. She doesn’t like leadership roles, unless someone is doing it so poorly that she feels a need to take over. It was nice for her to meet someone who was interested in women just as much as men. She speaks convincingly in a number of accents and one of which is a crazy-sexy New England American one. Her usual sleeping pattern consists of somewhere between 3 and 14 hours, usually between 7am and 7pm. She reads and owns autobiographies. She has more than one blog whose posts document the autobiography of her life.
He didn’t need to speak. Both of us already know everything about him.
I feel like I’m hung over, like I’ve got the world’s biggest head ache pressing against the front of my head cause I’m either dehydrated or my body just thinks I shouldn’t go to sleep at these crazy times. I didn’t think I could go to sleep at these crazy times anymore. I haven’t done it since I was in high school.
The night wasn’t just about sitting down talking for twelve hours. She was my exception for a number of my own reasons, some of which proving there were still some new things I could learn about my best friend. I’m now here grinning like a moron, despite the head ache and the fact that I go back to work again on Tuesday and somehow hope my sleeping cycle goes back to normal in the next two days. I’m a waking up at 7am kind of person, not a sleeping after it’s dawn type. At all.
I’m reading Cam Girl by Leah Raeder at the moment, and in my disoriented state I somehow feel that it’s essential that I share my experience with the internet. Books are becoming real life and stream of conscious writing is my whole world.
The cats were happy to see me. I managed to fall asleep by around 11.30pm to the sound of music that makes me think of Goth clubbing and him, my best friend, after a playlist of 90s music and occasional Hosier tracks had been the backdrop of the previous 26 hours.
And that is 2016 so far in a nut shell. 10/10 Would recommend to a friend.
December 30, 2015
"…Writers remember everything…especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars,..."
-
Stephen King, Misery
There was a period earlier in the year when I was regularly pushing away certain thoughts, certain words, that were intruding into my calm. I’ve now ended up in a place where I’m like, ‘Where’s the laptop? I have a scene that was waiting for this thought to come back around.’
All I can say is that I’ve found new understandings that have made me a better writer this year.
December 29, 2015
A trans guy's thoughts on #ReadWomen
“I know this will surprise some of you, but my ability to write well-rounded lesbian characters and queer women didn’t vanish when I got my first binder 15 years ago, nor did disappear it when I gave myself my first shot of testosterone in September of 2015…”
When I first found out about this book, I read it was The Fault...
When I first found out about this book, I read it was The Fault in Our Stars meets Eleanor and Park and I borrowed it so fast I was a blur.
After reading just the first character, I couldn’t hold with the comparison to The Fault in Our Stars. That book was about two young people who so desperately wanted to live and love and experience the rest of the world, yet were each suffering from cancer in their own ways.
All the Bright Places introduces us to our main characters both standing on a ledge, and follows them through talking each other off the ledge and back towards living again.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand Finch’s desire to have a visible illness, something people could see and understand, and Violet’s grief over her dead sister. It’s not the depression that I’m commenting on, it’s the differences in mindsets between the two pairs of characters.
Eleanor and Park, however, is an exactly accurate comparison. Imagine the girl is popular instead of the boy, and it’s set in the present rather than the 1980s, but all the feels are the same. This isn’t a relationship that’s based on love, but on common interests and an empathy for each other’s situation. It’s two friends offering support to another person they previously thought they had nothing in common with, and learning otherwise. It’s… beautiful.
I just started reading All the Bright Places yesterday, and this is my head canon for the main characters:
(pictured, Sam Claflin as Finnick Odair from The Hunger Games, and Jessica Sula as Grace Blood from Skins)
