Ksenia Anske's Blog, page 38
September 7, 2015
The moment I decided to become a writer
Quite often in interviews I get asked about the moment I decided to become a writer and I always get stumped because I can't remember a precise moment when it hit me out of the sky: I WANT TO BECOME A WRITER. And then it did hit me. Not out of sky, but out of my brain. I guess it's been sitting there all along and decided to show up suddenly. So I'll use this post in the future to refer people to when they ask me this question.
And that moment was...while sitting in the mo...
August 29, 2015
Does your early work stain your portfolio of books?
Mars Dorian asked:
"Hey Ksenia,your advice and blog has always helped me in the best way possible, all things book related.I've worked four months on a novel and finished it two months ago. Proofreaders/editors went over it, so it's ready to get (self) published if it wasn't for my high standard that isn't a 100% satisfied with it anymore.It's still a good novel, but it's not my best. Question. Would you personally publish a piece of work you put a lot of effort in,...
August 26, 2015
When the book you read makes you weep...
When you weep because there is nothing else in you but to weep. When words fail you. When the canvas of your skin ruptures and you're you no longer. A blank. When whatever you knew is gone, and whatever there is to know hasn't come yet, and you're in between the empty and the full, the full and the empty, and you don't get the meaning of either. When the idea of you stops existing, and what emerges instead is so fragile you're afraid it will die the second you touch it,...
August 23, 2015
What do you spend your life on?
I don't like math, but I do...sometimes. Sometimes it lets you see amazing things.
I'm obsessed with improving my writing. I'm hellbent on getting so good, my words will make your teeth sing. I want to be so superb, no one will be able to put my books down. No one. This is my goal. To take over the world. And so I'm grinding away at it every day, trying to maximize the time I spend on my work, because the more time I spend on it, the better I will get. I have seen a direct...
August 21, 2015
Where my crazy stories come from
Every time I call Russia, I hang up the phone bewildered. Was it true? Was it fiction? How can I separate the two into bits that make sense? Primarily I call my mom, sometimes my half-sister, sometimes my cousins or my step-mom, but most of the family drama comes from my conversations with my mother. I have just started reading The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton and got to thinking. This is human shit and blood and sweat that we're all wallowing in and yet are afr...
August 20, 2015
Why solitude is important for writing
It smells of wet dogs outside, and I'm utterly exhausted. My eyes are dry as sand, and my head wants to fall off my shoulders, and my sleep has thinned to nervous dozing that gets interrupted by every noise, be it a bark, a honk, or the insistent gurgle of my bladder.
These last few weeks I have expended my energy on other things besides writing, and I'm paying for it dearly. I'm judging a writing contest on Wattpad (for 13-19 year olds, so of course I agreed) and I'm overseei...
August 19, 2015
The Badlings will be an audiobook! Wheee!!!
Fantabulous news! The production of The Badlings as an audio book began in earnest, and I'm going to jump the gun and let you listen to the first chapter because it's amazing, amazingly narrated by amazing Erich Lane who resides in the amazing LA.
The link will lead you to the download from my Dropbox, let me know if you have any problems. The file is over 20Mb, and I don't know how to compress it to download it directly to my site.
Erich's speech inflections, his renditions, intima...
August 12, 2015
Growing your vocabulary by using etymology
I seem to have cracked one of my biggest obstacles towriting well: the excruciatinglyslow growth of myvocabulary (have found a way to significantly speed it up, I mean, not crack it).Since I started writing in English,I have tried all kinds of methods topoundnew words into my headand failed at each, adding maybe 10 new words per month or so, which was nothing. It got me mighty pissed that I couldn't retain the meaning of words like "inexorable" and "parsimony" and "celerity" and "doff" and "...
August 10, 2015
Where I answer questions from your postcard, Penny
Thank you for beautiful questions, Penny. Here are my answers.
1. Have youever gotten lost thinking how it all could just be make-believe?
Yes, all the time, since I was very small, in fact. I often thoughtthatlife asI sawit wasn'treal and madeup my own theories about it. When I was 5 or so, I was eating purplishberries from the juneberry tree bush at our dacha, standing on the rickety bench, and I came up with an idea that when I will grow old, I'll turn around and grow young again, then grow...
August 3, 2015
The only way to succeed is to keep showing up
Too often I see people start and drop things. Start and drop. Start and drop. And then they lament as to why nothing is happening. Nobody is reading their books. Nobody is commenting on their news. Nobody is paying attention to them. So they get upset and drop another thing they just started, and start something else, and then thesame story repeats. There was a time when I tried helping those people by gently coaxing them to NOT drop the current thing they were doing b...
