Ksenia Anske's Blog, page 49
December 25, 2014
My boyfriend's very personal story
This Christmas we're missing one of our teenagers, and it's heartbreaking. Josey, Royce's daughter, is currently in a substance abuse problem treatment center in Oregonwhere she will spend anywhere from 1 to 3 months in a locked up environment, meaning, she is not able to leave the grounds. If you have been subscribed to my blog for a long time, you will remember her daring teen erotica story that I posted here and that caused quite a stir. I was contemplating to tak...
Why crowdsource your book
For the past several days I couldn'tbeat this thought out of my head: how to get around the copyright issue I ran into with Corners? What to do? What to do? WHAT TO DO? Now, I could've lashed my brain to the inside of my skull with barbed wire and lynched it and turned it into some gibbous amoebaand roped it with steel hawsers and hacked it apartand...well, what I'm describing here is what typically happens inside any writer's head. The endless internal monologue, or d...
December 21, 2014
A note on copyright
Could I be any dumber? Obviously. My darling editor started reading the seconddraft of CORNERS, which I have completed and sent off to her a few days ago, and the first question she asked me was, "Did you think about copyright?" And I replied, boisterously,with flippant facetiousness, "Nope!" And then it hit me in the gut. Why didn't I? Was I blind? We do things in life sometimes that leave us puzzled. The short story is, I will have to swap out 8 of the 25 mentio...
December 20, 2014
The 2nd draft of CORNERS is done!
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all my readers who encouraged me, to all my beta readers who sent me feedback on the 1stdraft, my friends and family who left me alone to write it. Without you this wouldn't have happened. The 1stdraft took me only 2 weeks to write, this one took 1 month. I have done something different this time. I didn't take weekends off, plowing right through them, and it sped up the process.
To all of you who pre-ordered CORNERS, you rock! I love y...
I broke my writing routine
Oops! It broke! Well, it was supposed to break. There were fissures running along its spine for a while now―my daily writing routine, that is―only I was ignoring them out of some imbricated stubbornness, you know, like ahideous serpent so used to its covert cemented ways, it refuses change like a plague. Yes, that was me. And guess who was suffering for it? Me.
What exactly am I talking about? And why did I break this thing I'm talking about?
Well, let me tell you a littl...
December 18, 2014
The fear of writing well
I'm afraid to be good. Afraid to write well. It's a ridiculous,ludicrous statement. I hear you saying,What? You're afraid of what? It doesn't make any sense. Yes, it doesn't. It's that luminous cusp between an amateurish philandering with words and the mastery of language, that point when you can sense you're getting better, but you're not quite there. Yet. And the pressure to get there fast is insurmountable. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. It holds me back, this fear,...
December 15, 2014
A day in a life of a writer
It begins with a nefarious thought, or a tail of a delicious nightmare, or a hatching tweet, like, really, an idea expressed in 140 characters that pecks on the inside of my skull, or my characters screaming, tearing at each other's hair or staring forlornly at the dusty road of the plot they were supposed to travel the day before and didn't get to, because I have written it in a different way. These and other thoughts skitter into a corner of my head and from ther...
December 10, 2014
Taking praise: Take it. Take it. TAKE IT.
Something new is happening in my life. I must tell you, it's getting weirder and stranger and more beautiful in a bizarrekind of way. I have to pinch myself, to make sure I'm not macerating or pullulating or gemmating or...can you tell I read too muchStanisław Lem lately? Yeah, all this amorphous gluttonous Solaris vocabulary hasstuck in my mind, and here I have derailed from the main topic of this important blog post.
PRAISE.
How to take it? And why am I blogging about it? And...
December 7, 2014
My Amtrak residency itinerary is here!
I'm so excited! As you know, I have been selected as one of the 24 finalists to take a ride on the Amtrak train as part of the Amtrak Residency, a wonderful that's been born on Twitter from a couple writers asking Amtrak about the possibility of such a thing. So, afew writers have already completed their adventures. First was Bill Willingham (read about his triphere), next was Jennifer Boylan (read about her trip here), and after that Marianne Kirby (her adventures here). I'm not sure who is...
December 4, 2014
HOLIDAY BOOK RECS for you bookworms
Behold! Here comes the holiday book recommendationextravaganza bonanza thing! You asked me! About the books! I would recommend tobuy as gifts! To those bookworms in your life you love! Well then. Here are my selections for you this Christmas season. Hey, if my selections will be popular, perhaps I'll do this every year. And, the gleamingsparkling glittering books you should buy for everyone are...
Okay, hold on a second. Let me warn you about something.
MY TASTE IN BOOKS...
