Averil Dean's Blog, page 11

Peas and Chocolate

When I started writing, I marveled at the words. I’d jot down a few paragraphs, go back and play with them, write a few more and so on. I was having fun with it, just messing around. There were no word counts or fast drafts. There was no pressure. I loved writing a page and then immediately rewriting it, over and over sometimes, with the whole story still in the background waiting to be discovered. I’d go for long walks when I got stuck and I’d think about what might happen next, imagining th...

Frailty

A woman came into the clinic yesterday. She was beautiful once; I scanned her driver’s license and saw the photo. Though she’s still very young, her teeth have gone pewter and she fills the room with the chemically scent of a new sofa. She’s cut off her hair, scraped at her skin, she’s lost inside her clothing: she’s breaking my fucking heart. Tweaker, someone says of her, and this is undeniably true. Daughter, also. Sweet, frail human being whose mind must surely have been wrecked somewhere...

Canyon

ambition |amˈbiSHən|
noun
a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work: her ambition was to become a model | he achieved his ambition of making a fortune.
• desire and determination to achieve success: life offered few opportunities for young people with ambition.
ORIGIN Middle English: via Old French from Latin ambitio(n-), from ambire ‘go around (canvassing for votes).’

I’ve been thinking about ambition. What it means, how its presence or the lac...

Unfurl

I am writing to you from the lap of luxury—aka, a brand new bed. Two burly men delivered this baby yesterday morning and hauled off our old two-trough backbreaker, which often left me so twisted after a night’s “sleep” that it would take me an hour or more just to unfurl. Not so this morning. The new bed has a movable platform underneath to raise and lower the head and feet. It’s made of firm but smooshy foam. It’s guaranteed to last twenty years, starting now. It’s making me so fucking happy...

The Empress Chronicles

Congratulations to my dear friend Suzy Vitello. She’s written a fantastic new YA novel called The Empress Chronicles (and by YA, I mean that it’s the sort of book you buy for a young friend, then fall in love with yourself so that you have to purchase a second copy just to keep around the house for moments when you need a dose of writerly inspiration). Suzy has a wonderful knack for voices, and in this story she really gets to let it rip. I loved both halves of the alternating narrative but w...

Needle (Needful)

Do you laugh when someone asks if you’re enjoying all this? Do you offer the weary smile of the knowing? Do you become earnest, try to explain that it’s work. Mime the act of hair pulling, zombie typing, an invisible noose jerking at your neck? Oh, the agony of seeing your characters float above the landscape because you don’t know where to set them, or how to introduce them to each other (Gwyn, meet Dermot, he’s going to fuck you over in chapter 33), and can’t seem to winkle out their opinio...

Smooch

I’m in love with people this week. It’s been a rough patch for me and for someone I care about, but everywhere we turn there has been compassion and help and the plain, unvarnished kindness of strangers. We forget about that sometimes. We get caught up in the news of the world, the racism and violence, and overlook the plain human truth that most people, given the smallest chance, will rise to the occasion and be kind. They’re just waiting for an opening.

Here’s yours:

Do one kind thing for a s...

Broomstick and Buckets

I used to hide my work. All my notebooks, my pink and yellow post-its, the cryptic phrases I’d jotted on the back of receipts or torn envelopes. It all was so precious to me and so imperfect, which shamed me in some way, as though I could only call myself a writer if the words sprung brilliant and fully formed from my head, as if grappling were not part of writing except as an exercise for the poorest members of the tribe. I had this notion that writing involved leather-bound journals and fou...

Fancy

Here’s what happens: I have a good idea for a book and start to write it. Then I read someone else’s (better) book and think, Hmm… This story has some interesting elements, maybe something similar could work for mine. And so like a magpie I add this or that idea to the scrapalanche, this or that type of character or voice or structure or tense, and I put them all in an enormous idea-pile until whatever nugget I began with is buried in miscellany.

Steampunk art by Santiago Caruso

Which is where...

Stew

It’s time, I think, to go back to my previously sporadic posting schedule. The danger of not-writing has passed. True, I had planned to blog every day for a year, but what are goals anyway except as a means to an end? The end in this case being books, of course.

So here we are on a Thursday morning, and even with a few days between the last post and this one, I don’t have much to report. I’ve been writing, working, eating peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches. The other day I made pasta with an...