Nick Alimonos's Blog, page 18

Sorry, but, your book sucks …

TRIGGER WARNING: This article may piss you off, raise your anxiety level, or throw you into a depressive spiral. It might also make you a better writer, so there’s that. You’ve been warned!  I don’t want to come across like a jerk or anything, because I know how badly it hurts, to get a bad... Continue Reading →

The Devil's Advocate: Everything You Know About Writing is Wrong!

This article originally appeared in The Writer's Disease

How-To Write Fiction? Advice is everywhere, from books to magazines to the Internet. Most of this advice focuses on plot, character development, and style. If you’re an aspiring writer, you’ve probably gone over these factors before. But while I can’t argue that plot or character isn’t important, I consistently find a broad discrepancy between how writers are told to write, and how great stories are actually written. The very best authors seem to have attended very different classes than I did. Conversely, if you study the basics like a chemistry lab student studies the Periodic Table, you’ll often turn out fiction that just isn't exciting anyone, that is is just plain . . . blah. Sure, you might get lucky with a “great job!” or “Hey, I really enjoyed that!” But honestly, is that why you spent hundreds of hours slaving over your masterpiece? The only words I ever want to hear is, “Hey, when is the next part coming out? I can’t wait to read the rest!” Generating that kind of excitement, the kind that gets people to dress up in ridiculous costumes, is every author's dream. But the how-to books won’t get you there, and in many successful pieces of fiction, the basic ingredients of “good writing” are missing entirely (see: H.P. Lovecraft). Writing a book isn’t like baking a pie. It isn’t science and shouldn’t be treated that way.

Here’s a quick synopsis of a popular young adult novel: At birth, a child is delivered to uncaring foster parents. When the child reaches a certain age, they meet a mysterious stranger who takes them far from the home they grew up in, revealing to them their special parentage in a world of magic, monsters and mystery. As the story progresses and the child enters into young adulthood, they learn of a prophesy, that only they can save the world from a great evil.

Is it Harry Potter? Or The Golden Compass? The synopsis works for both. And yet, there is stark difference between the success of Rowling’s books and the success of Pullman’s. While the Harry Potter series sold a whopping 450 million copies, Pullman’s His Dark Materials sold only 15 million (still an incredibly high number). Of course, a lot of random factors are involved, like luck, timing, and the success of the films, but those factors alone cannot account for the difference. Even if you were to divide the Potter series into less than half, since there are seven Rowling books to Pullman’s three, Harry outsells Lyra by a factor of 12! Looking back at Creative Writing 101, the case could be made that Pullman’s character, Lyra, just isn’t quite as developed as Harry, or that his style isn’t quite as polished as Rowling’s. But I find the opposite to be true. On strictly technical terms, Pullman is a more accomplished writer. So how do we account for the difference in sales? Is it just a random numbers game? Did Rowling hit the literary lottery? I don’t think so. I believe, and most people would agree, Harry Potter is a better series. Why?

One word: ideas

What makes people want to read a book are the ideas the book contains. Like Jerry Seinfeld once said, who based his comedy on the obvious, people like things that are interesting. Start telling a person about a book and what’s the first question they ask you? What’s the book about? That’s it. They never say, “Oh, how is the writing quality?” or “How are the characters developed?” What people want to know is, does the book contain information they want to process. And when I say ideas, I am not referring to grand literary themes here, but every single concept, from the smallest kernel of a thought to the main plot. What makes Harry Potter great? Owls that bring the mail and chocolate frogs that jump and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean. Sorting hats and quidditch. Pullman also has a number of fantastic ideas in his series, like souls that take the form of animals, and a knife that cuts through dimensions, and intelligent elephant-like creatures that rove around on wheels formed from giant seeds. But his ideas and his characters are not as numerous, charming, or clever. Rowling’s greatest talent is her ability to conjure up ideas. When Rowling talks about how she came up with Harry Potter, she first mentions the birth of the idea, which came fully formed into her mind. Since she’d been writing from a young age, she already knew the basics of writing, so the rest was easy. Star Wars is another great example of the power of idea. The story is purposefully cliche, based on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but Campbell never conceived of light-sabers or Darth Vader. Of course, a story is not an encyclopedia of interesting tidbits. A good writer shapes ideas like raw minerals, forging them through plot and character into a cohesive narrative. If the writer is truly brilliant, these ideas will flow seamlessly and feel inevitable, never incidental.

But where, oh where, do good ideas come from, you might ask? Well, this is where no how-to book can help you, because there is no magic formula for success. And what constitutes a good idea from a bad one is so subjective, so prone to variables of culture and taste, Douglas Adams’ Deep Thought would need a billion or so years to calculate it. This is why, whenever a best selling author is asked about their success, they look totally baffled. You never hear a Stephen King or a J.K. Rowling owing their fortunes to a set of literary guidelines they found in a book. But this isn’t to say that, as aspiring writers, we are entirely helpless to the whim of Fate, waiting around for a million dollar idea to strike.

If you’re serious about writing, elements of plot and character should come naturally. After all, writers are readers, and we know what we like and why. It’s the idea that separates the dreamers from the doers. Over the years, I’ve gathered a few kernels of wisdom that have helped me capture that all too elusive idea. So here’s my set of guidelines to add to the masses, in order of what I feel is most important:

1. Love what you write.
While it is important to consider reader tastes, too often we forget the most important demographic of all: ourselves. If you don’t love what you write, nobody else will. If you don’t honestly love an idea, if it doesn’t come from inside, you won’t make it work. Only J.K. Rowling could have written Harry Potter. Only you can write your masterpiece.

2. Live life.
Whether your novel is a romance between zombies or the adventures of squirrels in space, all fiction is about life. Life dictates your writing, which is a good thing. Instead of trying to fit some successful mold, embrace your existence. Don’t just write. Ride a bike, make love, hike naked through the woods. Ideas are hidden everywhere, and the ones that come from life are the most genuine.

3. Talk to real live human beings.
Forget the Internet. Meet people in *real* life. If fiction is about life, characters are about people, real people. Even if you write about thousand-year-old vampires, they must possess an element of relatable humanity. In Flatland, Edwin Abbot’s main character is literally a square, but you believe in the story because of the square’s human attributes. An idea can be anything, from a MacGuffin to a plot device to a new kind of character.

4. Read books.
Lots of them. Reading is good for learning technique, but more importantly, it gives you perspective. You will find there are no absolutes in fiction, no right or wrong way. This will you give the courage to find your own voice, and trust in your own crazy ideas.

5. Don’t just do something, sit there!
Remember when you were a child, how on-fire your imagination was? Ideas seemed limitless then. Children are more creative because they have time to be bored. Too often, in our rush-rush lives, we forget the importance of doing nothing. Find time to stare blankly. Quietly sip tea while contemplating your exact location in space and time. Great ideas sit at the cusp of the abyss.

The Devil's Advocate: Melodrama is Good

This piece originally appeared in The Art of Storytelling

In the 2004 film, Troy, Achilles kills Hector after a climactic battle, and Andromache, beset by grief by the death of her husband, basically does . . . nothing. The actress gives a performance of subdued shock, blinking heavily before slacking against the parapet wall. This is in stark contrast to the way Homer describes the scene in the Iliad:

"stunned to the point of death, struggling for breath now and coming back to life, [Andromache] burst out in grief among the Trojan women: 'Oh Hector—I am destroyed! . . . would to god he’d (her father) never fathered me! . . . and leave me here to waste away in grief!' "

and just look at how Hector’s mother, Hecuba, reacts:

"And now his mother began to tear her hair . . . she flung her veil to the ground and raised a high, shattering scream."

In the Iliad, Andromache’s reaction is an example of melodrama. Like cliche, writing melodramatically is one of those things writers are warned never to do. It’s been taught to me by many a teacher and many a book. We are told that melodrama is exaggerated behavior, that real people in real life don’t act that way. In written fiction as well as in film, there seems to be a growing trend toward subdued emotion. Almost never does an actor cry with rage, as Charlton Heston used to in movies like Ben Hur. Tonight I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2; and while I did enjoy the movie, Harry, Ron and Hermione’s portrayals left me cold. But I don’t blame the actors or the director. They did what resonates with American and English audiences today.

Examples of melodrama abound not only in Homer, but throughout Greek literature. In Euripides’ Medea, a wife slaughters her own sons to punish her husband’s infidelity. If you watch the play in the original Ancient Greek, women in the chorus run around the stage screeching (even in modern Greek soap operas, there is a lot of this going on). The Greek tradition of melodrama did not remain unique to Greece, but extended throughout Europe. The way Hamlet admonishes his mother for betraying her dead husband can only be called melodrama. The operatic songs in Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries also fall into this category. After the turn of the century, the trend was to move away from such theatrics. In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land that Time Forgot, the author describes, with great pride, how calmly the British make for the life boats after their ship is sunk by a German U-Boat. It was not long before subdued emotion turned from a virtue into the only behavior accepted by readers as realistic.

Despite my sincerest efforts to adopt it, the notion that melodrama is over-the-top has never sat well with me, because my personal experience differs greatly. There are certainly people who take pain and suffering with quiet reserve, damning up their emotions and keeping a “stiff upper lip,” so to speak. But I grew up in a Greek household, where screaming and hair pulling and table smashing was not too uncommon. My wife, who is from a much more subdued Moroccan culture, was horrified after first witnessing an argument in my family. She couldn’t understand how, the following day, we could all be chummy as if nothing had happened. Greece has a long storied history of civil war and reconciliation, because we are a passionate and forgiving people. One of my favorite movies, I Love You to Death, a dark comedy about an Italian family (which could have just as easily been Greek), illustrates the point beautifully. In the film, a wife attempts to murder her husband (played wonderfully by Kevin Kline) upon discovering evidence of his infidelity. After several failed attempts to kill him, and much hilarity, she is arrested. When her husband finds out about it, from the hospital where he is being treated for the bullet in his head, he immediately bails her out of jail—then begs on hands and knees for her forgiveness.

I am not opposed to the American and British ethos of subdued emotion, or subtext. In fact, I find it quite refreshing, because I am not a fan of arguments that leave your vocal cords sore (or having my wife try and kill me). But to be taught, for the sake of fiction, that people simply “do not behave that way” is absurd. Maybe not in your household, but they do in mine. If I were to write a piece of fiction portraying typical American life, a lot of hair pulling might be inappropriate. But in a fantasy setting, where cultures vary greatly from our own, how can we expect the characters to always react the same way we do? If we are to place our characters in settings inspired by ancient time periods, how can we not expect them to behave the way we are told by Homer people of that time behaved?

What constitutes melodrama is a matter of culture. In the early days of Fantasy and Sci-Fi, there was a bias towards women and sex. Today, we take for granted that women can play the roles traditionally reserved for men; women don’t have to be the damsels in distress; they can fight, even play the hero. We have also come to accept diverse sexuality as aspects of culture. No longer do we limit sex to monogamous man/woman relationships. And yet, the same cultural sensibility is not applied to verbal and emotional behavior. To me, it seems, every character, in every fictional universe, no matter how bizarre and alien, must conform to this credo of reserved emotion. Without even realizing it, a lot of fiction today is limited by American cultural biases. My wife has suggested that my novel might be better appreciated in foreign markets, since they can better appreciate its Greek influences. After all, I was not raised on a diet of Tolkien. My Lord of the Rings is the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Arabian Nights and the Kalevala. I’ve done my best to portray a spectrum of cultural diversity in Ages of Aenya, but I am unwilling to ignore my own social experience.

Often, critics will say, Who talks like that? And I have an answer for them. Greeks do. Or, more specifically, my father does. My father has been known to stand at the dinner table to recite, with perfect clarity, from Socrates or Solon or Herodotus. Nobody in my family finds this the least bit unusual. For the longest time, my father has asked me to write his life story. It is something I have been putting off due to my busy schedule, and to the fact that my writing style hasn’t prepared me for a biography. Still, I grin whenever I think of all the melodramatic things my father has said over the years.

The Tao of Writing

This post originally appeared at The Writer's Disease

For two decades, my family and friends have struggled to understand my need to tell stories, and to have those stories be recognized. They sometimes see it as just a need for approval, or praise, or fame. While praise does motivate me, what really drives me to write is much simpler: we who suffer from the writer’s disease are eternally lonely, trapped in our own minds, on islands of our own imagination, and the only way we know to truly connect to the outside world is through story. Through the written word, we share our views about life, in the hopes of someday making a mark, the proverbial hand print on the wall that screams, “I was here! Once, I existed!” If anything, blogging purges my brain of ideas. At best, it is my way of reaching out to my fellow human beings. And yet all of this, I am aware, must come across as egocentric.

There are so many things I would love to share about my writing experiences, from techniques I’ve learned, to things writers should do to avoid heartache. But since I have yet to prove myself to a publisher, the idea seems a bit vain. Now that I am seeking professional representation, I have to be extra careful about the things I post. I have often been criticized for egotism, and have since done my best to achieve a Buddhist-like selflessness. But a selfless writer is a paradox. How can a writer not be even a little self-centered, when he must come to believe, at some point, that his voice should be heard over the din of the masses? That his experiences are worth being known, and must be recorded for future generations? This contradiction, between the need for humility and the need for confidence, has plagued me for the past six years, since failing in my self-publishing ventures. Just like the famous koan that asks, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” there are many paradoxical enigmas in the writing profession. It is part of what I like to call the Tao of Writing. And, just like the Tao, nobody can teach you what it is to be a good writer, or offer up the secret to a great story; you simply have to discover that on your own.

Publishers, editors, and professors like to offer formulas for literary success, as if such a formula could be found after ten thousand years of trying, but the advice they give is often contradictory, if not inane. I fondly remember a story I wrote in my college days, "Anna," now lost to a computer virus, which featured a nun dragged to Hell by the Devil. My second year professor, the one with the PhD on his wall, kept insisting what Anna should have done. He didn’t like that she was a victim of random chance, that the Devil could steal her away despite her innocence. He recommended, of all things, that Anna be guilty of masturbation—which would have turned the story into a medieval morality play (not surprisingly, his PhD was not in English, but in religious studies). Everyone in my class thoroughly enjoyed Anna, however; they understood that the story had nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with the futility of fear. I changed the story for a better grade, but my professor didn’t like it any better, and neither did I.

To this day, if anyone uses the word "should" on me, I’ll likely punch him in the face. A story shouldn’t do anything but entertain the reader. Literature isn’t a science, and 1 + 1 does not equal 2. Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3, once not-so-famously said, and I paraphrase here, “In this business, nobody knows anything,” and I couldn’t agree more. Give me a story that does something well, and I’ll show you a well beloved yarn that doesn’t do the same thing. Do all good stories need engaging, interesting characters? Not if you ask H.P. Lovecraft. Do all good stories need a well defined conflict? Not if you ask Joseph Heller, or Albert Camus or J.D. Salinger. If I’ve learned anything during these past three decades toiling at my keyboard, it’s that the only thing a writer needs to do is write. Writing is no different than any other art form. Nobody picks up a violin and starts playing beautifully from the onset, no matter how many rules and guidelines they may have studied beforehand. Becoming a good writer comes from a lot of hard work, from the 10,000 hour rule Malcolm Gladwell puts forth in his book, "Outliers." Being a writer someone will pay to read also comes from living. Herman Melville could not have written Moby Dick without having worked on a ship. Mastering the literary arts is a lot like meditating on the meaning of the Tao. It takes time, dedication, and endless practice.

Lastly, how does one persevere, or as I like to phrase it, ridiculously persevere, without throwing in the towel? Writers often give so much of themselves for zero reward. What insane person spends thousands of hours working on a job, without ever knowing whether they’ll get paid for it, or whether they’ll even be recognized? I think this explains why so many of us suffer from depression, from Edgar Allen Poe to John Kennedy Toole to, yes, J.K. Rowling. Some people have suggested that I simply “write for myself,” but again, this is a paradox. The act of writing is a form of communication, the transferring of thoughts, feelings and ideas to the mind of another. I am forever conscious of the reader when I am hammering out a sentence, which is why, to attempt to tell a story without having a listener in mind simply doesn’t work. And yet, we all must strive toward the goal of being heard, even though we can never know, with any certainty, whether anyone will ever hear us. The only way I can see past this dilemma, is to write to communicate without ever expecting anyone to listen, which is, again, a paradox.

Buddhists have been known to spend days creating beautiful murals, called mandalas, out of colored sand. Once the mandalas are complete, they wipe the sand clear, instantly destroying days or weeks of work. It seems like a crazy thing to do, but that is part of Buddhist meditation, the learning to let go of desire and permanence, to achieve without wanting. This is now what I must teach myself. To simply write, in the present tense, without past or future in mind. This is the Tao of Writing.

Money and Art Make Strange Bedfellows

This post originally appeared at The Writer's Disease

Internet Land is rife with a very angry bunch of people who have nothing better to do than decry certain individuals for being, for lack of a better word, “sellouts”. George Lucas is most famous for this, with message board posts going something like this: “Once, George cared about art! But now, he’s just a businessman, a sellout!” But what exactly is art, or artistic integrity, and what does it mean to be a sellout? These terms are difficult to define. There is this popular notion that the “true” artiste cares little about money or success—that everything he does or doesn’t do is in the sacred name of his art. But just how accurate is this notion? And how legitimate is this hatred for people of film, literature, and music spewed by bloggers the world over?

Most people consider Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel a true masterpiece. But Michelangelo had little desire to paint the ceiling, doing so rather reluctantly, after being pressured by the Church. Auguste Rodin, famous for the Thinker, was commissioned by the Parisian government to create a statue of France’s most famous novelist, Honoré de Balzac. Although Rodin worked enthusiastically for many years on the statue, the completed work was hated by the French, so much so that Balzac’s sculpt was hidden for decades, before finally becoming accessible to the public. Like Michelangelo, he did what he was paid to do. But unlike the Sistine Chapel, Balzac was universally panned. Of course, no one today would argue that Rodin was a sellout. If born during the Internet Age, however, I’ve no doubt his integrity as an artist would be challenged. In music, consider the depiction of Mozart in the film, Amadeus (which, I know, is of questionable accuracy). The film depicts Mozart’s greatest compositions being of those for which he was paid to write, including his own funeral dirge.

What the public perceives as “art” has little to do with the circumstances surrounding how the art originated and more to do with the end result: does the public think the work is any good? Typically, if the piece moves people emotionally, it is labeled great art; if, on the other hand, the work is deemed inferior, the artist’s integrity is challenged.

The subject of art and business is near and dear to my heart. When I was in college, I rebelled against my creative writing teacher; the first chapter of our textbook insisted that art had little to do with inspiration and more to do with hard work. Since this didn’t feel like the position of the true artiste, I flat out told the teacher the book was bunk and that I refused to read it. Due to my passionate argument, he told me I didn’t have to. I wish now I hadn’t been so pigheaded; it would have saved me years of heartache. I would have learned that great art can come from the head as well as from the heart, and that, usually, the very best art comes out of a confluence of the two.

Unlike Michelangelo or Mozart, some artists with purely artistic intentions churn out garbage; case in point: Lady in the Water by M. Night Shyamalan. This was a movie that, as the director describes it, came straight from the heart, an actual bedtime story he told to his kids. Despite its artistic intentions, however, the film was universally panned, and Shyamalan’s promising career as “the next Spielberg” quickly disintegrated. George Lucas had the same problem with his first art house film, THX 1138, which was based on a student project he produced in college. The film was a flop both commercially and critically, and only after succumbing to studio pressure did he come up with American Graffiti. Though Graffiti was largely based on Lucas’s childhood, and no doubt came from the heart, financial pressure is what pushed him into making it. Decades later, when Lucas made the Star Wars prequels, which he described as the first films he was allowed to make without studio intervention (purely artistic) the films were met mostly with criticism. Many argued that Lucas no longer cared about art—that the prequels were intended solely as moneymakers, but considering the billions he earns running his FX company, Industrial Light and Magic, that doesn’t make any sense. If anything, the prequels were a huge expense for Lucas, paid for directly out of pocket. Though Episode I made a fortune for him in merchandising, production expenses could have been split by 20th Century Fox, as was his 1977 film, but just as he did with Empire Strikes Back, Lucas funded the prequels to maintain artistic integrity. Whether the prequels were any good is beyond the scope of this blog, but I’ve never questioned the man's integrity.

Often, art and commercial appeal go hand in hand. I learned this in the most painful way in 2004, when I self-published my first book, The Dark Age of Enya, which came straight from the heart to become a total fiasco. After a bout of depression and much soul searching, I reevaluated my beliefs and started reworking the book. In the rewrite, I took greater care to consider the interests of the reader. Rather than becoming a sellout, the need for commercial viability pushed me to becoming a better artist. The end product, Ages of Aenya, has, in my opinion, greater artistic integrity than the old version. This mode of thinking is contrary to the notion of “art for art sake,” but a whole lot of heartbreak has taught me otherwise.

I don’t think anyone can say what is in the heart of an artist. I cannot presume to call anyone a sellout. I cannot bring myself to believe that a person who once cared about the craft would stop caring over love of money. But I do believe that, due to need of income, an artist may direct his efforts toward more commercially viable projects. Does that mean he has lost his artistic integrity? No. The two concepts are mutually exclusive but often exist in a state of confluence.

The Internet is so rife with couch critics calling famous people sellouts, that Trey Parker and Matt Stone, of South Park fame, in one Interview decided that, knowing they would be called sellouts eventually, decided to jump the gun and admit that their goal all along was to “sell out as soon as possible.”

World Building and Never Ending Stories

This was originally published at The Writer's Disease, on October 14th, 2010

It seems today that fantasy has been hijacked by “world builders”—writers so enamored by Tolkien, that their No. #1 priority is to build a convincing world. While I am all for convincing worlds, I am not all for it if it hinders the telling of a story, or takes the place of one. I won’t mention names, but many of today’s most popular fantasists don’t seem to so much be telling a story as writing a textbook for their daydreams. I am often left asking myself, what’s the point of this book? Tolkien was less a story teller and more a professor of history and linguistics. He translated Old English classics like Beowulf and Sir Gawain & the Green Knight into modern English. While this brought a level of expertise to his writing, it did not bode well for the future of writers wanting to emulate him. As much as we may want, none of us can be Tolkien, or can hope to achieve the same kind of success. We would have to live Tolkien’s life and study everything he did to match his style, and even then, why would anybody want to? Writers must draw from their own experiences to tell their own stories. And most importantly, story telling must be our no. #1 priority. True story tellers, it seems to me, are more often found in Sci-Fi. Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke were true story tellers. In the fantasy realm, Ursula K. Leguin, Peter S. Beagle, and J.K. Rowling are true story tellers. Rowling’s Harry Potter, by the way, also builds a believable universe, but she does so in a subtle fashion that services the plot. Did anyone really need a history lesson about Hogwarts before taking an interest in the tormented boy living under the cupboard?

Despite my love for speculative fiction, I more often find enjoyment in a good classic, or even in a real world setting. I adored The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaleed Hosseini, and wonder whether I can capture the same intensity of emotion in the fantasy genre.

I also hate it when books do not conclude, or do not conclude in meaningful ways. This seems to be another symptom of world building, in that the details take up too much room to allow for a conclusion. What is it about this new trend of books that doesn’t give an ending to a story? How can you tell if a writer is any good if he doesn’t even end it? I may be old fashioned, but a story for me must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones has no ending at all. Scott Bakker’s The Darkness that Comes Before does the same thing. It is for that reason that I have recently started to appreciate R.A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf Trilogy, and Margaret Weis’ and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance. While they may cater a bit more to the youth, at least they actually tell a story; at least they know how to end things in a way that feels satisfactory, while leaving enough mystery and intrigue to make a reader want to pick up the next in the series.

People of Aenya: Princess Radia

  Once, not long ago, there lived a king in the land of Tyrnael, who had but one daughter. This daughter he loved with his whole heart, but upon her eleventh year she fell ill, her cheeks paling like the petals of a dying ilm. Never leaving her bedside, the king called for every physician... Continue Reading →

People of Aenya: Avia

AVIA is the daughter of King Azrael of Nimbos, a prominent yet rebellious member of the avian people. She is known for her willowy figure, bright azure eyes, tall head crest, and bright plumage of green, blue and violet, which changes with the direction of the light. Despite her highborn status, in Nimbos AVIA is... Continue Reading →

My Naked Dream

From as far back as I can remember, I’ve dreamed about being naked, and always my nakedness was coupled with feelings of liberation, elation, and joy. I never understood the, “Oops, I forgot to wear clothes to school!” nightmare. Shame, vulnerability, all those negative emotions we associate with baring our bodies, never entered into the... Continue Reading →

Aenya Newsletter 01/10/20

Greetings, Aenya fans! It’s 2020! It’s finally 2020, the year of the Aenya Big-Bang, and I am very excited about all of the great stuff I have to show you in this update. First and foremost, I should probably explain a little about the literary explosion that is about to make your reading experience a... Continue Reading →