The end, or a new beginning.

I've been meaning to make this post for quite a while, but I keep putting it off.

Recently I had a bit of a wake-up call about the public-ness of this blog, and I seriously considered making it private, but I stand behind everything I've ever written here. Fully.

However, I would like a place to post my more recent writings, which are much more of the fiction persuasion. I would love a place to put up my finished short stories for anyone to read who wants to read them, but I worry about privacy and plagiarizing (is any of my writing good enough for anyone to want to copy it? probably not, but I'm not taking chances), and also if I want to publish any of my work someday, I can't have it up in a public place.

So, I am creating a private, by-invite-only fiction blog. I can only invite people whose e-mail addresses I have, so if you want an invitation, please e-mail me (Miranda E Piris @ gmail dot com, no spaces). (Or leave a comment here with your e-mail if you're okay with that.) The only e-mail address I have is my sister's, so if you're not my sister, e-mail me!

If you ask me and your intentions are good, I'll add you to my new blog. Friends, family, well-wishers, I hope to hear from you.

Most likely, this will be my last post on this blog. It had a good run. I'd feel more sad about it, except I'm writing my ass off this year, and I feel AWESOME about that. 75k and going strong!

Cheers.

Three months in

Well hello!

I haven't posted anything since January, but the writing is still going strong. Earlier this month I did a little retrospective about the writing I've done so far (writing about writing, what a navel-gazer I am). Here it is:

I started this year with a goal of 200,000 words. I was so excited to start. I had no plan for what I was going to write; just trusted myself to writing, that it would come to me.
I am over a quarter of the way toward my goal, and I could not be happier with the transformation that has taken over my life. I feel like writing a thank you note to whoever put me up to this. I'm not sure if I should address it to my past self or to God. I am too modest for the former and not devout enough for the latter.
I spent January writing things for myself, sort of getting into the groove of things with prompts. I ended up writing my first allegory. I hadn't finished a story in years, but I finished that one, and I felt so proud of myself. I felt a newfound confidence in myself. I felt that the 200,000 word goal was doable.
February, I tried my hand at short stories. I started several. I wrote what my sister later told me was called “microfiction.” I wrote scenes. I found that writing fiction was much harder than responding to prompts. It takes more time, more heart, more dedication. More pushing.
March got difficult. My stories, it seemed, had run their course. Pushing plotlines any further seemed futile. I cast about for material and came up short a lot of the time. But I pushed through, and wrote even when I didn't have anything to write about, and milked stories. Fortunately I had my story lottery to lean on, seven randomly picked prompts as seminal points for thousand-word-minimum stories. I got some wonderful material from those, and am still working on them.
Now it is April. Looking back on the past three months and seeing how much I've written (over 50,000 words), I'm in awe of my own abilities. But even more amazing than the word count is how I feel about myself, and what I've learned.
I'm reading The Right to Write by Julia Cameron, and her take on writing really speaks to me. She sees it as a spiritual thing, something you need to do every day just like eating, something that helps you make sense of your life. What I feel about writing does touch upon the spiritual. It has radically changed my life. I want to write through everything. I want to write as therapy. I want to write to understand myself better, my life better. And I am doing that. It has given me more confidence, made me more open and honest about everything. I feel like I added a dimension to myself. Or found a dimension of myself that was lost for a while.
Before I started this writing project, I felt flat, like something was missing from my life. I felt two-dimensional, like a lifeless drawing on a forgotten pad of paper. Writing has helped me jump off the page and live fully.
I'm still in the learning process, of course. I'm still just three months in. I'm learning to craft characters, I'm learning how to follow plots, I'm learning how to tackle fatigue and lack of ideas and my own personal blocks. I'm learning to fight lapses in self esteem.
Most of all I still haven't tackled dealing with an audience. I can swallow my pride and send bits and pieces of my work to my husband and my sister, but letting people read my work is very difficult for me. I'm so afraid of getting shot down. I know my fledgling writing-ego is very fragile yet. I'm working toward it. I know one of these days I'll just have to dive in and let real writers read my stuff. I'm just not ready yet.

On that note, I do plan to post some of my writings (like, real writings) soon. I've got a few pieces of short fiction that have gotten the stamp of approval from Anthony and Aimee, and I feel comfortable putting them out in the world.

I feel awesome.

That is all.

3 weeks in

I have not been blogging, because I've been writing.

New Years' Resolution numero uno is going very, very well. It's been three weeks now, and I've written every single day. My daily goal is 548 words (that adds up to my 200k goal over the course of the year), and while some days I haven't quite written that many, on most days I write far more. I'm overshooting my goal by about 1500 words already.

The three week mark was significant for me, because my childhood piano teacher told me that if you can do something consistently for three weeks, it becomes a habit. And so it has! It's no longer a matter of "am I going to find the time to write today"-- it's "what am I going to write about today?"

Here's what I wrote today; it seemed vaguely blog-worthy.

What I Want to Write About, Really.

I have felt for a long time now that I have something in my mind worth writing about; it just hasn't come together yet. But there's something there, building. Maybe everyone has this sensation of all of their thoughts, experiences and knowledge sort of stewing together in their minds, which will someday combine perfectly and come out as a work of art. If the novel I have building were a cake, I would be somewhere between the mixing of the batter and the putting it into the oven. Maybe mixing and adding ingredients is what I was doing all along, and now, since I have been writing every day, this is the process of pouring the batter and letting it bake. Maybe I should have used a different metaphor.

Anyway, there are several elements of this creative dish that I would like to have come out in the finished product, so let's brainstorm that. My goal (my dream?) is that in the end, the different elements will be well combined but still retain their own unique flavors, like in any good dish.

These elements are (in no particular chronological order):

• Motherhood. There's no way I can keep motherhood out of my writing now that it's such a part of my life. It is who I am now, so it's going to come out in my characters. Even when Jodi Picoult had a 40-year-old female lawyer with no children in one of her books, the woman was still maternal in a way, and ended up a mother in the end. I think the same would happen if I tried to write a childless character. Plus, there are so many funny and poignant and bizarre elements of motherhood and childhood; there's lots to write about there.

• Psychology, psychoanalysis, Lacan, abnormal psych, etc. I worry that my brain is just a little rusty on these concepts, but as the past year has shown me through my blog, they're easily conjured. I'm not sure exactly how these things will come out in my writing, but a few things that fascinate me in particular are schizophrenia, and the psychological effects of trauma (both in childhood in adulthood).

• The supernatural. I don't particularly believe (or disbelieve) in ghosts, but I still find paranormal stuff interesting. I spend more time than I'd care to admit reading stories and watching shows about paranormal stuff. It's fascinating and it never gets old. I also love horror movies, and I pay specific attention to what is particularly scary about them, to me. Often it's just the suspense. A lot of times when it gets to the super-scary, everyone-in-the-audience-screaming parts, I'll think “Well that was scary, but this happening would've been scarier.” I've sort of got a mental list going of things that would freak me the hell out.

• What I'm most interested in doing is trying to combine the psychological element with the supernatural element. What if you thought you were seeing paranormal stuff, but it turned out you were just showing the first symptoms of schizophrenia? What if you were already schizophrenic, but were seeing paranormal stuff and no one believed you? There are lots of avenues to explore along that line between what's in your head and what's real but unexplainable.

I also dabble with thoughts about religion, but I'm not sure I'm well informed enough about religion to write it. Environment is also something to ponder, and I've got an edge on that, since I've lived both in rural Maine and New York City. An interesting thought is that my urban dweller friends are creeped out by the woods, whereas I was fine in the woods but really creeped out by the city until I'd lived here a good long time.

So there you go, Internet viewers. A peek into my process (that sounded dirty). Will I write the Great American novel? Time will tell.