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Journey Together
I'm a lucky man! On June 4th, I married a wonderful and lovely woman - Laura, whom I can now call my wife!
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The wedding was on her family's wooded property in in the hills of Labadie -- west along the Missouri River from St. Louis. Guests were welcomed by the bride herself, handing out drinks from the back of a pickup truck in a barn! We led the whole party, drinks in hand, out to a clearing in the woods. After a short ceremony consisting of a traditional Sri Lankan lamp-lighting, a pagan Celtic Handfasting, and an exchange of rings and vows that involved some of our closest friends and also moss, we walked back together to the barn for eating, drinking, dancing, and fire.
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The DIY MFA
Having apparently learned nothing from my previous two stints of graduate school, I got curious about what pursuing an MFA might look like. Wouldn't it be cool to be a triple Master? And then, fortunately, I remembered that actual grad school requires an absurd amount of time and money, and is a terrible idea. If only there were a way to do it myself -- if I only knew what to do, I could do it on my own time.
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Fortunately, someone named Gabriela Pereira decided to solve this problem. She's subdivided the intended outcome of an MFA into three components: 1) learning how to Write with focus, 2) learning how to Read with purpose, and 3) building your writing community. Of the three elements, where I feel most under-leveled in the second. It's nice to have some guidance in picking out reading that is not just interesting, but will also help me become a better writer.
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I ordered her book and we'll see how it goes.
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Writing Update
Progress on Rassam's Eye remains at about 18,500 words, but I've done a lot of refinement of the ideas and character goals and received some great feedback from the Word Still Writers Circle that I am in the process of implementing. My short story, The Karma of Ponds, remains under consideration at Fantasy magazine.
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Aside from the above recalibration work on RE, I've spent a lot of writing time lately exploring new ideas that have been bubbling in the background, wanting to capture them before they fade and I can't remember what they were about.
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The foremost of these new ideas is (finally) a kind of sequel to Red Soil Through Our Fingers, but set a decade or so later and centered on Ashok Parekh, a secondary character from the first book. The tone feels a bit more reflective and the pace a bit slower than my first novel's fiery urgency, but we'll see what comes out whenever I get around to writing it. I actually have a rough outline of the whole story I think -- it would just take time to actually write the damn thing down!
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The second set of ideas is for a linked trilogy of what would each probably be novellas in length, set in a fantasy world I made up for a recent Dungeons and Dragons campaign I ran called Aramoor. The motifs center on ecological stability and the sustainability of societies.
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What I really need to do is set aside a full day, not just an hour or so here and there, to just hammer one of these ideas out in a "blazing fire", as Joyce Carol Oates recommends writing a first draft (in one shot if possible)! I suppose more ideas than time to write them is a better problem than the converse...
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The backlogged idea buffer cleared for the moment, I'm looking forward to what July brings in terms of prose on page. Written promise: a sneak-peak excerpt of something in the next issue!
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Content Consumed
- Finished: The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones. I'm not typically one for horror, or even thrillers, but I'm very glad I took a chance on something different. It's not for the squeemish - lots of graphically unpleasant ways to die. However, I think I learned from the snappy prose, the thriller-like pacing (I literally did not want to put it down), and an excellent working case study on "raising the stakes." Bonus points for interesting characters and a very intriguing lens on a slice of contemporary Native American identity and life.
- Started: Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. Despite its status as a classic of the genre, I've actually never read it. I realized I had a used paperback copy picked up from some con or another and that it appears to be relatively short and decided to go for it. So far, my standard Asimov reaction: the ideas are interesting, the characters are boring, and I'm trying (and so far, succeeding, but slowly) to stay above the threshold of "enjoyable enough to keep going." I kind of feel as though I need to finish it just to say that I have, but also it's pretty good.
- Started: The Paris Review, No. 238 (Winter 2021). Normally this kind of thing is too... uh, "literary" for me. I still think that might be true. This single "issue" of a "journal" is about 285 pages long! I felt the opening interview with author Gary Indiana was very self-referential -- the interviewer and -ee trading knowing smug allusions to dozens of authors and works and literary haunts in NYC and LA that I have never heard of. (To be honest, I'd never heard of Gary Indiana before reading the interview either.) It's a culture I guess. HOWEVER, I did learn a lot of things about this author's process for idea generation and sorting, and it's also interesting to see what is considered to be excellent prose by a premiere journal.
- Started: The DIY MFA, by Gabriela Pereira.
- Queued: Every writing and storytelling class available on Masterclass... starting with Joyce Carol Oates and her course on the craft of short story writing
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What have you been reading or watching? Any recommendations for me?
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I do love getting your feedback and comments, so please continue to reach out. Thanks for reading, and see you in the next issue!
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