Native Response

Against the wishes of many of my people, we have helped the strange ones have emerged from the horizon. These odd people floundered upon the rocky shores when they landed, their already pale bodies turning paler as they slowly started to die out.

The village has offered these strange people from the sea our help and our ways. We have taught them how to adapt to our home as they are seemingly incapable of nurturing the gods beneath their feet. Indeed, it seems as though these people do not realize the promise between the land and the people.

They are cold in nature and apparel, much like the god they worship. They are harsh and unforgiving, their clothes joyless and showing nothing of the individual. They are alone, untrusting of others, including my tribe, even when they offer help. It is like their god. He is alone, with his other two manifestations by his side. Though there may be two, it is like looking in a mirror: they are all the same in the end, and he is the only one in his own world.

I think my village will come to regret trusting these foreigners in the end. They will harm us, I am sure of it. They care not for our help and view us as less than they. I know we shall regret it.

I certainly do.

Love Polygons can ruin books

     As a part-time librarian who works in the Young Adult section, I realize much of the content passed through the library to our section every day is primarily romance novels. Teen girls (and even some boys) read a lot of romance novels, whether or not they'd like to admit it. It's a focal point in most teen books because it's something most teens focus on. There's pressure to find your special person, to have a high school sweet heart you're going to spend the rest of your life with.

     In Prized, the sequel to Birthmarked, there's an awful love polygon going on right now and it's honestly ruining the plot. It's a polygon so ugly its mother probably left out for the wolves at some point during its childhood and even the wolves didn't want it. As a result, it grew up in the wild to one day reemerge into the civilized world and evolve into the next ugliest thing, the politician. It will procede to drive the country further into depression until it is time to evolve again and slink back into the sea as everything goes crazy around it.

     Trust me, it's so how this love polygon has spent its life.

     The polygon drives me insane. My advice to Gaia is to stop being naive, because we all know she's not, pick a guy, and get the hell out of dodge. The society Gaia currently lives in only has 250 women and over 2000 men as a result of some freakish mutation. The women are in charge, naturally, and they're insane as Star Wars fanboys at Comic Con in San Francisco when George Lucas walks onto the stage.

     The Birthmarked triology isn't the only teen series insisting on using this blood thirsty method of moving a dead plot along. Some books, such as the Twilight series, the Shadow Falls series (surprisingly not all about vampires), Theatre Illuminata (Shakespeare's Ariel thrown in with other play's characters love triangles), and even the Hunger Games are using awful love triangles. I know you're writing for teens, but even teens like to be thrown a scrap of plot every now and then. Even the Hunger Games is guilty at times, using the triangle to move the plot along, with the tension between Peeta, Katniss and Gale to hold the plot up.

     Honestly, for the sake of your reader and your main character, make the choice easy for them. Sure, make them fight and claw for the love of their life and by all means, don't take it easy on them. That, my good authors, is a plot. A plot isn't when the main character spends her entire time thinking about the men (plural, men) of her dreams while sitting in the shade or mercifully being run over by a van. Give your readers a bone, something to make them think or cry or do something! Just don't let your character do the thinking for them.

Moment of Inspiration

...Her horse moaned as his powerful cousin pranced down the street. Their two sires were cousin species of the Northern unicorns. His sire was the bullish kind, heavily muscled and built to work, hardy against the flaying winds that screamed through the mountain passes. They were captured and used to sire the cold blood draft horses in the village.

The horse moaned again in fear, his skin shivering and twitching under her hand. His stunted face butted against her shoulder, large eyes rolling back into his head. She spoke softly to him and rubbed the bony knob on his head as the lordling passed.

She could not blame her dray for quailing at the sight of the lordling's steed. It was obvious his sire belonged to the deadlier of the two species. They were vicious creatures, with fangs and sharpened cloven feet, which made them seem more lupine than equine. They hunted the mountain sheep, the elk, other unicorns and even humans when they had the chance. Their tiny feet allowed them to scale sheer cliff walls and their bodies could stand such impacts from jumping off such cliffs.

The steed seemed to have inherited its height from its dam, but its spindly legs, skeletal face and sharp teeth gave it away from what it truly was. It fought against the reins, shaking its head back and forth, but the lordling would only pull back at the reins with a snap to discourage such insubordination. Eventually,  blood mixed with the froth at the corner of the horse's mouth and she knew the bit was cutting its mouth.

The steed trembled as its master urged it on down the street and she could see people shrinking to the side to avoid the mad monstrosity and its cruel rider.

What strange and terrible people these lordlings were.



(I'm not really sure what inspired this.)

Carter's blog title keeps changing

     I'm looking forward to this semester's Lit Mag. Apparently the theme is 'submersion' and I'm already finding I have ideas flying around in my head like popcorn as I start to pen my next submission. I have pictures from Alaska I'm thinking about submitting, namely the valley to Kenai as sun started to set at 3 p.m., their time. 

     It was a wonderful view; the ice was groaning and breaking in the Cook Inlet, floating past at amazing speeds. The narrow road wound between the freezing cold water and the sheer rock cliffs, ice falls clinging to their sides. Farther down the road, the cliffs mellowed out and bulldozers could be seen going back and forth, going farther down the valley towards Kenai, where avalanches had blocked off roads. If one looked up on the mountainside, you could see avalanches which hadn't quite made it to the road. Twenty foot walls or more of ice and snow sat looming by the side of the road. At the bottom, spheres of ice peeked out from the body of snow, feet of a giant millipede which had slid down from the clouded mountain tops. 

As the sun really began to set, beams of light were visible in the air, catching on the snow which had blown off the trees with light breezes. Besides the groan of ice and the occasional car, the valley was silent. There was no wind, a constant by Wyoming standards, except high above in the mountains. Snowy mountains turned pink in the dying light loomed across the bay.

This was Alaska, in the eyes of a Wyoming native.

Why I write

     To be frank, I have pretty bad memory problems. It's part of the reason why I write, even if I don't necessarily realize it most of the time. When I write, sometimes things appear in my writing I had forgotten or I write situations out as I see them in a snippet of memory, and it sometimes works out. Other times, my peers and family will read through a story of essay and say, "Don't you remember when...?"

     Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

     To my classmates, this is why I was weird all those years.

     When I was seven, I moved to Cody. Several months after, I began seeing a counselor and he told my mother I had PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder. Usually it's something soldiers have when they come back from a warzone. I wasn't really sure what that meant at the time. I guess I was too distracted by these glass wands he had. One thing I can remember is they were filled with glitter and stars and shone when you held them up to the light. We didn't realize at the time what it meant for me. Besides the emotional relapses I'd go through, I apparently seemed to be a normal kid. 

     I don't remember much about being a normal kid.

     The thing about the entire time I was growing up was I was the kid who acted weird and had the weird name. That's about all I can remember from that time period. Most psychologists say memory loss is a sign of repression of bad memories. It seems to me I remember most of the bad stuff and forget everything else. As I went through elementary school, I think I told some pretty wild stories about my life back in Casper. I realize I probably did that because I was afraid to remember that I couldn't remember, so I made up slightly probable stories so my classmates wouldn't think I was more of a freak than I already was.

    I didn't realize I was missing large chunks of memory until I was in sixth grade. Something stupid popped up in my head one day, something from an old cartoon I used to watch. I couldn't remember the name of the character or anything about the show and it frustrated me. Then slowly, I realized I couldn't really remember anything about living back in Casper. To be honest, I flipped. I could remember nearly everything academic I had learned, but I had huge 'blanks' in my memory about my life. My mother wanted to say it was normal, but she and I figured out pretty quickly it was a side effect of PTSD. She encouraged me to trawl back through my memories to try to find what I was missing, but it didn't do me any good. Memories seemed to come and go as they pleased, sometimes in the middle of a social studies class. It helped to have a computer in middle school, because if it was something I was interested in back then, I could just put it in a search engine and go. Other times, it'd be something only I could know, a personal experience.

     I lost another chunk of memory between eighth grade and my freshman year when faced with a really screwed up event that year. It may have been gradual, but for me, it was like waking up one morning and knowing, just knowing, that I had forgotten it all again. Thanks to my friends and the low stress situation at home, I managed to scramble and piece a lot together again, so there's only minimal blanks, mostly surrounding my middle school years. My elementary years became foggier. 

    

    It's a fair question to ask, "Don't you forget as you get older?" You do. Many people do. I just thought that summer it was pretty weird when I couldn't remember a few months before very clearly. My situation feels like I'm an old man looking for his teeth when they're in his mouth. His mouth is numb and he is blind. If he could reach up and touch his mouth, he'd be able to feel the teeth. He wouldn't be able to describe them to you, but they would be there. 

     I took the opportunity my freshman year to rebuild myself, as a lot of people do when they get into high school. The problem remained with getting back a little bit to person I was before, without being the extremist I was about certain issues. When I looked back to that girl in middle school, I saw a selfish, moody girl with huge anger problems along with obsession issues. It's like looking at a completely different person and trying to project their personality onto yourself. It was a long road. My newly acquired debate mentors, one of whom became my best friend later on, thought I was pretty weird. I was pretty weird. I stuck pretty close to them that year, trying to create a safe environment for myself as I rebuilt myself out of scattered, colorful legos that were scattered all over the floor. I sought to become a kinder, better person out of the blank personality that I had. It was hard. Occasionally I'd act way too much like the old me, the old judgmental and hateful person I was.

    There's not a lot to say about the years in between then and now. Elementary has become a lot fuzzier, to the point that I maybe have five distinct memories. Maybe that's normal. I was worried about freshman and sophomore year earlier this month, but my parents and I are trying to stable out my diet and see if it helps at all. I've got a lot of factors against me right now. I was born with a genetic B12 and iron deficiency, something that's really prevalent in my family. Vitamin B12 controls the balances in your ears, but it can also mess with your memory if you aren't careful. I obtained a brain injury freshman year during Homecoming. Yearbook managed to forever memorialize my marred face at the dance that year. While nothing initially showed up on the MRI and CT scans after my wreck, it was obvious I had a concussion and for months afterword, I had migraines. There's the ever present PTSD. I mostly don't have a problem with it anymore, but occasionally it rears its ugly head.

    Things still get fuzzy sometimes. Stress gets to me and it feels like my head has been shaken really hard and everything's fallen of the shelves. My friend, one of those debate mentors, mentioned to me that I had told him about joining Equus a total of 18 times in one week, the week before finals. He was a little worried. I figured it was minor, compared to everything else.

    I'm a pretty normal person, or I'd like to think I am. I'm trying to be proactive about managing stress and my food, hoping it'll eventually get better, and that the old man will be able to see his teeth again someday. I'm going to get it checked out again as soon as I'm 18 and move my records to my new doctor. I've got other appointments lined up with therapists, and hopefully, I'll be able to have a plan for how to handle this by the time I go to college. 

    This is why I write.

Relating to characters

     I'm currently reading Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'Brien. It's another teen dystopian novel and like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, it deals with the manipulation of genetics, although mostly this theme prevails later within the novel instead of the very beginning.

     Gaia Stone is the main character of the novel, a young woman from 'Outside the Wall'. She is a midwife, and delivers babies to the gate of the wall, which houses the society of the Enclave, in order to fill the quota. I can really connect with Gaia, mostly because of her self-hate throughout the novel. Half of Gaia's face is marred by a burn, supposedly caused when she fell on a vat which was boiling honey while she was learning how to walk. When faced with the society inside the wall, she feels stupid and uneducated, inferior to both citizens and doctors alike with her knowledge of the world and her skills. Her doubt and hate  weave in with her confusion of her situation, and I can definitely relate with her.

     While I don't have the same reasons, I can connect with Gaia over her self hate. For me, it's sometimes hard to get through the day. There's always a cynical voice in the back of my head, my own voice, telling me everything I have done wrong and beating me down with it. I'm usually in control of it, and my emotions, but sometimes if I'm too tired, if I'm too stressed, a look from someone else will get to me or someone else will say something and I'll take it the wrong way and everything will just spiral down hill. Gaia feels this as well when she's sneaking through the market. Citizens jeer at her as she races down the street and later, in prison, she perceives kindness from the other inmates as personal attacks and mockery.

     I can't really connect with Sephie, though. Persephone, or Sephie, is another physician inmate with Gaia. At first, she seems kind and almost nurturing to Gaia. However, I began to see a little bit more into Sephie's character when she and Gaia went out on a doctor's call to deliver a baby. She was harsh to Gaia at times, often for no reason. Several days later, Sephie was taken and released from prison. The guards revealed that Sephie had basically sold Gaia out, working off of Gaia's slip of the tongue during the delivery. I can't imagine ever justifying using someone else to that extent. She knew the trouble Gaia was in, yet she still threw her to the wolves. Sephie was cold and manipulative, a true psychopath, hiding  behind a warm and nurturing mask.

     Birthmarked is definitely a great read and I think it's leading the teen dystopian genre into a direction. The series is definitely one to watch.

World Building in Novels

     I read fantasy more than any other genre of book. The idea of magic, in both the familiar world I know and the world the author builds, fascinates me and I feel it truly put my imagination to the test.

     As I wrote my books in July and November, I made sure to sit down and read for, at least, an hour a day. With my job this summer, I didn't find it too hard to find time to read. In the summer, it helped me formulate the world Iron Butterfly took place in.

     I studied maps and descriptions of the setting extensively. How did the author describe this? How did this link back to the map? What can I do to incorporate that technique into my own writing?

     The Twilight series accomplishes the describing the world well, in my opinion, although my opinion of the overall series aggravates others. I realized how well the author described Washington, down to the last details down the coast. As I explored down the coast this summer, I linked in the novels I read prior to the vacation, like Wings by April Pike, which takes place in Crescent City, California. However, a fellow NaNoWriMo author, who has enjoyed a great reception to her self published novel Duffy Barkley is not a Dog, grumbled about Pike missing a key detail about the placement of the lighthouses on the coast. 

     However, other fantasy authors, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, T.A. Barron, Ursula Le Guin and Diana Wynne-Jones build their worlds fromt he ground up. Wynne-Jones, a favorite author of mine, mixes the 'real' world with magic as her characters travel through the dimensions. Twists on history make an excellent story lines, whether the world forms with magic growing along side it, or whether history changes due to the early discovery of DNA, such as in the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfield. Other authors, like Tolkien and Barron, go back to the very beginning of time to build their novels, or at least introduce the character responsible for it all. 

     I incorporated both the 'reality' we live in and my own world in Iron Butterfly this summer. I wish I wrote as well as the authors listed above (with only Meyer's descriptive skills). I need to work many snarls to work out in my story line, whether it deals with deciding what kind of forest the Black Court lives in or describing the series of buildings the dwarves built within the mines after they escaped from the oppression of the White Court. I need to build around some of the characters, like the ever present iridescent chameleon who makes his home in the trees of the forest. Sometimes, I'll need to build the characters around the world, as characters like Finn and Emma will need to react to environment around them. 

Either way, I have a long way to go.