evanescent fireworks

lights will guide you home

and ignite your bones

and i will try to fix you
// coldplay

Yesterday I accidentally started a novel. Again. That seems to be how all my novels start: accidentally. 

 See, I was adamant I wouldn't start another novel. I already have Broken Wings that I need to write, and editing Because I'm Irish and plotting for that book's sequel. As for writing, I'd been hoping to make my main focus on writing the currently four-book fantasy series fondly called The Silverthorne Mafia. I just don't need  to start another project right now. I want to finish what I've already got going, because the Silverthorne Mafia is really important to me.

But that doesn't mean my other projects aren't important to me, either.

It started with a couple of pins, then morphed into a pin board. For some reason the phrase "Evanescent Fireworks" came into my head, so that's what it was called. I wanted to leave it in the transitional planning stage indefinitely.

But that's not the way things work sometimes.

Last night, Scarlett posted in the group calling for a word war. Caroline joined, and they did one word war. I wasn't going to join at first, but then, as it so happens with word wars, they're infectious. Scarlett went to bed, but Caroline and I decided to do another one. There was just one problem: I had no idea what to write.

"Write something from Evanescent Fireworks," she said. "It'll be fun," she said.

All kidding aside, I started it. "I'll just write the beginning, as a snippets," I thought. I write snippets all the time. "And then I'll leave it for when I officially start writing EF."

Hahahaha. Haha. Ha.

That's when Annah and Wren came on, respectively. And five or six word wars later, I had a 2,000 word long beginning to EF.

The premise is this: it's a romance, set in the South. Evyn is my girl main character, who was born into a rich socialite family, but she doesn't fit in and only prefers to watch endless TV shows on Netflix. Don't let her seemingly carefree lifestyle fool you, though: she carries around a lot on her shoulders and has some really deep stuff to sort through. Her penchant for Netflix only disguises the pain she feels. As for the other half of the lovely couple, Chris is the lead singer in a band, and he's being very mysterious thus far. I do know he plays guitar and rides a motorcycle and he has some secrets about his past that I don't think he's telling me. He also sang Part of Your World while dishing up his green bean casserole at Evyn's mom's party.

There's also Alec Mumford, aka Mum, who plays guitar and loves Eragon and wears Ring pops and is an incorrigible flirt. I adore him. (That's him playing banjo on the right.)

I don't know what this story is about in full, and I don't know how I'm going to write this, or what will happen when I do. But I do know that I love Mum and I connect with Evyn more than I ever thought I would and this story does need to be written.

I just don't know how or when. But I do know that my best and most beloved novels happen by accident. I have an inkling that this one will be no different.

(if these images belong to you, please let me know.)

Barney Lessons 101: Learning to Share our Stories

If any of you guys have ever watched Barney growing up, then you probably know what sharing is (if you don't then there was something wrong with your childhood). I hate sharing, personally. Well, I don't hate sharing stuff like my shoes or my clothes or my food (unless its chocolate or something), but I hate sharing my work. I think that's a common thing about writers; we are afraid to share our stuff while we are writing it. Even the big name writers have a hard time. Take Stephanie Meyer for example. One of her excerpts leaked out online and she freaked out. At first I was like chill woman, but as time went on I realized that I would have been the same way. I would have been just as protective over my work as she was, and I think that you would too. We are all so greedy and selfish with our stories. Why is that? Why do we have such a hard time sharing our stories? I still don't really understand why, but here is my explanation for it.

Sometimes school really sucks. Let's face it people, its fun for a little bit when you can come home with coloring sheets for homework and reading assignments such as The Magic Treehouse  book series or whatever (you know, the one about Jack and Annie and a totally epic tree house that would put the Tardis to shame). By the way, does Morgana or whats-her-name remind anybody of Revir Song? Anyways, ever since those glory childhood school days ended we all just kind of slipped into the deep, scary, dark world called high school (dun dun dun). Our imaginations were torn out by textbooks, math, bad teachers and worst of all, the lack of Ms. Frizzle (its just Ms. right? she's still single?). But nothing about high school is as terrible as the fact that homework takes the place of doing the things that we love. And for us, that is writing, which, in return, creates monsters out of all of us. When I go for long periods of time without writing due to homework, I turn into a permanent PMS beast. But that's just me.

I'm going to get a little bit personal here. Its been a hard year for me. Heck, its been hard for everyone around here. School is hard enough, and its breaking me down honestly, as it is for all of you (probably). And then there are those like me who not only have to struggle through school, we have to struggle through situations at our homes and in our personal lives. For writers like us, the only thing that gets us through the day is the hope that we can return to our books and our characters, pouring out our pains and our struggles through people who don't even exist. Writing is, in a way, living. We use it to get through the horrors of high school, college, home situations, relationships, and most of all our biggest problems. 

Yeah, see, that's what most people don't get about us authors. They don't get that when we write, we aren't doing it because its a hobby. We aren't doing it because we are bored or because we want to become famous authors someday. We do it because we have to. Inside of all of us lives a creature, a living soul that contains all of our tears and hurts and pains, and it drives us to write. No, it doesn't just drive us to do so, it forces us. And if we stop, it just might eat us up.

Bad analogy? Maybe. But its true that there is so much more to the writer than meets the eyes. There is so much more to our work than simple words and stories and characters. I believe that every character that we create is a part of our lives, a memory pushed into a human body, a piece of ourselves that we didn't notice before reincarnated as a living person. These characters have the power to take our experiences and make them their own, and to take our pain and our suffering away from us. They make us better people; they show us who we can be and the pieces of ourselves that we should avoid.

When I write, I usually do so when crying. Every word contains a small silver tear, and within every tear lives a world of my own regret and my own misery. When a writer puts a pen to the paper, it is not done in the hopes that another could come and read it and then leave it behind forever. When an author begins a story it is not done because they dream of having someone read it and then compliment it or something. No, for me it is much different. I see the writer as a complicated person who cannot understand herself no matter how hard she tries. In order to do so she spills out her soul onto the paper to read and understand. She bleeds out her tears and her hurts caused by the pains that life has to offer her, so that she can know how to overcome her fears and her difficulties. Writing isn't a hobby, its therapy. And without it, I seriously doubt that I would be here right here right now rambling to you guys. I would have been consumed with the bad, dark things in my life, and I'm sure that other writers would have done the same.

See, darkness is a demon that threatens to take the good parts of us away, and writing is a power that we use against it.

When authors write, they put themselves out onto the paper, and if we are placed into the wrong hands, we will get cut. The deepest wounds are made by those who criticize us, and the pains that hurt the most are found on the pieces of ourselves that are the most vulnerable. When we give our books and our stories out to people, we give them the ability to make these types of wounds. That is why it is so difficult for us to share our work. That is why I cannot show some parts of my writing to other people; its too deep and too personal, and it gives the reader too much power over me.

So the next time someone tries to steal your work from you, or bothers you by asking for it over and over again, tell them that its not ready to share yet. Because when you are writing your stories, you aren't writing them for other people. You are writing them for yourself, and there is nothing wrong with that. So don't share yet, and don't feel bad about keeping your work to yourself. Sharing is something that comes with a lovely thing called editing. But that's a topic for another time.

Peace, my lovely Tea Spitters! Don't be afraid to be selfish with your work.
Have fun writing. And thanks for hearing me out.

-Fuze

The Key To Success In the Analytical World (Or, How To Survive College With a 4.0)

From a young age, Mirko has always reached for success. From his Slovenian roots, he gained an admiration of all things honorable, a love for truth, justice and family. His drive to succeed guided him through law school and twenty years of work as a prosecutor before he finally became a partner in an independent firm. In those twenty years, he married a beautiful woman, and together they built a family. They are still together today; their youngest daughter will graduate from college next spring. Mirko was and still is everything one wants for their sons; he is a pillar in the community, earns a very high yearly wage, and a respectable man. His sons have taken after him, becoming successful businessmen and lawyers. Together they work to defend innocent people and seek justice for those wronged. But Mirko has a secret.

Holly is much younger than Mirko, but she shares his values of truth and justice. From a young age, Holly was always active in her community, working alongside her parents and other concerned citizens to do everything possible to better her town. As a teenager, Holly was an avid speech and debate competitor, routinely placing highly in national championships. After her high school graduation, Holly took some time off from community involvement to focus on her degree, as well as to spend a year of intensive study and work in Europe. Holly graduated with a Political Science degree when she was only twenty, and how works part time in a law office, dedicating the rest of her free time to providing hands-on help for disadvantaged, abused, and enslaved women. Her work recently expanded to an international mission, as she now travels to foreign countries to provide support for new help centers. Holly has a secret, too.

Aurelio came to the United States as a refugee. As a four year old boy, his parents had woken him one night to rush to the last open airport on Cuba, racing to leave the country before Castro’s soldiers captured them. Of the blur of memories of Cuba, Aurelio remembers most vividly running across the tarmac, listening to the boom of gunfire as they made one last effort to reach safety. His status as a political refugee offered him little in the way of advantages. He grew up in the slums of New York, having little but his own drive and his mother’s encouragement to finish high school. He battled with post traumatic stress, which a school counselor mis-diagnosed as insanity, then refused to assist his family in providing the proper treatment. He finished high school, then, on his own, worked night and day to put himself through college, eventually managing huge budgets and projects for companies such as Ogilvy. Yet, Aurelio has a secret, too.

Mirko, Holly, Aurelio. Three individuals, that have never met—and, very likely, never will. Yet they all share the same secret. One that they share with thousands of other highly successful people. They are artists. Their pastimes are creative. Mirko draws and works with the theatrical arts. Holly writes stories. Aurelio paints and writes. Whenever they face a problem that they can’t find a solution to, have a bad day, or simply lack motivation, they turn to a blank sheet of paper. Mirko even credits much of his success in the courtroom to the time he spent drawing, finding that the more complicated the case, the more he needed to set aside the case and pick up a pen. If he pushed aside the urge, and soldiered through with his research and arguments, he would lose his case. Thus his art has found a prominent place in his life, even though it would never be his profession.

 Mirko is not the only lawyer I know who draws. I know many others. One, a water attorney, cooks gourmet foods. Another writes poems. The phenomenon of successful people being artists isn’t limited to lawyers. Even Albert Einstein would turn to artistic expression when he felt stressed, had a bad day, or couldn’t figure out an equation. He turned to his violin.

I considered all of this as I stared at a textbook. This is the lightest semester I have ever taken, but it is the semester I have struggled the most with my grades. While mulling over my predicament, I go back to my heaviest semester, where I took twenty units at one time. What did I do differently? I spent hours comparing schedules, assignments, and workloads. Everything indicated that I should have better grades this semester than that semester, but I’m struggling to maintain a B in two of my classes, and I have nearly given up hope of doing more than barely passing the third (I carried a 4.0 in my twenty unit semester, by the way).
Finally, I realized. In that huge semester, I had unconsciously worked in artistic outlets. Once a week, I would spend an hour at a coffee shop, killing time between classes. While I was there, I would draw bones. I wrote it off as study time, since every bone I drew was one that I was studying in my labs. At the same time, I spent roughly two hours a week writing stories; that was marked down as homework for an English class. Being a good anthropology student, then, it was time to test my hypothesis. It was time to see if artistic endeavors really did make my grades better.

I started off spending about a half an hour a day writing stories. Some were weird, some didn’t make sense, some were absolutely beautiful and if I showed them to you, you would cry (I won’t show them to you, in the interest of keeping crying at a minimum). I started carrying blank paper around with me, and took advantage of the odd half-hour break I had three times a week. Sometimes I would draw, sometimes I would write. Last week I spent nearly an hour working on a manga Viking. Silly, I know. But I was taking the time to be artistic. The semester isn’t over, but the time I’ve taken to let my imagination run free seems to be giving good results, so much so that I’m confident that I might even get a high B out of my most worrisome class.

It was shortly after this that I walked into work one day to be handed a drawing by Mirko. It was a cartoon of my father, one that he is very pleased with. That was the day I found out that Mirko draws. He had always been the analytical lawyer; I never knew that he drew. That was the moment it began to make sense. Creativity isn’t just about being weird, dressing funny, and throwing paint at a canvas. It is about crafting an expression, working out a solution to a problem that we’ve artificially created for a person that exists nowhere but inside our minds.

I never told my mother about the stories I write. Growing up, I knew she had a strong dislike for fiction, and she still regards it as a waste of time. I know she approves of my drawings, but merely because she finds them “useful”. All my childhood paintings and drawings have disappeared from her house, though the ribbon I won at a State Fair for one of those drawings still hangs visibly. I wonder if she even remembers that that particular ribbon was connected to a cash prize, or if it is merely a subconscious leftover. I don’t know where my other ribbons hang, or if they hang at all. Perhaps they are lost to the dusty corners of my memory.
Don’t get me wrong; I love my mother very much, and I think she gave me the best possible upbringing she could. Yet, sometimes I wish she could feel how I feel when I’ve finished a drawing or a story. It isn’t a feeling of pride, though; it is one of peace and clarity. So the creative balances the analytical, the peace of the one gives way to the solutions of the other, and we begin again, with a new course of study, a new court case, or a new mission in life, knowing that soon, it will need its own story. Perhaps that is why I can never quite write “The End.”

Living vicariously through my characters

There's been some STUFF in my life lately that I'd really rather not get into, but basically, it's been rough.  Some people have left, I had a really brief health scare, and some issues have arisen within my extended family.  This has all been over the last week or so, and I've really been scared about the world and about the problems we all face.  Everything seemed to blow up in my face, and I was powerless to stop it. 

And that's when I realized something. 

The thing I'm most afraid of is being powerless.  I hate not knowing what's going to happen and not knowing how to prevent it.  I know most people would say they don't want to know their own future, but I would love nothing more than to jump in the TARDIS and see myself in ten years, if only for reassurance. 

And I think that's why I love writing so much.  I have complete control.  Yes, my characters tell me what they want and I have to adjust to please them, but I can mostly manage their lives to the best of my ability.  Which is why it's so important, at least to me, to throw obstacles and problems in their path. 

This has always been difficult to me.  I LOVE my characters and I don't want to see them unhappy.  I want them to live happily ever after with 2.5 children and a white picket fence.  But by giving them challenges and by placing things in their path to prevent their happiness, I discover another layer within myself.  This layer is one that is reassured by hurting characters.  This layer is one who knows that if a character can get through a much worse struggle, something I invented, then I can get through the problems in my own life.  I sort of live through their problems, and as I comfort them, they also comfort me. 

Often their struggles reflect issues I face in my own life, whether it's the loss of trust or physical loss, or something worse.  And by seeing them fight their way through their problems, I am reminded of both how blessed I am (yes, I am VERY mean to my characters.) and often, I receive a solution that I hadn't even considered before. 

So there is merit, besides dramatic effect, in placing characters in grave danger and taking the things they love most away from them.  Sometimes it just makes you feel better.  And sometimes it gives the much needed encouragement to get through another day.