Shiny and New

So, new year, new blog layout. What do you think?

I am well aware that it's been so long since I last posted on this blog that some of you might've given up waiting for a new post from me. These last six weeks or so have really taken a bite out of me, and I apologize profusely for not keeping up with the blog.

This past year feels a little bit like a whirlwind of amazing that led me straight to a brick wall that I slammed into, hard. I've recently come to an incredibly painful conclusion about someone I've known most of my life, and that's been a bit of a black cloud over me for a little while, to say the least.

But you know what? In spite of that, I've had an utterly incredible 2012.

I flew to London to study there for five months. I saw Big Ben and the London Eye and St. Paul's Cathedral. I walked home from Piccadilly Circus for three hours in the snow. I had cream tea at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I climbed Arthurian mountains and danced at ceilis. I visited the catacombs beneath Paris. I spent five days in Italy, impressing my friends with rudimentary Italian and managing to get us un-lost on more than one occasion. I spent two weeks on my own in Ireland and London. I found a home in London, a home I miss every single day, but even so, it is something I will never, ever regret doing.

I have had four internships in the past year - one with a nonfiction publishing company in London, one with a nonprofit in the next town over, and two with literary agencies. I have worked with wonderful, talented, kind people, and I have learned so much.

I have made some wonderful friends, some of whom I met in person at last, some of whom I worked with this summer, and some of whom I am lucky enough to be sharing an apartment with. I don't quite know how I managed to find such amazing friends, but I am so grateful for all of you.

I have had some amazing professors tell me that they think I'm talented, praise which basically made my life. There are few things better than having a professor you esteem very highly tell you how much they enjoy your work.

This past semester has been insanely busy for me, and a little bit rocky, especially towards the end. But the good stuff that's happened to me in this past year far, far outweighs the bad stuff. I'm not entirely sure how 2013 is going to top that.

So, here's to a new year - new friends, new adventures, new writings, new experiences. And yes, I promise: new blog posts. :)

Ithaca Again

Hello, dear blog readers. I hope you are well on this fine Tuesday evening. I am currently ensconced in my wonderful new apartment with two of my three lovely flatmates, listening to someone else's music and the sound of my keyboard and the wind, and more than a little miffed that the very strong smell of pot coming through the window from somewhere is putting a damper on my sense of calmness.

The rather omnipresent smell of pot is one thing I did not miss about Ithaca, but there are many things I have missed. Mostly those things are people - I missed sitting around at two in the morning with roommates, hanging out and laughing and talking about important things or the meaning of life or nothing in particular really. I missed my friends that I have not seen since December, before I left for London. It's been great to see things click back into place, to pick up conversations as though I've never even left, to hug people I've only known in text or in pixelated videos for months. It's been great to be surrounded by friends again, in my apartment, in the dining hall, sitting at a table in "the pub," having person after person wave and say hello and ask how my summer was. Classes start tomorrow, and I'm excited to be reading new things, learning new things, attempting new things in my writing. It'll be hard, but it'll be fun.

Of course there are things I did not miss. I did not miss the utterly vile smell of marijuana, I did not miss the worry of piling-up homework, I did not miss the cold (although it is not, of course, cold here yet. It certainly will be, though).

It feels a bit surreal to be here again. I was walking through campus to pick up my textbooks in the mail center, looking around at all the familiar buildings, and for a moment I felt a little bit like I was in one of those dreams where you know you are in a specific place even though your surroundings are not that place at all. I couldn't quite grasp what being back meant. How could I be here again after everything that had happened? How could I be in Ithaca, after being blown off a mountain in Edinburgh, after getting hopelessly lost and then found again in Venice, after walking three hours in snow-clogged London? How can I be back in the same place, to do the same thing, when I am not the same?

I do think this semester will be pretty exciting though. I'm looking forward to my classes; I'm looking forward to directing Broadway Revue and joining the Quidditch team. I'm excited to cook delicious things for my roommates and other assorted friends; I'm excited about the shiny new internship I snagged myself (talk about the benefits of Twitter!!); I'm excited for lots of adventures around this neat little town I live in.

I think one of my favorite things to do is just sit and talk with a small group of close friends until all hours of the morning. We talk about serious things - relationships and breakups and friendships and careers and hopes and dreams and fears, all sorts of things. We talk about other things too, like books and tv and movies. We tell jokes, talk about stupid stuff that doesn't matter, as well as the stuff that does. It feels comforting to be surrounded by people you trust, when you know they trust you too. I'm glad to be back in that environment. I'm looking forward to a lot of late nights and tired mornings, smiles and secrets and so many laughs my jaw aches with it.

And hopefully all this will happen without too many unpleasant smells filtering in from outside. 

The Year Turns Round Again

Yes, that is a War Horse reference. No, I am not completely obsessed. Well... yeah, okay, maybe I am.

Anyway. It's that time of year again - time to pack up all of the things, put them into my dad's car, and drive back up to the frozen north. Which is not, of course, all that frozen at this time of year, but will hopefully not be blisteringly hot, at any rate.

I'm both really excited and a little reluctant to head back to school, as usual. I'm excited for my flat and my flatmates (well, technically apartment, since I am once again in America, but WHATEVER), and I'm excited to see friends I haven't seen since December. I'm excited for my classes (although not so much for the homework). I'm excited for my theatre group and all sorts of things. It'll be great.

But I'm also, as usual, sad to leave my house and my bed and my cat and my sister and my parents. They're lovely. I'm very lucky to get along with my family as well as I do, so as excited as I am to go see my friends and hang out and be all Independent!Semi-Grown-Up-Person, it's always a bit sad leaving home again.

I'm also a bit worried that I'll get the whole "reverse culture shock" thing all over again. After spending five months in London and all summer working in NYC, going back to Ithaca is going to be a bit... strange. I'll be in an apartment again, cooking my own meals, but there will be no local Sainsbury's around the corner to pop into if I had run out of an ingredient or wanted some dessert. There will be no corner pizza place only open in the middle of the night (which, by London standards, is about 11pm) to run to when I don't feel like cooking or it's late and I'm starving after coming home from seeing a play for class or hanging about in a pub with friends. There will be no pubs, and no pub food. (Gosh I miss pub food.) Halfway through October, it will start getting colder than it ever gets in London, even in January.

And I've changed. I'm a little bolder than I used to be. I'm a little more sure of myself. I hope that I can fit who I am now into the space I left for myself in Ithaca.

I am looking forward to going back, though, even if it means my Italian class might kill me.

I'm going to do my best to keep up the Tuesday-Thursday blog schedule, since those are the days when I have only one class. Dear readers, tell me what you would like me to blog about! More query tips from my internship? Writing things I learn in my classes? Reminiscences of my adventures in Europe? Snippets of my current wip (there will soon be two, one regular one and one for my short novel class)? Let me know!

Are you going back to school soon? Excited about it? Let me know! :D

*headdesk*

So this week has been a little like this.




Also this.




Thank goodness tomorrow's Friday.

How do you celebrate the end of a long week?

Library Saga

So today, I present to you a Library Saga, a tale of staircases and helpful librarians and misshelved books. I hope it will amuse you.

First of all, some background. I don't know if newer readers of Tea & Biscuits will know this, since I haven't mentioned it in a while, but I sing. I like to think that I'm pretty good at it. I take voice lessons from a grad student at school, and I really enjoy it.

Also, out of all the people I know in Ithaca, the majority are either writing majors or music majors. My roommate is a music major. Last year I lived with TWO music majors. My very good friend from down the hall is a music major. This is unsurprising, as a majority of my friends and fellow AP level students in high school were band geeks.

So my voice teacher, Sarah, told me about this place:



Since I live pretty close to NYC and don't have a music library any closer to me, Sarah sent me on a quest to the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center in search of a Mozart art song, "Ridente la calma." And since I was going, my music major roommate Anna asked me to copy some music for her as well, a Polish folk song called "Mother Dear" and a Mendelssohn piece called "Der Blumenstrauss." So off to New York I went. This was, of course, an opportunity to visit my best friend Ella (I link to her so often I should just figure out how to put a link in the sidebar and have done with it). She was coming home later Tuesday afternoon, so I would be able to get a ride back from her dad.

I got into NYC around 9 or 9:30, and Ella hadn't eaten breakfast yet so we went to her dining hall and she ate breakfast and we told stories of the last three weeks and et cetera. Because that's what friends who haven't seen each other in three weeks do.

By the time we got to the library, it was about 11:30. So, this is a library, right? Libraries open around 9 am, because they're libraries and that's what they do, right? Wrong. This library opens at NOON every day (this will become important later). We walked down the street and found a supermarket and I bought a sandwich. It was then noon, so we went back to the library.

Once in the library, I found a map and we went up to the second floor, which is where (most of) the music books are. I looked up the three books we needed again, to write down the call numbers and check that they were still available. Those three books were: 15 Arias for Coloratura Soprano, The First Book of Soprano Solos, vol. 3, and the Lieder Anthology. They were all there; the first two had the same call number and the third one was "for library use only" so we'd have to go somewhere else to find that. We then went over to find the first two, since they were in the same place, and after several minutes of looking on the wrong shelf we found the right shelf and, fairly shortly after that, my book. I made my copy (I do not get along well with copy machines; I wasted so many dimes and so much paper trying to figure them out) and then we went to put it back and find the book for Anna. We scoured every inch of that shelf, as well as many of the surrounding shelves, as well as all the return carts we could find, trying to find it. But it simply was not there. So we decide to go find a Helpful Librarian to ask.

We asked Helpful Librarian 1, and she told us that if it says it's available but isn't in the right place it's either misshelved or it's just on a cart after having been returned, waiting to be reshelved, and we would need to go downstairs and ask them if they can look for it. We also got a little form thing for the Lieder Anthology, which we would need to request upstairs.

We went downstairs and asked Rather Unhelpful Librarians 2 and 3 what to do, telling them what Helpful Librarian 1 told us. They didn't pay very much attention to what we were trying to say (Also, apparently "Fifteen Arias for Coloratura Soprano" is a rather incomprehensible title, since I had to repeat it A LOT), and they sent us around the corner to what turned out to be the DVD section or some such thing. We went up to that desk and asked Helpful Librarian 4 what to do, telling them what Unhelpful Librarians 2 and 3 had told us, and Helpful Librarian 4 told us that what we needed was a page who would go through the stuff that hadn't been reshelved yet. We went back to Rather Unhelpful Librarian 2 and told her exactly what Helpful Librarian 4 had told us. She looked rather cross but told us that the pages were all out on their lunch break. Mind you, it was 1 o'clock, and they opened at noon. Hmmm...

So we decided to try that one again later, and we went up to the third floor, in search of the Lieder Anthology. On the third floor, there's a coat check and all sorts of official stuff. We handed the slip from Helpful Librarian 1 to Helpful Librarian 5 and then wandered around looking at stuff for a while as we waited for her to get the book for us. (They had a display of Beverly Sills' scores with her stage direction notes and ornamentations written in - it was pretty awesome.) When we went over to retrieve the book, Helpful Librarian 5 asked me for my library card. I do not have a library card for the New York Public Library, since I do not live in New York. Ella, however, does - she just forgot to bring it with her. Helpful Librarian 5 asked Ella for her name, and then asked her to verify her address. Now, since Ella has just finished finals week, Ella has not slept in two days. And because I go to Ithaca, which is a hippie school in every sense of the term, I was afraid that Ella would come across as crazy, on drugs/drunk, or as someone trying to steal someone else's library card (why you would do that I have no idea, but there it is). But Helpful Librarian 5 was very nice about it, and we got the book.

We trotted over to the copy machines, and I put in the little copy card I'd had to get and laid the page out and pushed the button and BAM! Paper jam. (Ella later remarked that this was the most karmically attuned copier she'd ever come across.) I tried to do Anna's magic trick (Anna is very good with copiers) where you pull out the door on the side and then close it again and it's magically fixed, but it didn't want to open and I didn't want to force it. So I went back to Helpful Librarian 5 and said "I'm sorry, I don't know who I should ask for help about this, but there's a paper jam..." and she said "You're making copies? Do you have permission to make copies?" Of course I had no idea you needed *permission* to make copies, and so I apologized profusely, and she pointed me across the floor and said she'd fix the paper jam while I went to go fill out the necessary form.

Ella and I then took the book over to Helpful Librarian 6, who handed us a form and pointed out the copyright mark at the bottom of the first page which meant we'd only be able to copy 10% of the song.* Much hilarity ensued when she waited for a sleep-deprived art student and a writing major who has always been abysmal at percents try and figure out just how much 10% of a five page song would be (I worked it out later thanks to the calculator feature on Google; it's half a page). We had quite a nice discussion with her about copyright law and how weird it is, but ultimately didn't fill out the form to copy things because half a page would really be quite useless to Anna, so why bother? We then went back to Helpful Librarian 5 and handed the book back and said thank you and went back downstairs.

It was now about 1:40 or so, so after I'd collected my coat and backpack (Ella, of course, did not have to check anything because Ella does not carry bags or wear coats, because she is a silly person) we went back down to the first floor to check on that coloratura book. Rather Unhelpful Librarian 2 was still there, and she rather snippily told us that they were still on a lunch break. So we left the library and sat outside for a bit, waiting for them to get back from lunch, being cold, etc. At about five after 2, we went back in, and Unhelpful Librarian 2 was no longer at the front desk. Instead, Helpful Librarian 7 went back and looked at all the return stuff they had (it took her rather a while, it must have been a lot of stuff) but couldn't find it. She said if we put it on hold we could come back later and try to find it, but since we were leaving and neither of us would be living in the city till Ella goes back at the end of break, that would be sort of silly. So, two hours and a bit after we'd started, we gave up. We went back to Ella's dorm to wait for her dad to pick us up, and I finally got to eat that sandwich. I was really hungry by then!

So I suppose the morals to this story would be as follows:

1. Librarians are awesome.
2. Never try to do nice things for your roommate.**

I hope you enjoyed the Library Saga. It was certainly an adventure!

--------------------------------------------------------

* The thing that really puzzles me about this is that the reason Anna asked me to look for this music was that someone had taken those books out of the Ithaca library over break. Which meant that they were in the Ithaca library with absolutely no restrictions, which meant that if you really wanted to, you could copy the whole book and nobody would care except the person behind you on the copier line. Hmmm.

** I'm just kidding, always do nice things for your roommate. Roommates are awesome.

Hallelujah!!

(Anna mi vorresti farlo.)

Allora, l'esami sono finito, e io sono molto contenta. Sono stanca, sì, ma contenta. La mia compagna di stanza, Anna, dovrà fare due esami anche sarà finito. Potrò ritornare a casa in NJ domani. Vorrei dormire per due mesi.

Tutto è finito, finalmente. Non ho i temi o i presentazioni. Non ho i compiti. Non ho le lezione. Necessito molto questa vacanza. Potrei scrivere molto, e vorrei trovare un lavoro. Mi mancherebbe le mie amiche di Ithaca, ma voglio vedere le mie amiche di Verona. Inoltre, mi mancano la mia famiglia, il cibo buono, e i miei gatti.

Caro abbraccio a tutti.

--------------------------------------------

... Oh. Wait. Wrong language. Er. Sorry...

(Also: I might be an Italian minor, but that does not guarantee the accuracy of ANY of that. I apologize for any horrific errors...)

Exam Time

When you're sad and it's exam time
Your papers are rough and suck levels are high
Just remember there's one thing that you can do.
And it always works, too.

You gotta put stuff on your head.
Put stuff on your head!
Well it can be blue,
Or it can be red,
The color doesn't matter if it's on your head!

How's this, John?

I'm Plotting... no, not the evil kind

I have decided that I am terrible at plot.

I get these really great ideas (when I was first querying A Bridge to War so many people were going "historical werewolves? That's so cool!") and then they don't go anywhere. It is most terribly frustrating. The reason I am not currently working on ABtW is because it literally has no plot that I can find. As hard as I try I cannot make sense of it, which is extremely irritating because I absolutely love where the characterization, atmosphere, tone, and prose style were going in that rewrite. When I fix it (and I WILL fix it - I am too fond of that idea and those characters to let it die) some of the stuff from my most recent rewrite will definitely be added. I just need to figure out what to do with it.

And now I'm trying to figure out what to do in the meantime. And I have four potential projects:

1. The steampunky story I teased from on Tuesday. Problem: All premise, no plot whatsoever (seriously, Will is one of the most silent characters I have ever encountered. He won't tell me anything!!!)

2. Another Victorian epistolary novel about a girl who goes to live with her father's regiment in India and all the trouble her brother gets them into. Problem: Ridiculously vague outline, no ending or motivation for anything.

3. A revamped version of the epic fantasy I've had kicking around in my head since freshman year of high school. Problem: Loads of fun characters, no plot.

4. Starting up the graphic novel Ella Fastiggi (update your blog, silly!) and I have planned out based on the short story I wrote involving faerie hunting. Problem: Awesome premise, no ending point (aka... no plot).

I sense a trend, don't you?

So I want to know how you guys come up with plots. Do they just fall out of the sky? Are they the results of meticulous outlining? Somewhere in between? When you've got a great idea but don't know what to do with it, what do you do? Maybe you guys can give me some ideas about what to do with these strange half-stories.

Things for August

So, hallo blogsphere! (Apparently that's actually blogosphere, but I thing blogsphere sounds nicer, don't you?)

Guys, how did it get to be August already? Seriously, it seems like I was frantically pounding out the last pieces of Letters to Oliver only a few weeks ago - and that was in May! Time flies when it's summer...

I go back to school on the 23rd, and of course am excited to go back and have cool classes and be in the amazing place that is Ithaca and see all my friends. But I will miss home, and I am still enjoying summer very much, and I am taking two writing classes that I fear will grossly interfere with my personal writing time. Ah well. Such is life.

Anyway, a few random notes before returning to our normally scheduled programming.

The first is that the lovely and talented Vee of Ramblings of a Writer is having a contest! I have experienced her skill as a beta and would love one of those fifty-page critiques she's offering!

The second is regarding regularly scheduled programming. I have two more book reviews I might do (I Am the Messenger definitely; Starclimber maybe), as well as weekly teasers of course. I'm also feeling a post in the mode of Tahereh in the near future.

But I'm not making this blog for me (although comments are nice I love comments yaaaaay comments). I believe the whole point of putting content on the internet, whether it be Blogger or YouTube or what-have-you, is to start a discussion. To connect with people that don't live near you or share different views, people you would not ordinarily be able to talk to. To toss your ideas out and see what other people think.

So. My question to you is, what do you want to discuss?

Excitement

Good morning, blogsphere! (says I at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. I have been up for half an hour. But it is summer. Also, even if it was an accident, staying up till 3 am watching vlogbrothers videos is never a good idea.)

So because my mom is an awesome and wonderful person and answered my question, this blogpost is based on her idea. Because she has good ideas.

What sorts of things are you irrationally excited about?

And I mean REALLY OVERLY EXCITED, the JUMP UP AND DOWN AND SQUEAL kind of excitement. The EVERY TIME SUCH AND SUCH HAPPENS I GRIN LIKE A MANIAC kind of excitement.

There are many things that excite and amuse me (in fact, when the aforementioned awesome mom was driving me home from college last week, I noticed that the most common phrase in my conversation was probably "it amused me" or "I was amused").

But amusement is not what I mean. I was excited to go see Robin Hood the other night. That's not what I mean - I was excited, yes, because I was going to go see what looked like a pretty good movie with my wonderful friends. But I wasn't bouncing off walls or grinning like a maniac.

I mean the kind of excitement that leads two grown men (read: my awesome dad and our very lovely neighbor) to lean over our slightly-new kitchen stove and proclaim about BTUs (which I think is the right term? I can barely boil water, so...). It was like watching guys talk about cars... but with cooking. That's my dad's exciting thing. And I think the three girls in the house - me, my mom, and my sister - were definitely very, very amused to see those two getting all excited about the stove.

So if "excited over going to see Robin Hood" doesn't count, what does? Here are a few things that I am, rationally or irrationally, really really excited about.

1. Tomorrow! Tomorrow I am going into NYC to visit my best friend on the planet, Ella! We are going to do awesome things and I am going to distract her from her homework (can you say role reversal?) and run around the city in tomorrow's supposedly very hot weather and be silly and probably take lots of pictures, which she will hate but which I will do anyway. I AM SO BLOODY EXCITED FOR THIS.

2. Peanut butter and jelly. Trust me, when you only have access to college pb&j for the past few months, you get very excited when there is very good raspberry jam that actually reaches to the edge of the bread for a change.

4. This is where we get into the irrational excitements. The other night, I found out that Neil Gaiman is going to write an episode for next year's season of Doctor Who. Had it not been in the vicinity of midnight when I learned this, I definitely would have squealed and jumped up and down and done silly things. Because Neil Gaiman is amazing. And Doctor Who is amazing. But seriously... that's a whole year away! Talk about irrational excitement.

3. Music. I get very irrationally excited over music. I definitely did squeak a little when my Tale of Two Cities musical cd arrived, and my poor family has had to suffer through me playing it on a loop ever since (sorry guys). I definitely spazzed about it to my friend from college over AIM (although this led to me forcing her to listen to James Barbour sing... you're welcome, Katrina ;P). But I had been waiting for a CD of this since... er... November of 2008? Wow.

But to put my irrational excitement into true perspective, you guys get to see just how dorky (and overly analytical) I am. If you did not already know just how dorky I am, prepare to understand, and I apologize for the extreme levels of dork-ness.

Have you seen Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame? Heard the song Heaven's Light/Hellfire? It is the transition between the two parts of that song that have me thoroughly convinced that Alan Menken is a musical genius. It uses a theme that has already appeared in the movie, but in the Heaven's Light portion it is sweet and light. In the Hellfire portion, it is dark and heavy and ominous. And how does the musical genius achieve this transition? A drumroll. Just one drumroll. That's it. And it works perfectly. In literally the space of two seconds, the entire tone of the song changes, and it is absolutely amazing. I literally grin like a maniac every single time I hear that - which, let me tell you, is often.

Now that you have written proof of what a dork I am, and I have rambled for quite some time about it, I shall stop and ask you what things you are irrationally excited about.

DFTBA

(ETA: Blogger, you're mean. Why can't I post an exclamation point in my title?!?)

Awesome Epistolaries and Why They Are Awesome

Hello, all! Happy Saturday. I intend to do very little that is productive (schoolwork wise, anyway). That's what Sundays are for, right?

In any case. I'll be working some more on Letters to Oliver, my lovely historical fantasy epistolary novel. Yes, epistolary. You'd be surprised how many people I have to explain that term to; I don't think it's a particularly common format. According to that wonderful source, Wikipedia: "An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use. The word epistolary comes from the Latin word epistola, meaning a letter."

It is indeed an interesting format, if not often used. I have read some truly wonderful epistolaries that I am taking inspiration from now and I think I ought to share the love and point out these works of brilliance.

The first epistolary novel I ever read was Kate Klise's Regarding the Fountain. If you like MG, READ THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW. It's about an elementary school principal who commissions a new drinking fountain from an eccentric artist; she sends letters and drawings and all sorts of things back and forth with the principal and with the class of third graders at this school. It's a very clever book, and really, really enjoyable.

Now, I wasn't a really big reader of epistolaries, so from when I was say eleven and read Regarding the Fountain to when I was... er... seventeen? eighteen? (I have such a good memory, can't you see?) and read this next book, I can't particularly remember reading another one, although I know I read a few with epistolary elements. I just didn't really think about it much.

But then I came across The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and I fell in love. This book is WONDERFUL. Absolutely, completely, and totally wonderful. The moment I finished it, I wanted to read it again. I wanted MORE. (Unfortunately, there isn't any more - sadly, Ms. Shaffer, the main writer, passed away before the book was published.) It's about a journalist living in London and set at the very end of World War II. She's trying to recover from the horrors of the Blitz, and is contacted by someone who read her articles during the war. He lives on the British channel island of Guernsey, which was occupied by the Nazis. The story is both funny and poignant; it even made me tear up a little. Seriously. GO READ THIS BOOK.

After that, I went hunting for more epistolaries. One that I found was Jane Austen's Lady Susan. (After all, if one is writing anything set in the Victorian era, one must return to the source.) This one was fun because it was not at all a 'typical' Jane Austen story; the main plot focuses around a girl trying to get out from the clutches of her overbearing mother, Lady Susan. It is filled with typical Jane Austen wit, of course, and is quite lovely.

Another epistolary I came across, and which probably provided the inspiration for Letters to Oliver, was Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede's Sorcery and Cecelia. It is a Regency-era epistolary set in an England where magic actually works. The characters are quite clever (I especially love Kate) and the story intriguing and delivered with a sort of bounce and a great sense of humor that is really quite fun. There are also two sequels to this: The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician, or Ten Years After. All are quite good. I like the first and the third best; the second is in testimonies and diary entries rather than letters, which is an interesting format (especially when you look at what the one character includes in her diary but the other leaves out of her testimony), but I prefer the letters. Also, in book three, the gentlemen get to exchange a few letters as well, and goodness but they are hilarious.

In any case. Even after I had read all of these, I thought that I could never write something like that. It is an extraordinarily structured format, after all. But then Nathan Bransford had a contest on his blog to write a diary entry or unsent letter, and there was Emily, writing Oliver a letter he would never see. And after that, the rest of the idea followed. I'm discovering it is a very fun format, and quite useful. For one thing, I hate first person. Hate hate hate. I really dislike being limited to one character's perspective for an entire story, but this format allows me - basically forces me - to head hop, which is a relief. Also, I think the terribly structured format is good for me, since I tend to just scrawl out words and then have to clean up the mess later.

Speaking of which, I ought to go write.

Are there any epistolaries you would recommend to me?

"Words, words, words."

So says Hamlet to Polonius. So sings Eliza Doolittle to Freddy. So shouts the author glaring at the Blinking Cursor of Death.

Words are important. Words make us smile, make us laugh, make us cry, drive us absolutely crazy. And everyone’s got their favorite. I tend to be particularly fond of tricksy (a very cool word which, unfortunately, only Gollum can really get away with), complicated words.

For example, two of my favorites are exacerbate and extrapolate, both introduced to me through The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I simply love the way they sound – they roll off the tongue in a particularly pleasing way, I think. Those are words that seem to go along perfectly with a sardonic tone and a ridiculous atmosphere – hence why using them in H2G2 is so brilliantly entertaining. Complicated words are just FUN. Like Gloucestershire and flibbertigibbet and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. They’re almost like mini-tongue twisters, and the walking-dictionary part of me feels a sense of accomplishment whenever I manage to fit them into a conversation. (Writing them is great. Saying them in real life is truly wonderful.)

Not all the words I like are complicated, though. I also love short, simple words that convey everything we need to know about their definition in only one or two sounds. Like fop. And snarl. And glomp (which is not a “real” word but it certainly belongs in the category of words that sound exactly like what their definition is, whilst still being short.) (Whilst is a good one too.)

More word geekery (another word that is most entertaining): I love words that sound like what they mean. For instance: billowy provides an excellent image of fabric blowing in the wind. Not rustling; billowing. The words have almost a different flavor – it’s like deciding which spice to add to a sauce. Rustling turns the phrase one way, while billowing turns it another. It changes the taste, the tone, everything – all because of one word that fits exactly the way you want it to. Which, on occasion, makes writing an infuriating process. I have occasionally been known to stare for hours (this is only a very slight exaggeration) at the Blinking Cursor of Death because I cannot for the life of me think of the right thing to say. Mostly, it comes to me eventually. Which is nice, and which silences the evil little chuckle of the Blinking Cursor.

There are also words I don’t like. In my opinion, the worst word in the entire English language is “woo.” Perhaps this is because I am a hopeless romantic, and I feel that a word which means “courtship” and connotes “love” should not sound so similar to something as disgusting as “goo.” The only person who has ever gotten away with saying that word without making me sneer with derision is Captain Jack Sparrow. And since very few people can attain that level of sheer awesome, I think the word should just go hide in a corner somewhere so we can forget about it.

But it’s more than just sounds, after all. I like words like ephemeral not just because they seem to glide across my mind, but because they seem to suit their meaning perfectly. If something is ephemeral, it conjures up images wisps of fog withering away in sunlight, or blowing away on the wind. At least, it does for me, which is why I like the word so much.

“Words, words, words.” We see them littered everywhere; it is like we are bombarded by words nowadays. Of course, by themselves, they sound cool and look neat. But string them together, and they become something even better. After all, we don’t read just to look at cool words and go “ooh, exacerbate!” We read the combination of cool words, and it is the combination that makes the writing great.

This is going to be my guest-blog for the lovely Choco! Go check out her blog and keep an eye out for me! :)