Point of view. Or rather, a certain point that I view things from.

May 26, 2010 — Rebecca Enzor

I’m starting to think that I might be kind of weird.

No, hear me out now.  Really.

Last night I was writing some Fie Eoin, because I sorta, kinda, am really in love with it, and I realized that I always look at Fie Eoin from the southeast.  Whenever I see Fie Eoin in my mind, I’m looking from the southeast.  No matter where I am in the village.  If I’m in the center of the village then Kindra’s tent is directly to the left of me, the High Priestess’ two over to the right.  The HP’s tent is directly east (where the sun rises – woah boy the symbolism!), but I always kind of look between the two.  Even inside the tents I look from the southeast at the tent.  I never stand in the doorway and look into the tent – I’m always looking from behind a cot.  It’s the weirdest thing.  And I just realized it last night.

The only time I look from another direction is during the wedding scene (who gets married? I’m not telling!) when I look from the southwest.  I only do it for a moment before I’m back in the east.  I only look that way while Susan is being killed, because I wouldn’t be able to see her from the southeast (and who doesn’t want to watch someone being killed at a wedding?).  It’s the same in Aleda – I look from the southeast.  Same in Gaerlom (you would think I’d look at the village from the ocean, but no, I look from the forest which makes no real sense).  Same in Fie Obsid.  Same all throughout Pike’s Revenge.  What is this obsession with the southeast?

I started thinking of other stories, and what direction I look at them from.  Let’s see, Apollo? Southeast, unless you are in his house, where it changes to northeast.  After Ancient? Southeast until they get to the Mississippi Ocean.  Phooka Tales?  hmmmm, yep, southeast.  Even the manor is on the southeastern shore of the Loch Ness.  Lane’s Girl? Ah Ha!  I look at Lane’s Girl from the north.  I can prove it, just take a look at the drawing of Archein I made on a sticky.  The main gate is to the north, and the hidden gate to the west, and this is always the way I look at Archein – from the north.

So really this post has no reason behind it, other than to illustrate the face that I don’t like to look at things from the west.  Unless I’m standing on Sullivan’s Island Beach, which I will be doing all next week!  Don’t expect any posts from me while I’m on vacation ;)

Posted in After Ancient, Apollo and Daphne, Lane's Girl, Phooka Tales, Rebecca Stories, The Nameless Warrior (Fie Eoin). Leave a Comment »

Writing Meme, Day 10

April 10, 2010 — Rebecca Enzor

10. What are some really weird situations your characters have been in?

Holly was attacked by a giant cat with a spiny tail and a distorted version of her own face.  This was after she saw the mouse wearing pants run away with a piece of bread in its hands, but before Phooka the Dog talked to her to warn her that she was following a Will-O-The-Wisp.

A giant yellow bird with a gun grabbed Rebecca through a doorway and into another world.  That was after she fell in love with the giant werewolf.

Meara survived a train wreck in the middle of Ancient Colorado and then had to walk to Atlantis (Atlanta) with a girl suffering from TB.  The Mississippi Ocean is in the way.

Timin is convinced that Kaye is a silkie (seal-person) but really she’s got wings and can’t swim.  If she proves that she’s not a silkie by showing him this he’ll either cut off her wings or kill her.

Apollo hit his girlfriend in the head with a discus and killed her (it was an accident).  His next girlfriend drove drunk into a Red Bay Laurel and died because she caught him kissing another girl.

There are more, of course, but those are some of the weirdest situations that pop into my head for each story.  Kindra the woman warrior seems downright normal compared to everyone else.

Posted in After Ancient, Apollo and Daphne, Phooka Tales, Rebecca Stories, The Nameless Warrior (Fie Eoin). Leave a Comment »

Writing Meme, Day 7

April 7, 2010 — Rebecca Enzor

7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?

I listen to music while I do everything.  Drive, work, eat, write.  Music was my first love, and I love just about all types of music (not so much heavy metal or rap though).  Loreena McKennitt always makes me think of Fie Eoin, especially “The Mystic’s Dream” and “All Soul’s Night”.  Dave Matthews Band is for Lane and Rebecca (“The Stone” is especially Rebecca’s song: “Yes I have done wrong, but what I did I thought needed to be done. I swear”).  Somehow Mat Kearney’s new album, City of Black and White, became the soundtrack for Apollo, and A Fine Frenzy’s new album, Bomb in a Birdcage, is inspiring the Top Secret Project.  Phooka Tales has a soundtrack pulled from all sorts of different places rather than one singer or album, although Sara Bareilles‘ “Between the Lines” is a pretty good summation of Holly’s relationship with Josh, and “Come Alive” by the Foo Fighters inspired her final meltdown (“Come Alive” is also shared by Karigan in Pike’s Revenge).

The only book without a soundtrack is After Ancient (there are one or two songs that make me think of it – one of them is Copland’s “Appalachian Spring”).  This is probably another reason that AA never worked out – there aren’t any songs that I hear on the radio that make me think of it and inspire me to work on it again.

Posted in After Ancient, Apollo and Daphne, Book of Souls, Lane's Girl, Phooka Tales, Rebecca Stories, The Nameless Warrior (Fie Eoin). Leave a Comment »

Writing Meme, Day 5

April 5, 2010 — Rebecca Enzor

5. By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?

My youngest major character is Mikayla Morgan, who is six years old at the beginning of Lane’s Girl.  My oldest major character is… um… I’m not really sure.  Once they become old enough I stop worrying about ages so much.  Maybe Henry, from Phooka Tales, although he’s not really that old (in his late fifties/early sixties).  Meara’s mother, Amanda, is probably somewhere in her sixties as well.  There will be a character in TSP who is very old, but I haven’t really storylined him yet, so in effect he doesn’t really exist yet.

Yeah, I guess I don’t write about a lot of older characters.  They either die young (Lane and Rebecca), or their story fades away into The End well before they are old.

As far as youngest in terms of when I found them, that would be the cast of TSP: Neona, Sean, and Alicia (Sean the youngest of the three, because I found Nea and Ali first).  My oldest original fiction character is Kindra, which is probably why I love her so much.  She’s been around for a long time.

But my oldest character ever would be Pone – she’s almost as old as I am!

Posted in After Ancient, Book of Souls, Lane's Girl, Phooka Tales, The Nameless Warrior (Fie Eoin). Leave a Comment »

Writing Meme, Day 2

April 2, 2010 — Rebecca Enzor

2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

How many characters do I have?  Oh man, I have no idea.  Give me a few minutes to count them all up…

Sixty-three major characters.  This doesn’t include short stories or The Good Man (which can hardly be called a short story), or any characters that have brief cameos.  Heck, that doesn’t even include Fennec, who is practically a main character in Fie Eoin although he’s dead – or the Manticore from Phooka Tales (who shows face almost as much as Phooka himself).  It also doesn’t include fandom characters (Lane’s Girl doesn’t count as fandom, because I’ve changed the world so much and made all of my own characters).

Wow.  That’s a lot of voices running around in my head.

As to male vs. female, I’m pretty much even.  I have two books where the main character is male (Apollo and Lane), three where the main character is female (Kindra/Kaye, Meara, and Holly), and two where the book is split between two main characters (Karigan/Sipi and Neona/Sean from the Top Secret Project).  I probably have more female characters total (Apollo, especially, is surrounded by women), but I don’t necessarily like writing one sex over the other.

Posted in After Ancient, Apollo and Daphne, Book of Souls, Lane's Girl, Phooka Tales, Rebecca Stories, The Nameless Warrior (Fie Eoin). Leave a Comment »

After Ancient

March 29, 2010 — Rebecca Enzor

After Ancient is one of those great ideas for a sweeping, grand story that got too big for me to handle.  I have confidence that someday I will be able to tackle it again and whip it into shape, but for now it’s a half-written, scattered-scene mess.

The idea behind After Ancient is that in 1000 years the Earth’s oceans rose 1000ft, effectively covering anything that wasn’t a mountain in water.  The Mississippi River becomes an ocean, and Atlanta (half of which is below sea-level at 1000ft) built a giant wall to keep the water out and is the only city left with major technology.  The rest of the world has gone back to agricultural society and city states, and society has become once again pantheistic.  Today’s culture icons are tomorrow’s gods and goddesses (Disney, for instance, is the goddess of childbirth and children in general).  And everyone is worried about Global Cooling, which is going to kill the crops.

The plot came second to the world, and I think that’s where I fell into trouble.  I had this awesome world built but no characters to play in it.  So I threw some characters in right before NaNo ’06, and a loose plot about a train wreck, and wrote 50,000 words.  Because I had no plot or characters until a few days before NaNo started I didn’t have any idea what to write and ended up skipping around all over the place as far as writing scenes, and then I got confused as to what I had and had not written and what went where in the timeline, and then I gave up.

I still really like the idea of the world, so I will try again, but for now After Ancient is on the farthest back burner I have.

Posted in After Ancient. 2 Comments »

Sticky #20

March 30, 2008 — Rebecca Enzor

Sticky #20

 Last weekend was Easter, and I wasn’t able to get a sticky up.  I apologize.  This weekend’s sticky comes from a National Geographic article arguing that the water stored in dams and reservoirs is keeping sea levels from rising at the normal rate.  This, in turn, is causing faulty data about the actual amount of water available to raise the sea levels.  Since much of the world has stopped building these huge dams and reservoirs the sea level will start rising faster now, and may end up rising twice as much as originally anticipated.

What does this have to do with Sticky Note Stories, you ask?  After Ancient is a story about sea levels rising 1000ft, and while I know this isn’t possible, I am always looking for scientific facts and data that will back up a greater-than-predicted sea-level rise.  Even with this data the sea levels will even out at 40ft higher than normal, which is a long cry from 1000ft, but every little bit helps.

Posted in After Ancient, Sticky Notes. Leave a Comment »

Sticky #11

January 21, 2008 — Rebecca Enzor

Sticky #11

Forgive me for not getting this up yesterday.  I was in the process of extirpating all of my insides via my throat and couldn’t find time to remove myself from the bathroom and make it into the computer room.  And speaking of feeling as if you are going to die all day, we have another sticky from After Ancient!  Conveniently from the part of the story where Lizzie tries to die (and yes, she does try to extirpate her insides as well, starting with her lungs – she has TB).  And as you can see, even when I’m writing the stickies, which are the first first draft, I still decide to edit a bit on the way, finding better words to use and making sure to not confuse people with random “she”s that don’t point to any particular character.  By the end of the scene Meara has finally come around to prayer, although she’s screaming it, and I won’t tell you if her prayers are answered or not.  For that you’re going to have to read the new excerpt up on www.stickynotestories.com :)

Posted in After Ancient, Sticky Notes. Leave a Comment »

Sticky #10

January 13, 2008 — Rebecca Enzor

Sticky #10

 This is a fun sticky with two different stories on it.  The top half of the sticky is talking about Lane’s Girl, where I’ve been trying to decide where to start.  I thought of writing the first scene where Rebecca dies as the prologue, and then jumping back to tell the story of her and Lane as young apprentices instead of the current version which is done half in flashbacks and may be confusing.  I wrote this sticky about a year ago, and I still haven’t decided which I prefer.  But in the meantime I’m writing all of the history so that if I do decide to put it all in I have it all written up.

The second half of the sticky is from After Ancient – another argument between Dr. Meara and impatient Lizzie, who didn’t listen to her doctor’s good advice from last week’s sticky.

Posted in After Ancient, Lane's Girl, Sticky Notes. Leave a Comment »

Sticky #9

January 6, 2008 — Rebecca Enzor

Sticky #9

 Today we are really mixing it up.  Today we get a sticky note from After Ancient – 07′s disaster of a Nano novel.  I went into this one with only a short blurb about the world and a vague idea of a train wreck, a bad guy modeled after someone I worked with, a doctor, and a sick girl.  At one point after the train wreck, Meara (the doctor), Lizzie (the sick girl), and Tim (the other train-wreck survivor) find an abandoned ski resort, and find a group of people living there who don’t speak their language.    But as Lizzie finds out, everyone speaks the language of love, and her broken ribs and TB don’t seem to be that big of a problem in that language.  Of course, Dr. Meara doesn’t think this is a good idea, and says so – loudly and numerous times.

 Do I need to point out to you that Lizzie doesn’t often listen to her doctor’s good advice?

Posted in After Ancient, Sticky Notes. Leave a Comment »
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