Author: Shoshana

A word on workshops

by Shoshana, posted in Workshop update, Writing Testimonial

If there is something I love and dread more than anything else about trying to be a writer, it is workshops. They are the fodder of the pretentious windbag and the aspiring new Danielle Steele. They are, in fact, the place where you go to find out if your writing is in any way good and instead have to play nice with people whose writing makes you want to claw your own eyeballs out and spill the goo on their papers. 

Case in point is the untitled bit of cynical, jaded New York CRAP that I had to read for class. A young narrator, cryptically arrogant and harmed by the tragedies of his intelligence and the cruelties of a fickle urban world complains about how the world is unfair, not nice, generally sucky, and spends his time ramming creative metaphors about the modern world being equated with filth down the reader’s throats. In the end, the witty windbag narrator goes on and on about the way the world is and never really does ANYTHING in the entire story. A day in the life of a gasbag who complains about other gasbags. 

Welcome to the modern ‘hip’ writers, the jaded and cynical cats and kittens who think that the world is just so ‘over’ that they don’t know how to write about a single happy thing. They are the overly serious, take themselves way too seriously humans who can’t see a ray of light if it came down and singed their nosehairs. They’re the kind who get published in the trendy mags and make the world sound like a dripping, festering sewer full to the brim with happy idiots and only one, miraculously intelligent person: them. They are the sole voice of intellect in a land of foolishness, and they are there to set you free.

Please. PLEASE. Grow up.

You are not the only voice of truth in this world. You are not the only one who has insight. And your jaded, cynical bullshit is not only not fun to read, it has no plot, no purpose, and is much the stuff of a famous quote: all noise and fury and nothing more. And frankly, I’m tired of it. PASS. Go back and find your plot, man, you lost it under all your emo.

Writing Update!

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

As of today, I have turned out one short story last night, entitled “Songs in the Dark”, which is a short story based on one of the larger projects I’m working on.

Pages = 9

Time it took to write = two hours

I’ve also been banging out the start of a new urban fantasy story based on an old roleplaying character that I really liked. That’s already on twelve pages in a few days of work, though for some reason I’m hitting some issues getting down the voice of this character… which is strange, because back in the day when I roleplayed her, I could go for days playing the character in an online text game, writing in the first person. It’s very strange, but I’m hoping the work I’m doing will get better. 

Anyway, just time for a quick update. Must get back to work.

Reading is fundamental. So do it.

by Shoshana, posted in On Reading

This is going to be the part of my blog where I support the process of reading.

I can’t tell you how many people I know who do not read for a fig. There’s a great deal of difference, of course, between reading the way that I do (book fanatic as I am) and a regular ‘reading for fun’ pace. What I’m talking about is the general loss and lack of appreciation for reading good books that a lot of people have. My friends, bless them, are a great and creative bunch but some simply do not have any interest in picking up a book and seeing what is between the covers. And I do not understand why.

My early life was prone for giving me a love of books. I learned to read before most other kids my age, and was an only child so I spent a lot of time with books in my hand as opposed to with other kids my own age. That appreciation never really went away, even when I encountered teachers who did their damnedest to make the reading process the most boring thing I’d ever seen. Reading to me was still a portal, a gateway, into things unseen and unexplored, just a breath away. Words became magic to me.

To friends of mine, people I know, they are cumbersome things that get in the way of information. They believe that reading something online, an article, talking about it, that’s enough. But getting down between the covers of a book? That’s either too boring or takes too long or is too difficult.

I don’t understand it. To me, that’s like saying a good kiss is too much tongue work, pardon the vulgar (if you find that vulgar). Is it too much work to cook a stellar meal you’ll enjoy? I never understand how the words can be such a passkey for some to adventure and such a prison of information for others. Myself, it is my bread and butter, my lifeblood, that spill from me like drops of rain.

And from plenty of other people too! These posts, marked appropriately, will be about what I’m reading right now and my impressions of the authors, the stories, everything. So let’s begin with…

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

It shows the mark of a great writer that you can take a concept like time travel, extra-dimensional travel, monsters and haunted houses, demons and wizards, westerns and drug use, and put them all in a series of books that spans places unknown and alike at the same time. Nobody doubts that Stephen King is a prolific and popular writer but this series also proves what many people might scoff about: Stephen King is one of the greatest writers of our time.

“The Dark Tower” series spans an unimaginably complex and beautiful story about the gunslinger, Roland, on his way to confront the Tower at the heart of the universe. From the very first lines of the story, you get caught up in the style and flavor of the text as Stephen King writes, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” There is no way to resist following. It came across to me like a compulsion to keep reading, to find out what this was about, to know more. It takes seven books, but King has completed the series recently, so follow it I will.

I’m already on book three and nearly finished with that one at that. I started this run last Monday and polished off the pages at a good clip. While the first book, I admit, takes a few pages to get into, once you’ve gotten used to the style of writing King uses to mark the gunslinger’s world as different from ours, it’s easy to get into this story of an epic hero on his quest for immortal answers. I can’t wait to see more of what King came up with in later books. The funny part is, carrying this book around has given me an idea of how many Stephen King fans there are out there, because no matter where I go there always seems to be someone who has already read the series or is right smack in the middle, just like me.

An addendum must mention, however, the graphic novels done by Marvel Comics, which tell the story of Roland’s childhood and quest to manhood. They are both epically beautiful and though the world of Gilead and Mid-World looks different in my head than it does in the comics (Jae Lee’s art, while beautiful, is not what I envision), the comics are so beautifully illustrated that there is nothing to do but gape at the tight lines telling the story of a hero’s trials. So far they’ve done two graphic novels, “The Gunslinger is Born” and “The Long Road Home” and they’re just about to get into “Treachery”, the third run. I can’t wait to see it, as all of this is new information to me anyway.

So that’s it from The Dark Tower series. Tune in next time when I talk about “The Exorcism of Annelise Michele”, the true-life account of an exorcism that went wrong which inspired the modern horror film “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”.

NaNoWriMo gives props to its writers.

by Shoshana, posted in Random Aside

So apparently, my little rant about how I kicked NaNo in the butt last year got on the NaNoWriMo Blog! It’s kind of ridiculous to me that I googled my name (yes, everyone’s done it, don’t lie, you have too) and this is what popped up in the top slot. It was linked to other groups and other blogs!

http://blog.nanowrimo.org/node/125

Check that noise out. It kinda blows me away.

The name of this blog.

by Shoshana, posted in Random Aside

If you read my previous post (and you’re still here, you poor fool!), you will notice that I… am verbose, even while typing. My sentences are long, my paragraphs longer, and I don’t stop writing until I say my piece. If you ever meet me in real life, you’re in for a treat: I’m like this in person too! Language is my crack and I’m an addict if I ever met one. So then comes the funny question: why the name of this blog?

Irony, folks, it’s a kicker. I read an amazing book not too long ago called Dune by the illustrious Frank Herbert. In it, he writes about his protagonist, the incomparable Paul Atriedes, who later becomes (or always was?) the foretold Muad’Dib, visionary, tyrant leader, and ultimately religious figure (that is an altogether simplistic overview of this amazing story: go pick it up to see why). In the book, there are quotes about Muad’Dib’s life written by his wife the Princess Irulan and one of them struck me. It went like this:

“At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.”

There was a connection between silence and wisdom, silence and the understanding to keep ones tongue and think instead of speak, silence being a medium for intellect before rash action and forethought rather than afterthought. 

This is not my nature. I am probably one of the most chaotic, helter-skelter individuals I’ve ever seen. And I talk a lot. That is the most no bullshit assessment of myself that I can give. So it seemed impossible to me that I can achieve a state of such forethought if there was this never-ending torrent of ideas in my brain trying to get out of my mouth. In short, I was not made for silence because language to me was a symphony of sound and silence was the absence of music. Then some years went by and I taught myself that sometimes, the silence before the symphony can be just as sweet as the music, the refining of the tune can make it even a more enriching experience.

In other words, I learned to shut my mouth and think before I spoke more often than not.

That changed who I am a lot in the last couple of years. It has taught me forethought, it has taught me caution, it has taught me the nature of human fascination lies in deriving truth from silence and uncovering mystery in our fellow human beings. I think this means I’m growing up, Peter Pan, but maybe I’m just a richer human being. Who knows if that means I’m a richer person, who knows? All I know is, the symphony is stronger when I open my mouth and the pay-off oh that much sweeter.

So this blog is called Wisdom in Silence because there is, I’ve learned, and while I still open my mouth to massive torrents of words sometimes, I’ve also learned to close the floodgate and just listen. And that has allowed a richer human being to be blogging here today.

So put that on a fortune cookie if you can.

Let’s start at the beginning.

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

Let me give you a no-bullshit assessment: Being a writer is a disheartening life choice somewhat akin to asking Fate to put you on the Sisyphus jogging team. It blows rocks.

Writers are thick on the ground where I come from in New York. You couldn’t swing a dead feline without hitting one. Everyone’s got a short story, novella, full-length trilogy or movie script tucked away somewhere that they’re just dying to slip under someone’s door. Everyone’s aching to get a shot at the big time. I, sadly, am one of those crazy masses just trying to get something together. My name’s Shoshana Kessock, I’m from Brooklyn New York and if I have anything to say about it, I’m going to get published. This blog is going to follow the process of my grinding away until it happens. 

This wasn’t always going to be my plan. Originally, I wanted to be a police officer or a teacher. Not so strange, when you think about it: I’ve got this hard-on for helping the community and (get ready for the big capitol letters) Making the World A Better Place. This is what I was taught since I was a little girl, that your job is to Make the World A Better Place. What that meant exactly, I never quite understood, but I read a lot of things (mostly comic books) and I thought I knew a basic idea. I wanted to help people out of jams, protect people, that sort of jazz. What I didn’t realize while I was doing all that is that I had a particular talent, you see, for doing that helping people thing in one way: I told stories. I could put together a mean sentence that could inspire, that could bring an idea to light, anything. And while I was slaving away, trying to lose weight to go into the Army (that was part of the whole Be A Cop plan), I was neglecting that little bug that lived in the back of my brain that said write this down, don’t ignore me, you know I’m here, now listen to this story idea and put it down on paper, get out your damn laptop and STOP IGNORING ME-

Anybody who has ever had the writing itch knows what this is. This, ladies and gents, is the writing fever.

It starts when you see something that intrigues you. You think ‘hey, wouldn’t it be great if that happened like this’ and suddenly you’re crafting the start of a whole tale. Now, if you’re anybody else but a writer, you put it aside, you run it through a quick fantasy, and that’s that. If you’ve got the writing fever, that itch? Then it just sits there and gnaws at you. Your eyes glaze over and suddenly, you’re gone and thinking about a whole world of ideas and if you could just get them down on paper, then what would it turn into? If you don’t get it out on paper, you tell a friend. Or you blog about it, in modern day, or you put it up on YouTube or you just forget about it. If you’ve got the itch real bad, sometimes that won’t do it. Sometimes, it will just keep gnawing until you have an outlet and the idea has been given birth to and then its gone.

That’s what being a writer is like for me.

Here’s what that does to my life. I work at a part-time job while going to college full time. I also run a role-playing game (yes, I’m a gamer, so that gives me an outlet) and try to have a social life. When the itch comes, sometimes I can’t write, because I’m too busy (classes, work, whatever) and then? Then it starts to get annoying. And if I don’t do it for long enough because I have to go vacuum or go to the gym, it starts to actually be more than annoying. It starts to get downright irritating and then I don’t know how to describe it. It feels like, to steal a term from Stephen King, like my brain is ready to do the junkie jive. So I suppose you’d say that to me, being a writer is like what I imagine being a junkie is like. You get it out there, you write, and by God you have to, because these ideas won’t stop.

I didn’t write for a long time. I didn’t have the stones for it. Rejection is a bitch, ladies and germs, and I didn’t like the notion of having to put myself up there to get pot-shots tossed my way. But I couldn’t stop writing. I would start short stories and stop. I would come up with novel ideas and toss them aside. Then, on a whim, I took a writing class and… yikes, the floodgates just about killed the hoover dam in my brain and out it all has started to come. I’ve got more ideas than I know what to do with.

Now? Now, I’m serious about it. I’ve done things like the NaNoWriMo writing challenge two years running and pumped out stories that were, while not my best writing, good practice. I’ve taken more writing classes and I’ve started talking to people at conventions (gamer conventions are great places to meet people). I’m taking advice where I can and getting my stuff together. And this time… I know what I gotta do.

No matter what, I gotta write. I don’t care if it means staying up late, not going to that movie with friends, or cramping up my hands due to typing too much, I’ve got ideas that just need to get out of my brain and onto paper. And so this blog is born. I’m going to chronicle what I’m up to, what I’m working on, and what I’ve bee doing to drive myself onward. I want this blog to be an inspiration for me when at the end of the day, when I’m discouraged or just plain tired of all of it, that it was worth it. I’m going to keep working and this blog is going to remind me of why.

Because in the end, I want to see my work in print. Because I might not get to be a police officer (that’s still up in the air) and I might not be a teacher or someone who saves the world, but I’m going to write something that somewhere, touches someone in a good way. I’m going to write something that gives someone a good time at the end of a sucky day of work. I’m going to do this because these characters are alive in my brain and they want out into the world to say hello. I’ve got dozens of them, hundreds maybe, and I’m going to let them come out and say hello. Because while writers may be a dime a dozen? I’m going to quote an author that I adore, Jim Butcher, who said that being a writer is like being chased by a bear. You don’t have to be the fastest one, you just have to be faster than the other guy. I don’t have to be better than the authors out there, I just have to be better than the guys around me who want to be authors. I just have to Do Something. 

Because, in the mathematics of my brain, when I Do Something I can get to my goal and maybe Make the World a Better Place in some small way. That’s my goal.

So welcome to my brain. Step over the old plate of cookies, don’t trip on the cat, and come on in.

– Shoshana Kessock /  Summer 2008