Freelance scribbler exploring worlds real and imagined
Carrie Gessner 419 pages Self-Published (2016)
Read this if you like: The Wheel of Time, David Eddings, character-driven high fantasy tl;dr summary: Three magic users in a world where magic is dying set out to avert war, solve a murder, and avoid bringing about a prophecied doom.
One function of myth is as a cultural teaching tool. It demonstrates moral behavior and outlines the rules and standards applied to different members of society. Religion has often been a tool to reinforce prescribed societal roles, and this includes gender divisions. You can usually infer which activities, behaviors, and physical traits were most strongly coded male or female by looking at the culture's deities, culture heroes, and other legendary figures.
But the gender division in mythology isn't always a firm binary. There are a slew of deities from around the world who are both genders, or neither, or known to switch back and forth on a whim. I'm intrigued by these figures and their roles in their respective pantheons, and thought other folks might find them interesting to learn about, too.
More so this reading period than in the past, I’ve been seeing more submissions in the After Happy Hour slush pile that make use of alternate approaches to formatting dialogue. This tracks with what I’ve read in other literary journals in recent months. It seems like ditching the quotation marks is on-trend right now—and there’s nothing wrong with doing that, in a general sense, but I’m not sure everyone who’s making this shift is doing so with a reason. I like it when it works, but a lot of the stories I’ve read, it feels like more of a distraction.
When a reader sees quotation marks they know exactly what this means, even if the writer hasn’t attached a dialogue tag to it: someone is speaking aloud. It’s an easy shorthand. Readers don’t have that same implicit understanding of other formatting approaches. You can teach the reader the conventions of your story quickly, but it’s still going to stand out for them as different from the norm. This means it takes a bit more mental effort to read the story—and, even if just at a subconscious level, the reader wants to feel like there’s a payoff for that extra effort, and a clear reason why the author made that formatting choice.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about some tools to help writers build a habit. All of those are super helpful when it comes to accountability, tracking progress, or even just getting reminders that it’s time to write.
None of those tools can make you sit down and use them, though. It still takes some internal motivation to start a writing habit, and for many people that’s the hardest part. I will say, there’s no magic formula for this. To some extent, it’s true that you just need to force yourself to do it and there aren’t really any shortcuts. That said, how you think about and approach the process of starting a writing habit can make a difference in getting it to stick. Here are the steps I took to build my current writing habit, which has been ongoing for a while now—even through an international trip, the last holiday season, planning the Scribble House Lit Fest, and other time-consuming stuff that is often deadly to writing routines.
Leech Girl Lives Rick Claypool 307 pages Space Boy Books (2017)
Read this if you like: Philip K. Dick, high-tech dystopias, creature horror
tl;dr summary: Woman on far-future fungus-infested Earth gets leeches for arms, uses them to save humanity.
When it comes to Mesoamerican cosmology, the Aztec tend to get the most press—largely because more Aztec history survived the Spanish than was preserved from many other cultures. When it comes to the Maya, the majority of their codices were destroyed, forcing modern scholars to reconstruct their beliefs from depictions on the structures and artifacts that avoided similar destruction. These efforts are aided by the one mythological text that was preserved by a uniquely forward-thinking Spanish monk named Francisco Ximenez: The Popol Wuj (or Popol Vuj), a name that roughly translates to “Book of the Community”. This text includes the Maya creation story, which flows into the tale of their culture heroes, the twins Hunahpu (or Junajpu) and Xbalanque.
If any place could be said to be the modern day domain of the Maya, it’s Guatemala. Of the 17.6 million people who live in Guatemala, nearly half (43.75%) belong to the Maya peoples. Maya culture lives on in the country’s food and customs, while the empire’s history can be traced through a slew of archaeological sites and the artifacts recovered from them.
I’m not sure if this is a universal experience for writers, but I usually find it more challenging to develop characters in a short story than in a novel. The reader doesn’t have much time to get to know them, which means the writer needs to be precise in choosing the right details, and conveying them effectively to make characters feel like real people as quickly as possible.
Often, when I read a story draft and feel like my characters are weak or vague, the problem isn’t just how I’ve written them—it’s that I don’t know the character well enough yet. It’s often not necessary to know as much about short story characters as those in a novel, but the writer still needs to understand their motivations and give their personality some depth to bring them to life on the page.
I love my writing group. A lot of us have been in the group for over 10 years, by this point, which means we know each other’s writing well—and that’s usually a good thing. Knowing the perspective each person is coming from helps to interpret their comments and put them in context, which makes it easier to fix the issues they spot without losing my voice. Their comments are also more likely to have that voice in mind since they’re so familiar with it.
That said, though, there are times that feedback from my workshop group might not be the most productive thing for the piece I’m working on. Sometimes it’s helpful to see how a story is reading to people who don’t know my writing, like when I’m playing in one of my established sandboxes and want to verify that it makes sense as a stand-alone, or if I’ve already workshopped the piece with the group and need a fresh perspective on how it reads after incorporating their suggestions.
Whether you don’t have a regular workshop group, or are looking for supplemental sources of creative critique outside your usual circles, here are some places you can get feedback on fiction without leaving the comfort of your house.
Rios de la Luz 143 pages Broken River Books (2017)
Read this if you like: Isabel Allende, V. Castro, Arundhati Roy
tl;dr summary: A pair of sisters in a magical family navigate the grief of losing their Abuelita, grow up
It’s New Year Resolution time again—when we all look back over our past year, what we accomplished, what we didn’t, and what we want to do better our next time around the sun. From talking to the writers in my circle, it seems like establishing a more consistent, regular writing routine is a popular resolution this year.
This is one area where I have some first-hand expertise to share. I’ve always been pretty good at establishing and maintaining routines when I put my mind to it, but I fell out of my daily writing routine a few years ago when both work and life in general got hectic. One of my goals for 2024 was getting back into a regular writing habit, and I’m pleased with the new routine I’ve developed over the past year.
Part of what has helped me to do that is finding the right tools to keep me accountable and give me a bit of extra motivation on the days I’m not quite feeling it. So I figured I’d share some of the tools I either use currently or have used successfully in the past to keep myself writing regularly.