Word After Word After Word

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." - Joan Didion


That quote comes from the beginning of a book entitled Word After Word After Word by Particia MacLachlan. This quote comes from the book itself:


"'I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to,' she said. 'But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever.' 'Some writers write to earn money,' said Evie. 'They do,' said Ms. Mirabel. 'But that is only one reason to write. And usually not the most important.'"


This comes from the page before that:


(After a student has asked her whether or not she writes with an outline) "Ms. Mirabel laughed loudly...'Of course not,' she said. 'Outlines are silly. Once you write the outline, there's no reason to write the story. You write to participate...to find out what is going to happen!' Miss Cash frowned. This is not what she had taught us in creative writing class. 'Actually, I loathe outlines!' said Ms. Mirabel with great feeling. Miss Cash closed her eyes as if her head hurt."


That made me laugh. Up until high school, I also loathed pre-writing, as we called it. I wrote because I liked it. I had the story all in my head. It wasn't until I started writing longer things that I was serious about (beginning with Clockwork) that I started outlining, and that was only because I couldn't wait for NaNoWriMo to start. This year, I've only been outlining Ishaera because I found a cool spreadsheet to help me do it, and it's a re-write in which a lot of things have changed (mainly names).


I spent the morning recording and mixing a song for The Leaky Cauldron's Jingle Spells 4. Up until this year, the CD was invitation-only, but this year they're having a contest. If I'm one of the winners, my song will be on the CD. If I don't win, it becomes available online for free. All money from the CD is donated to charity. My song is a filk (same music, different words) of "I Wonder As I Wander." My singing isn't the greatest (it was either slightly too high or slightly too low for me to sing comfortably, depending on which octave I tried), but I think it sounds pretty cool anyway.


The afternoon was devoted to printing, signing, stamping, and addressing queries and envelopes. There's five or six ready to go to the post office sitting on the floor of our study. Two of them have the first 50 pages of Clockwork, and the rest have the first three. The comments on the Ask Daphne post were incredibly helpful. Depending on when Mom gets them mailed, I expect responses to start coming in in late November or early December, and don't think I won't tell you the moment I hear anything.