I haven’t run a reblog post here in a while. Usually when I do, it’s when someone writes something that I’ve been thinking myself but haven’t figured out how to say yet. This time I did write about it, and after I hit “publish” I read something that made me think, “That’s what I meant to say!”
On Friday I wrote about signs. I got it partially right. I got that the crows in Seattle are more than just urban opportunists (they made their way into a post I wrote for Dave’s Garden last week, too…), and that it had something to do with developing as a writer. But author S.P. Sipal, whose new novel Southern Fried Wiccan (she had me at the title) has just been released, explained it so much better and more beautifully in a post on Adventures in YA Publishing. That blog is on a different platform, so I can’t embed it here, but I hope you will click through and read it – HERE.
And if you don’t know what we’re talking about with the crows, the story is HERE.
I just remembered that crows (specifically, Seattle-based crows) featured in the short stories read at the Reykjavik Writing Jam I attended last fall. I wish I could include one of those stories here, especially Karen Finneyfrock’s, in which the crows were significant, but I couldn’t find them online. I think they were only printed zine-style for attendees of the jam. Maybe that’s what got crows percolating in my brain. Or maybe it’s because they screech outside my window all day as I work (like right now). Or maybe the appearance of crows in tandem with creativity popping up everywhere in my universe lately is some kind of sign.
I would like to include a picture of a crow here, but technology hates me this week and I’m just not going to put myself through that stress today. Instead, here is a picture of the stories I mentioned that include crows.
My computer is littered with false starts. Somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 words of fiction, I run out of steam, run out of ideas, fall into a plot hole, and don’t know how to continue. So my stories sit, unfinished and abandoned in a folder on my laptop. Last Friday I made it all the way to 16,000 words before I realized I had no idea where I was going. I closed my laptop in disappointment and that night I went to bed a failure.