#metanoianovel

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Last Line Tag

I was tagged by @the-writister. Thank you!! I missed the tag games!

Rules: share the last line (or few lines, if you’d like) that you wrote for your WIP, then tag as many people as words in the last sentence (if you can).

Slinging around sound the way Monet slung color onto his canvases. The precipice between the two is where his smile gets the biggest. So many teeth.

And I tag: @dabiyyah @gingerly-writing and @q-oetry . Have fun everybody!

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Oh look it’s Maeva’s celebrity crush

Edgar Degas.  Artist famous for his ballet paintings.  1834 - 1917.

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Week in Review

I forgot last week so there’s EXTRA literary stuff this week.

MetanoiaNovel

Words: 3,606

Chapters: 1 & 1/37th!!

Favorite line:

“She is still flushed from whatever she drank at the party, and the bright color makes her eyes look darker, somehow. Blacker than black. Void-like. The sort of eyes that make raw questions seem inevitable.”

The KittyFox Chronicles

They’re practicing good social distancing; 0 words written.

I’m taking bets now on how long they last.

Books

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

It was brilliant. I had no idea what was happening 87% of the time, but the writing was too pretty to care. Bees, everyone. Bees.

With Deer by Aase Berg

This is poetry written in Finnish (I think) and translated to English. Very weird. Some fascinating work with sound. About the death of nature, the body, and reproduction somehow all at once.

Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino

Another interesting book of poetry. I didn’t like this one as much. It was a lot of womanhood and fertility—which I don’t think about much—so I appreciated the new thought cuisine. But I read poems for concentrated images and sound; these are more effusive poems, so they weren’t my cup of tea.

Ararat by Louise Glück

This one is named after a mountain in Turkey, and in essence, it’s a collection of poems about sibling rivalry. Lots of flower imagery, interesting consonant matches. Louise Glück’s poetry books always have a complete narrative; super-satisfying to read.

Poem of the Week

“Steam rose from frozen wells, ice floes chafed the channel, the cold sweat broke out of the skin wall between my being and the cold. It was a hopelessly treacherous time.”

—from “Deer Quake” by Aase Berg

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Welcome back!!!! And happy STS! If your characters were dragons, what would they hoard?

Thank you!! And happy STS to you too!

Oooo such a great question, I love imagining people as dragons!

So Corin would horde microphones. The oldest, crappiest microphones, the newest fanciest microphones, even gaming microphones, if the hunting was scarce. He loves them. He could curl his claws around them and snuggle them to his face all day.

Maeva? Easy: flowers. Round, fluffy pastel ones that she intimidates into growth. Her horde is less a pile and more a luscious meadow, or a well-gardened mountain.

And we’ll throw Alex in, because he’s fun and easy--guitar picks. In Ziploc baggies all over his cave, and he spends his days oh-so-carefully threading them onto bracelets to give his friends.

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Happy WBW! Do you have a favourite setting in your WIP? Why do you love it? What inspired it? - the-writister

Why yes, yes I do! Thanks for asking!

The school Corin and Maeva go to have this café (as most schools do). It doesn’t have a name. It doesn’t have a menu.

What it has is freshmen drama kids dressed up as newsies behind the counter, and the worst coffee imaginable. It only comes in single shots, bitter enough to make your knuckles go white against the counter. It doesn’t matter who you are—dancer, musician, conductor, actor, artist—you’ll kick it back like vodka and wait in line for another.

I love the café because it captures the culture of the school perfectly. Everything is life and death. Patience must be endless. Aesthetic is something you suffer for. Sleep is an illusion. No matter where you are, you must art. Counter? Barre. Crowded room? Rapid-fire figure sketch. People shouting? Name that pitch.

I’m pretty sure I got this idea from the 2.2billion trips I took to the Starbucks at UW. Those trips were like a sport. Calculating the amount of time the line would take. Doing as much homework as I could in the line. Watching the pick-up counter like a hawk to make sure another depressed and exhausted student didn’t pick up my drink by mistake.

It was always worth it to show up to workshop 15 minutes late with Starbucks. You know. Aesthetic.

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Maeva likes dark chocolate bc it matches the bitterness in her soul.

Corin doesn’t eat chocolate bc he’s a heathen.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

What is your OC’s favourite type of chocolate?

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Happy Storyteller Saturday! Have any of your characters ever been betrayed by someone they thought they could trust? What did this person do, and how did your character react?

Oh man oh man this is a good one.

So Corin and Maeva have a really complicated relationship, in that they like each other a lot, but Maeva thinks Corin is really scary. Not because he’s malicious or harmful, but because he’s emotionally unstable and she refuses to get close to someone who might cause her grief down the line.

But he gets a lot better. A lot a lot better. He gets better enough and promises her he’s better enough that she starts to let herself be soft about him.

As soon as she does though, he backslides. Even though it isn’t his fault that he did (mental illness is a killer as we all know) Maeva views his relapse as an enormous betrayal of her trust. Her answer to betrayal, as is her answer to most things, is to ignore and repress. She cuts him off and does her best to pretend she was never obsessed with him in the first place.

Then Corin feels like she’s betrayed HIS trust by abandoning him when he needs her. So he decides he too is done with this...whatever it was.

Yeah that doesn’t work.

Thank you so much! Look out for an ask from me!

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Last Line Tag

Thank you for @rhiannon-writes for the tag! There is no better motivation to write than a last line tag 😂

The game: Post the last line of your WIP and tag as many people as there are words!

From MetanoiaNovel:

It’s a question he’s been asked endlessly over the past month and a half. Why, Corin, why?

17 words. Ouch. If I tag you and you’re not feeling it, please feel free to ignore!

Tagging: @dabiyyah @christinawritesfiction @gingerly-writing @idreamonpaper @knightedwriter @thelordgreen @toboldlywrite and anyone who wants to write a new line of their WIP. That’s 17 people, right? Tag me so I can see what you wrote!

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Happy Monday! Tell us something about your WIP that excites you :3

Happy Tuesday to you! I’m sorry it took me so long to get to this—thank you for asking!

Wow, this is a tough question because there is always SO MUCH about my WIPs that excites me (I’m sure everyone here can relate).

I think what I’m really excited about today is the aesthetic of the story. All of my stories are hightly (but subtly, I hope) stylized, this one in particular. I have an extremely strict color palette for: everything pastel/desaturated, limited use of metallics and no purple. Corin is the MOST saturated character in the story, and Maeva is the LEAST. Everyone else kinda hangs out in the low-middle. Flowers and paint pigments are a descriptive motif. There’s more.

I’m trying to keep it in mind as I do the first draft, it’s a fun challenge, but I’m extra excited to go back and really refine it in the editing process.

I hope you have a great week and stay safe :3

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A painter and an opera singer have matching existential crises in a stereotypical French coffee shop. The color blue is involved.

hi i need more writeblrs to follow so!!! badly explain ur wip in 2 sentences i’d love to learn more 👀👀

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Happy Storyteller Saturday! What's something about your WIP/OCs you love to talk about but are seldom asked?

Ahhh, happy STS to you too! Thank you for talking to me!

I spent so long researching Corin’s voice, there will never be enough asks to cover everything I now know about voices and this voice in particular. So we’re going to have a ramble about why Corin loves microphones.

You cry, he’s an opera singer, they don’t use microphones. Why would he ever want such a thing when he can sing everything he needs to sing without one?

The answer is pretty simple: It’s a lot less work to sing into a microphone.

The amount of projection it takes to use a microphone is exponentially lower than the amount of projection it takes to sing an aria. This is why an opera singer’s tessitura, or ‘comfort range’ is so, so important. These are the notes that they can produce easily and beautifully, so they can project them successfully every single night.

But if you have a microphone doing some of that work for you, you have room to splash around in the range that you can’t project very far. For Corin, that is A Lot of range. Microphones allow him to play with his voice so much more, and he loves that. Because the only thing bigger than his larynx...is his nerdiness.

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So I’m working on Oil & Sky and...

“That’s just what I do.” A new line in his book. “I sing, and I ruin things.”

Maeva almost smiles to herself as she whirls the flat brush in turpentine.  

...

That’s it that’s pretty much the whole book.

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Ahhhhhh thank you @half-explored I’m sorry it took me so long to get to this! I really appreciate you taking the time to ask!

So yeah, at this point in my story the main characters, Corin and Maeva, aren’t close enough to have fought (they’ll get there though).

But there was a really significant argument a year (ish?) before the book starts between Corin and his best friend Sacha. Without going into too much detail, Sacha was doing his best to be a good friend, but Corin wasn’t in a place to hear what he was saying. It got ugly and lasted for a few months.

I don’t think there is bad blood necessarily—they’ve long since made up and Alex was right by a landslide. However, there is a lot of guilt left behind on both sides. If Alex pushed harder/if Corin listened sooner, they think Very Bad Thing may not have happened. They aren’t wrong, exactly, but Very Bad Thing is not the time to be blaming anybody. They will all learn that eventually :)

I hope you have a great week and stay safe!

[dragonscanbeplantstoo]

Week in Review

In which Sage talks about literary stuff she did

WIPs

MetanoiaNovel: 2800 words deleted and 780 words written

The KittyFox Chronicles: 0 words deleted or written

Books

1. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell—Finished!

I loved Carry On, so I was nervous about being let down here, especially because this one is so much shorter! But it was SO CUTE. Just as fun as the last one, just as gay, and I love how the magic system in this series dissects language.

2. Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough—DNF

(CW for assault on this book)

I picked this one up because it’s about a painter (Artemisia Gentileschi) and I’m currently writing about a painter. It wasn’t for me. The novel is written mostly in verse, but I didn’t think the language was poetic enough to ‘earn’ verse, if that makes sense. It felt gimmicky, not unique.

3. The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin—READING

So far, ok. It’s very literary and very large in scope. The writing is elegant, the characters are interesting, but I’m not obsessed. We’ll see if I lose patience over the weekend.

Poetry

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

My favorite.

Poem of the week: “The Red Poppy” by Louise Glück

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Happy STS best fren! What's the strangest thing you've ever done for a wip?

AHAHAHAHA

Idk if this is strange or just crazy... but for MetanoiaNovel I learned to read sheet music and audited a 10-week advanced voice class at my university. It was hell. It was glorious. My eardrums are still recovering.

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Maeva’s aesthetic is kind of retro but this is 1000% an accident and she probably hates me for it.