It was created with the particular needs of parents in mind, but I think there will be some good tips for any writer who’s feeling short on time lately. It’s free, but you do need to register to attend live. It will also be recorded, so you can watch it at your convenience.
I wasn’t planning on bringing attention to the fact that abortion plays an important role in my latest young adult fantasy novel ELIXIR SAVED. It’s a little bit of a spoiler for one of the storylines, but it also felt like bringing attention to it would come off as me taking a controversial topic and using it to market my own book, which is not my intent at all. So I was content to be confident in my choice to include the abortion because it was right for the character and the story, but I would let readers come across it organically.
All of this on top of years of states passing laws—some of which were later overturned by the courts—that eroded access to birth control and reproductive rights for women and people with uteruses.
I am firm in my belief that abortion is healthcare. Denying people who seek safe and affordable ways to manage their sexual health, including abortion, is denying them agency over their own bodies. It’s a tool of oppression that has been used against women throughout history and is more about control than it is about saving lives (see “Abolishing Abortion: The History of the Pro-Life Movement in America” by Jennifer L. Holland and “The Pill and the Women’s Liberation Movement”).
So when I was continuing to develop the matriarchal world in the second book of the Elixir Chronicles and an unwanted pregnancy became a storyline, there was no question about whether that character would have access to an abortion. I put a lot of thought into what her decision would be, but the access part was never an issue.
I also don’t think it’s inappropriate for birth control or abortion to be in a young adult novel. Some teens are having sex and certainly most of them are thinking about it. Some teens are on birth control. Some teens have had abortions. I hope any teens—or any person for that matter—who read ELIXIR SAVED feel safe using it as a starting off point to discuss and understand reproductive rights. They deserve to be educated about it.
So this is me using my blog as a platform to say that I support the right to choose for anyone with a uterus, and one of the ways I’m showing my support is by having abortion as a right in my young adult fantasy novel.
I’m going to start today’s post by telling you something.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the Fibonacci sequence (really, haven’t we all…no?). Basically, if you start with 0 and 1, it’s a series of numbers where the sum of the two previous numbers add up to the next number in the sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, etc… (0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, etc…).
It’s a tidy little pattern, and with some easy arithmetic (at least in the beginning), you can figure out what the next number is. In a world that seems to be getting more chaotic by the minute, I like the predictability of the pattern.
On graph paper, you can connect the opposite corners of boxes that are the size of each number and you get the Fibonacci spiral. Let me show you that.
It’s a neat little mathematical trick, but you’re probably thinking, so what? It’s a bunch of numbers that form a pattern. Well, there are lots of applications in real life that use this sequence, like computer algorithms. But the ones I’m most interested in are related to nature (for further reading see “How are Fibonacci numbers expressed in nature?” by Robert Lamb).
Take the sunflower. Let me show you this sunflower I grew in my yard.
Notice the spiraling pattern of the seeds in the center of the sunflower. (Have you guessed where I’m going with this yet?) Turns out in most sunflowers–it is nature after all, so with many outside factors, it’s not true for every sunflower–the number of spirals correspond with the Fibonacci sequence. From pine cones to spiral galaxies, this pattern shows up in so many places in our universe.
Yet, there’s a lot more to sunflowers than understanding the pattern of it. What do they smell like? What sound do they make blowing in a late summer breeze? What does it taste like when you pop open the shell of a roasted seed to get to the salty crunch in the middle? What’s a situation where you might think of a sunflower and what emotions might that evoke?
There are as many answers to the above questions as there people in the world.
Now think about if I just showed you the image with the Fibonacci spiral and didn’t tell you about it at all. Or if I just told you about the pattern and didn’t give you a visual. And what if I didn’t add in the bit about the sunflowers? Or what if I did include the part about the sunflowers following the pattern, but I didn’t ask you all those other questions about them?
All this telling and showing is what helps me to figure out the world. Knowing the math behind the nature adds yet another layer to the flower that makes me appreciate it even more. The sunflower helps me understand the Fibonacci sequence and vice versa. In nature writing, all this might be important to include, but in prose writing, it’s probably not.
Sometimes seeing a thing makes more sense than having it explained. But sometimes having a thing explained makes you see it in a whole new way. Finding the right balance between the two and understanding what your end goal is makes all difference in what to include in your writing.
Here, I included a lot. Even though the old writing adage is “show, don’t tell,” I wanted to explain the Fibonacci sequence by telling you about it and showing it in visuals, which included the sunflower. I also wanted to inspire you to think deeper about the sunflower. I suppose you could say I wanted to be academic in the beginning and move into the more poetic as we went along.
For a novel, you certainly don’t want to explain the Fibonacci sequence when describing a sunflower. Unless maybe your narrator is a scientist or a mathematician and that’s important to how they see the world and express themselves through it. But for most narrators that won’t be the case. So to strike the right balance, I find it’s best to see the world through their eyes. What aspects of the sunflower would they observe given their state of mind to convey something important about them and the story?
Also what does the reader need to know and care about? Perhaps simply telling them a thing is a sunflower is enough (sometimes I think as writers we can get too caught up in the showing) and you don’t need to immerse them in experiencing the sunflower. The reader can conjure the image themselves with just the word and no showing is necessary. Or perhaps not. Maybe this is a moment in the story when you really do want to take the time to show them the flower and all that it means.
How do you decide? Of all the above stuff I wrote about sunflowers and all the things about sunflowers that I made you think about, what’s important? The answer to that is it’s all relative. It all depends on who is telling the story and what the person who is reading it is supposed to get out of it. And I’m afraid that is only something you, as the writer, can answer.
First off, I know a lot schools started back this week (in one form or another), so I wanted to send good wishes out to all the teachers, parents, and students embarking on this new school year. My kids don’t start until next week, and I’m having a lot of feelings about it, many of which I’m keeping close to the chest because I want to stay as positive as possible for the kiddos. I wrote a post about change back in 2015 and find much of it is relevant to the year 2020.
This was the school year where all three kiddos were supposed to have some form of formal schooling. The year where I would have a little more time to write. The fact that this isn’t happening is a small thing in comparison to a lot of other problems, but I’m still trying to allow myself to feel some resentment about it without wallowing. I’ve had a ton of writing ideas lately, so at least my creativity is flowing again.
In bookish news, I have a secret project I’ve been working on. Some of you may already know this one, and it’s getting a second life! It’s a project I’ve been working on in the in-between spaces. I was stuck on it for a little bit, but now that I’ve solved a particular problem, it’s well on its way. I don’t have the timeline pinned down yet for a release. Maybe I’ll just do a surprise release with it whenever it’s done.
Here’s an adorable teaser image for it that I cannot take credit for as it was done by an illustrator. I’ll let you know all the details soon!
After pushing last fall and winter to get ELIXIR SAVED ready for publication, I was planning on taking a break in the spring to read and fill up my creative well. Then all the pandemic stuff happened, the kids moved to distance learning, and I didn’t get a chance to fill up the well.
I got to a point at the end of the spring when I felt like I would never figure out how to get back into writing and still felt totally burnt out. But I was also itching to get working on this witchy middle grade book I’d started last fall when I did an Unworkshop at the Highlights Foundation (you can read about that amazing experience on my post “Highlights Foundation Unworkshop: A Little Creepy, A Lot Productive”). I’m the type of writer who needs breaks, but when the itch to write comes back, I get antsy. It’s like my body is reacting to my brain’s need to write.
And I really love this witchy middle grade I’ve been working on. It’s about breaking up with toxic friendships, middle school bullying, historical and modern witches, crows, painting and art, mourning the loss of a loved one and how that process never really ends, and a Halloween night corn maze. I even got a crow t-shirt for my birthday to really get into the creative spirit of it.
So I thought about what would help me get back into it and came up with the idea of an accountability buddy. Having someone to check in with where we could be like “Did you get your words in this week?” would make it so I would be letting them down if I didn’t do my work.
A thing you may not know about me is that I’m not very good at asking for help. I hate the idea of putting people out for my benefit…even if it’s not necessarily an inconvenience to them or maybe it’s even something they would enjoy or benefit from. This avoidance of asking for help isn’t something I consciously do; it’s more like it’s in my nature not to bother others. Most of the time I don’t realize I’m doing it (or not doing it as is most often in these situations).
Anyway, I was super nervous when I reached out to one of my writer friends about being accountability buddies. I tried to be totally casual about it, prefacing it with statements like “only if you’re interested and have the time.” I didn’t even suggest the writing together (virtually, of course, because of the pandemic).
It turns out, she was totally on board with it (and I never should have been nervous about reaching out to her in the first place). She had been getting up early in the morning to write before her daughter woke up and asked if I’d be interested in joining her in those early morning session. Which I was super excited about!
Except for one thing…so something else you might now know about me (you’re just all learning so much about me today!) is that I am 100% not a morning person. Before kids, I used to sleep in on weekends until 11:00 and stay up all hours of the night reading or writing. On the other hand, my husband and our two older kids are early risers. I think I’ve had to wake up the kids to get ready for school maybe once. They have a clock in their room, not to wake them up with an alarm, but to let them know when it’s 6:30 a.m. and they’re allowed to get out of bed. They are my alarm clocks!
But, I could see how getting up early would allow me to get back to writing. And if my friend was already doing it, then it wouldn’t be an inconvenience to her at all. That’s why three mornings a week, my phone alarm rings at 5:30 a.m. and I roll out of bed to get my tea ready in time for our 5:45 writing sessions.
I’m not gonna lie and say it’s gotten easy the more I’ve done it…I still hate waking up that early and it feels totally unnatural. (It helps that it’s at least somewhat light this time of year.) But it feels so good to get all those words on the page before breakfast. My word count for the witchy MG is over 35,000 now. I’m past the muddy middle and working my way towards the end. Plus, it’s really fun to write with someone else and to spend at least a few minutes chatting together about our writing projects and life and stuff.
Once school starts back up again, it’s going to be a little trickier to do these early morning sessions (and it’ll be darker in the mornings), but I’m going to try for at least one morning a week. So keep your fingers crossed for me! If I can get this first draft done by the beginning of October, I will have drafted this novel in less than a year…which would be a first for me.
