A girl is the hero

16 November 2011 | 2 Comments

I know it seems to be all about the movies here in my little corner of the internet right now. So mote it be. I’m writing movies, and that means paying attention to all kinds of visual storytelling.

Brave has been on my radar for a while, and now there’s a full trailer available. I’m looking forward to it for several reasons. A girl is the hero! She has adventures. She’s good at riding and shooting. And she is brave. Oh my goodness, the power of that alone to make me want to see this.

But there’s also the power behind that power: Pixar, who are some of the best visual storytellers around — and both of those components are important. Movies are visual, which may seem like a d’oh statement until you’ve seen a film where everyone tells everyone everything, unless it’s My Dinner with Andre in which case it’s good. But for the most part, storytelling through dialogue is boring; and there is so much in good movie storytelling that happens between the words, in the silences, in the perspective of the camera and the small behaviors of the actors, in the fast cuts or the long slow moves. Remember the single shot in Hitchcock’s Frenzy that tracks out of the flat as the murder begins and backs away down the hall, down the stairs, out the door onto the street where people are going on about their daily lives… We could imagine it all in that single deliberate move, the fear and the pain and the lonely death. That’s the power of movies.

But there has to be a damn good story to tell, and that’s the other place where Pixar shines. They work hard to make the story right. I admire their process and philosophy enormously.

So I have high hopes for Brave. And high expectations. It’s Pixar’s first movie about a girl: we’ll see if they know how to tell a story about a brave human being with astonishing red hair.

Enjoy your day. Be brave.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, movies

The Hunger Games

14 November 2011 | 1 Comment

Start your engines.

I am really, really looking forward to this. A teenage girl is the hero. Adults are antagonists and allies. The stakes are the highest possible. There is no escape. And then the countdown begins…

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, movies

Cityscapes

13 November 2011 | 1 Comment

Meduzarts Subaru Ep3 By INetGrafx

Here are 45 beautiful cities of the future from a variety of artists. I could get lost in them: so much world-building, so many stories implied, so much evocative detail. The imagination, the focus, the discipline to create such specificity…. wow. So much that I admire in people has to do with this combination of imagination and willingness to do the work necessary to realize the vision well.

Dreams and work, friends. We need both.

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog

That Kelley, he’s so excited

12 November 2011 | 2 Comments

If you use Chrome browser, have I got a thing for you. If you don’t use Chrome, do yourself a favor and install it even temporarily for the pure pleasure of Jailbreak the Patriarchy, a fabulous extension by Danielle Sucher.

Go, go, go. Go read the examples and see if/when your head turns inside out. Then install Jailbreak and go play. The Internet is full of words and those words are full of gender assumptions, precious, yes they are. Go see for yourself.

Danielle Sucher, my brother, if you are ever in Seattle, I would love to provide you the beverage of your choice.

Enjoy your genderfuck day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, gender

Wave

10 November 2011 | 1 Comment

Even a tall person can look awfully small when they are surfing a 90-foot wave.

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under being human, blog

Murmuration

4 November 2011 | 1 Comment

The world, the world, the beauty of the world.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo (in case the embed isn’t working).
via Matador Network.

From the video: A collection of starlings is called a murmuration.

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog

Good and evil

28 October 2011 | 8 Comments

Wednesday night, Nicola and I joined our friend Colleen Lindsay of BookCountry to speak to members of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association about social media for writers. A lovely and lively crowd, and a very well-organized event (which makes me so grateful every time, because it’s not the easiest thing in the world to make everything run smoothly for folks).

It’s nice to pay forward in this way, and to offer help to other writers as I can. And it’s good to get out into the world after a long stretch of immersion in editing and writing, although I do sometimes feel like a bear emerging from a cave, squinting into the unfamiliar sunshine. Hopefully I do not behave like a bear, since that would probably scare the audience, which is certainly not the point… At any rate, it was good to reconnect with my own notions of “the community of writers,” and to realize that although I sometimes find it draining to maintain an online presence, I also find that it sustains me in a particular way. And so the search for balance continues.

And because every story needs a reversal (smile), now I will show you the EVIL that the PNWA did.

They gave us a present.

Each.

A goodie bag with a book and a lovely mug.

FULL OF EVIL.

Here’s the thing: Nicola cannot resist this stuff. She is like a two-year-old with the chocolatey-sugar-enormously-bad-fat combination. And we all know what happens when kids meet candy….

There is blood sugar whackness in my house today, friends, and I blame the PNWA.

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog

Timelessness

23 October 2011 | 9 Comments

I’ve just seen a time-lapse video made by photographer Dustin Farrell so beautiful that I cannot bear to embed it here and make it small. So instead I will send you to Vimeo where you can see it in HD and full screen, which I highly recommend.

It will take Far Too Long to load in Vimeo. Please embrace the delay. Go out for coffee, or something. It’ll be worth it.

Just magnificent. All the things I love about the west, how it makes me feel so big inside… and the time-lapse gives it a sense of timelessness that I can’t articulate but really respond to. Must think about this.

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under being human, blog

The writing days of summer

21 October 2011 | 15 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my experience of 41 Days of Story.

The background for those of you scratching your heads: I’m the Board Chair of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. This past summer, to raise money for CW, I accepted donations and wrote a new piece of fiction to a prompt supplied by the donor. I did this every day for 41 days in a row.

Thank you to all of you who donated, and read the pieces, and left encouraging comments. You made a difference to Clarion West, and to me. I will always be grateful.

I raised more than $2,500 for Clarion West.
I wrote 32,000 words of fiction, plus another 8,000-10,000 of editorial commentary at Sterling Editing.
At least 6 of these pieces are conscious opening or early scenes of a novel (meaning that I saw a much longer work when I was writing them).
34 of them are stories. Of those 33, at least 12 could conceivably be the genesis of a longer work (novella or novel) if I wanted to develop them along those lines.
There’s one piece that is not a story: a prose poem, maybe?
I would classify 9 to 12 of the pieces as speculative fiction.
7 of the pieces are YA fiction.

And then there were the days themselves. Getting up every morning and sitting down to a sentence or two of prompt, and a big blank screen, and then…writing.

It was brutal. It was absolutely fucking terrifying. It was exhilarating. It was deeply surprising. And it was occasionally ecstatic. But I keep trying to talk about it beyond hanging these tags on it, and I just…can’t. I don’t really know how to make anyone understand what it means to me that I did this thing. Because, you know, people write new fiction all the time. Lots of people write 32,000 words in six weeks. It’s not particularly impressive to the outside world, and it feels pretentious to process about it in public as if it were important to anyone but me. But I just wanted you to know that it mattered to me, and that it has changed me deeply and forever in ways that are exciting, and not entirely comfortable.

However, I would really appreciate your input about what the hell I should do with this stuff. Because my head is overfull of ideas. I could e-publish them as unedited flash fiction (explaining in the introduction the Clarion West/prompt context — I could even give the prompts). I could publish them with the Sterling Editing commentary appended. I could dig in and write one of those novels. I could polish/expand some of the better stories and publish them individually or in a small collection. I could put a nail gun to my forehead and end my indecision that way, although that seems counterproductive…

Your ideas? What would you do with too many options and not enough time? I would also love to know from those of you who read the pieces what your favorites were, and perhaps why?

I am not accustomed to crowd-sourcing my career (and, to be fair, I’m not leaving the decision up to the crowd), but any feedback is a gift right now, and I would appreciate any input you care to offer.

Enjoy your day, and thanks.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, writing

The 360 dinner

20 October 2011 | 5 Comments

Here’s what I did the other night:

Yes, friends, I ate an entire pizza by myself. 360 degrees of carbohydrate sausage pepperoni mushroom green pepper onion cheesy pie. And it was good.