Friday, December 15, 2017

In Translation

I've been reading poetry not in English, my favorite way of reading other languages.

In Spanish I read bilingual editions - Spanish on one side of the page spread, English on the other. So I always have at least an idea of what's going on in the poem. It's a way for me to expand my literary horizons, get a sense of the beauty of the language, see vocabulary in context, and cement what I've started to learn. My favorite Spanish-language poets from this last year are Alejandra Pizarnik - there's a line of hers I want as a tattoo someday, palabra por palabra yo escribo la noche - and Roberto BolaƱo. I'm currently working my way through an anthology of Latin American poetry that will probably take me, oh, five years to finish.

German is another matter. My passive German is good enough that I can attempt to read in the original (though always with dictionary in hand). Some poets are more challenging than others, for sure. I'm reading one right now who uses very specific natural history terms, not ones I've encountered before. The problem for me with some of these is that the words can have multiple meanings depending on the context - and I know one meaning of the word, but not the one she's using. So as I'm going through the poem I see references to things that don't make sense to me - but it's a poem, right? Metaphors and symbolism and all that. I'm all for one thing meaning another in the context of a poem, I do that myself. It didn't even occur to me at first that I needed to look up these words I thought I knew the meaning of, not just the words I knew I didn't recognize. (It doesn't help that this poet doesn't capitalize the nouns, not even the proper ones, so I've already had one layer of linguistic cues stripped away.)

As I've been reading these poems and thinking about translations I've been seeing another place where I have to translate - Twitter. There are words, mostly abbreviations, that I don't know, and common words that have acquired new meaning.* There are gifs and emojis - not just emoticons but emojis - none of which I feel skilled in using. There's the need to scan for additional context, especially to be sure I understand the emotional tone of the comment, and the need to hold back, and then hold back some more and weigh my words before I attempt to say something, knowing some things don't translate well to print. Like, most of my attempts at humor. And then, because Twitter is sometimes an odd mix of public and private discourse, of knowing when not to get into a conversation at all.

And yet, as with the poetry, it's worth the effort, as I encounter beauty and bravery over and over again. People shining a light into the world, word by word by word.**

In love with all kinds of words,
Annie

*Like "crickets", to mean a response of awkward silence. This may be my favorite new word usage. I'm not 100% certain I encountered this usage on Twitter, but it feels like I might have.

** I know there's a lot of negative use of Twitter but apparently not in my little corner of it, knock on wood.

Friday, December 8, 2017

My Money Matters (On Patreon & Being A Small Pledger)

Patreon announced new fees this week and has a lot of people (including me) pissed off.* You can complain to them about the new fee structure here.

For those of you who don't know what Patreon is, it's an online platform by which artists can receive funding directly from their fans. Here's more info on them (via Wikipedia). All of the creators I pledge to are writers.

I spend an absurd amount of money on books. New, used, and now e-books too. But I don't know the publishing industry well enough to know how much is going to authors (not much, I know that at least, and nothing for anything I buy used). And I also know that those funds are not steady.

It's made me really happy to find a way to support some authors directly. Even though my pledges have all been at the $1/month level (until recently), I know it makes a difference. And pledging at that level has allowed me to support more authors.

I work at a large liberal church and a big part of my work each year is running donation drives: hygiene kits for disaster assistance, school supplies for our summer students, Christmas gifts for our tutoring students. From talking with donors and my own experience as a donor, it's important to me that everyone be able to contribute as they can and would like to. I sometimes get grumblings about this from new volunteers - it's not efficient, it's not economical, etc. But these drives are part of the life of the church, of that particular community. People need to feel they have something to contribute, that they are a valued part of that community. That what they give makes a difference.

We all do.

And from my end, every contribution does make a difference. Dollars add up fast when you have enough people giving. One women's group I work with has a weekly collection of their "least coins". Trust me, when I'm dragging a sack of coins twice a year to accounting, those least coins are not so little!

Reading Patreon's new few structure, in light of my own experience with asking for donations, tells me my little pledges don't matter to them. That I'm not who they want giving.

I hope that's not the message they want to send. I know it's not the message creators want them to be sending.

For myself, I've dropped out of a couple of pledges (to organizations rather than individuals). I've upped my pledges to everyone else, both because I can swallow the per-pledge fee more comfortably if it's a smaller percentage of the whole, and because I know creators are losing pledges over this. And I've resigned myself to spending more overall this way - I was going to say I'll just buy one less book each month but I think we all know that's unlikely. Maybe a few less coffees instead. And I'll be more cautious about adding any new ones.

And yes, I have registered my complaint.

Sending love to all authors and those who support them,
Annie

*Word now is that Patreon is doing this as a way to freeze out creators that they feel aren't "successful" enough to represent them. What a dick move. I'll stay on it to support those authors I love, but if/as they start migrating to other platforms I'll follow them.

Monday, December 4, 2017

NaNo, Now What?

I did this NaNo thing last month, 50,000+ words when previously I'd never managed more than 12,000 in that time.

Even starting the month I didn't think I would be able to, but then I switched to writing by hand, which you'd think would take longer, but 1) I write pretty fast by hand (not that anyone but me can read my writing when I'm going that fast, and all the personal shorthand doesn't help), 2) I can take it anywhere with me, and 3) I don't edit as I go, which I do when composing by keyboard. I do all my other writing this way, I don't know why I'd gotten into the habit of something different for my fiction.

Plus I got connected with some other writer types - through the Chicago NaNo Facebook group, through Twitter, through emails with the all of two people I know in real life who write fiction - and that gave me inspiration to keep trying as well.

But even so I was amazed at what happened over the course of the month. I've heard NaNo described as a gym for writers and that was what happened for me. My sit-my-butt-in-one-place-and-just-write muscles got stronger. Like, ten times their size. And I wasn't as worried about being able to "come up with something good" either. Hell, it didn't matter. I just had to come up with something - and I got better at doing that too - time and editing will sort out what's good and what isn't, and what has the germ of something good but needs a lot more work to let it flower.

Since I've been working on this novel for over a year (NaNo was a way for me to jumpstart the total rewrite I needed to do thanks to a change in POV and some pesky paranormal stuff that demanded to be made more prominent - thus necessitating total change in backstory and plot details as well, thank you oh so much), I do actually have an idea of what happens in this story overall. So I know, for example, that I'm two scenes away from the end of Act 1 at this point and that I'm probably a third of the way through the whole thing. That is, a lot more writing still to be done.

My secondary goal for the month was to finish the first act, so after taking a few days off to just not think about it, I plan to keep going at a somewhat more moderate pace until I've done that. Then start the process of typing in all those lovely handwritten pages and I'll be editing on the fly as I do that.

And then another push for act two, and then another for act three... I want to finish this first draft by the end of my birthday month, four months from now. And I know there are plenty of people who would say however long it takes is fine... but no. I have more stories to tell. (Already thinking about next year's NaNo...)

But I can't say strongly enough how huge it was for me to "win" NaNo. Kind of thinking of myself as a real writer now... And I don't want to lose that, no way, no how.

I may have to be a complete dork and put up my winner's certificate where I can see it every day.

What it feels like to want something so much,
Annie