January 21, 2016

Cutting down to the bones makes your writing stronger

It's scary to go by your gut when you hardly have experience writing and consider yourself a rookie and tend to look up to the masters and doubt your every decision and agonize, agonize, agonize. You really start to bloom when you stop agonizing, and you don't stop agonizing until you learn to trust your gut. And that is very hard. How can you trust it when there are all these other writers who know better? You think they know better because they've been writing longer than you, they wrote more books than you, better books than you, and so on. You can drive yourself crazy thinking these thoughts.

I'm certainly nowhere near trusting my gut fully yet, but it comes in waves and it happens more often. The latest test of that trust is happening right now in the shape of me hacking and slashing and cutting and ripping at the second draft of TUBE whilst making it into Draft 3, which is resulting in prose that is so lean and minimal and bony that it makes me scared, and yet somewhere in the darkest farthest corners of my gut I feel that what I'm doing is right.

August 26, 2015

When the book you read makes you weep...

by Ksenia Anske

When you weep because there is nothing else in you but to weep. When words fail you. When the canvas of your skin ruptures and you're you no longer. A blank. When whatever you knew is gone, and whatever there is to know hasn't come yet, and you're in between the empty and the full, the full and the empty, and you don't get the meaning of either. When the idea of you stops existing, and what emerges instead is so fragile you're afraid it will die the second you touch it, and you don't move, don't breathe, and let it shoot out of you like the long forgotten child that you were before you forgot yourself. Before that child was broken.

December 31, 2014

Your New Year's Resolution: WRITE A BOOK

by Ksenia Anske

Welcome to 2015.

You just woke up. You're feeling the sodden pounding headache from consuming too much champagne the night before. You're scratching your head. What day is it? January 1st of the new fucking year. What is it that you have promised everyone willing to listen? You will lose those stubborn extra 5 pounds? You will sign up at a local volunteer organization and, with a bounding heart, will help them take down lost armadillos from the blooming pine trees in the neighborhood? You will spend less time lolloping online and more time playing cricket with your distant relatives? Get a better education? Better job? Pay off your debt? Oh, wait. I know.

YOU WILL DRINK LESS ALCOHOL AND SMOKE LESS WEED??

Nope.

December 25, 2014

Why crowdsource your book

by Ksenia Anske

For the past several days I couldn't beat this thought out of my head: how to get around the copyright issue I ran into with Corners? What to do? What to do? WHAT TO DO? Now, I could've lashed my brain to the inside of my skull with barbed wire and lynched it and turned it into some gibbous amoeba and roped it with steel hawsers and hacked it apart and...well, what I'm describing here is what typically happens inside any writer's head. The endless internal monologue, or dialogue, or whatever. This can drive one nuts. Actually, I suspect that's why most writers are nuts. It's enough for us to swivel a pair of blank fusty eyes at anyone who happens to be passing by our writing cave for that poor person to scream bloody murder and, jinking wildly, run full pelt to somewhere safe. Because, you know. Ever looked a mad writer in the eyes? Yeah, it's not pretty. Very scary, I must say. And every time something in our lives happens, we are tempted to stew in it without telling anyone. Well, the whole purpose of this blog post to show you what happens when you DO share, contrary to your innate resistance.

November 2, 2014

The urge to change your book once it's published

by Ksenia Anske

So a fellow writer asked about the urge to change things in your book once it's published, and since I have just published IRKADURA (Yes! It's done! Here! I'm still working with Stuart on free files, so hang tight...), I have brushed with this terrible beast whilst scanning through my book after my editor has sent me the final final version. I have read that final final file and ended up cutting out 1K more words. As if this was not enough, I stumbled on a mind-blowing article by Chuck Palahniuk about "Thought" Verbs (the best advice about show-don't-tell you will ever read) and after reading it panic-edited another 100 words. I had to tie my hands with a barbed wire to make myself stop from changing anything else.

The book is done.

DONE.