Return of the Mango! (or, Late-Night Tea with Ari and Fred)

*Frederick the Regency Raptor sits reading in his fireside armchair, wearing his dressing gown and sipping a cup of tea. A tentative knock at the door nearly makes him drop the cup. Tea sloshes onto the corner of the chair and gown.*

Fred Regency Raptor: *expletive censored*

Ari Fuzzy Mango: Helloooo…? Anyone home? *knocks on the door again*

FRR: Good lord! Miss Mango? Is that you?

AFM: Fred! Sorry, am I interr—

FRR: No, not at all! I’ve just been…I mean, I didn’t expect…*slips book facedown onto the armchair*…what I mean to say is that this is…all rather sudden. Where on earth have you BEEN?

AFM: I know, I’m sorry! I did say I was coming back, though. And now school’s out and I’ve…graduated. (Holy crap what.) So, er, here I am!

FRR: Yes, but…didn’t you have that…trip…y…thing you did?

AFM: Oh, yes! The choir tour!

FRR: Where was it you went again?

AFM: China and Hong Kong, for two weeks. I only just got back, so my time zones are a little screwed up, and…yeah. *gestures sheepishly at the clock reading 3:15 AM* But I’m home now! And trying to work out precisely what I’m going to be doing with my life this summer (slash this year slash the next few years).

FRR: But…if you’ll pardon my frankness, are you well and truly back? Are we to expect that you’ll go gallivanting off for goodness knows how long at the—

AFM: No! No. What I mean to say is that, for the foreseeable future, I’m back to blogging on a regular basis.

FRR: *cocks an eyebrow* *stares*

AFM: No, honestly! I am!

FRR: *continues to stare*

AFM: Really!

FRR: *raises both eyebrows* *picks up tea and takes a sip*

AFM: Soooo… *casts about the room* What’s this you’re reading? *takes a step towards the chair and the familiar-looking novel*

FRR: *snatching up the book* Oh, just some light fiction…you know, for the insomnia…

AFM: It’s Twilight, isn’t it?

FRR: NO! *splutters* No! How…what kind of a…

AFM: *raises eyebrows and grins* Dude, it’s fine. No shame! I read them too. John Green read them. They’re just fluff—

FRR: How could you THINK that of me??

AFM: Fred. Tell me honestly: how many books have black covers with a pair of hands holding a red apple on the front?

FRR: …

AFM: …

FRR: …

AFM: …

FRR: Lots!

AFM: *grinning* Riiight. Well then, I’m off to bed. Enjoy the literary junk food. That’s what it’s for, after all—enjoying. In the meantime, I’m going to try to get off Beijing time, if I can. Sooo…

FRR: So…

AFM: *stands awkwardly in the doorway* Well…g’night, I guess. *exits*

FRR: *waits a moment* *calls out* Miss Mango!

AFM: *pops head back around the corner* Mmm?

FRR: It’s…er…

AFM: …yes?

FRR: …well, it’s…uh…nice. To have you back.

AFM: Awww, Fred! *dashes back into room* *pounces on Fred and hugs him* *tea goes everywhere* Did you miss me?

FRR: Well, I—

AFM: Oh, I missed you too!

FRR: *sighs* *mutters under his breath* Mammals.

On Writing and AWOLing and Commencing

Hi!

This is another one of those I’m-not-dead-I-swear kinds of posts, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Because it’s not just this blog that I’ve neglected—in the past few months, my extracurricular writing has basically ground to a standstill. Several reasons for this:

• I’m taking a creative writing class that requires me to write approximately 300 words per day. For a NaNo vet, this seems like a trivial number (I can do 300 words in <5 minutes if I have to)—but unlike NaNoWriMo, these can’t be word-vomit. They have to be carefully-crafted 300 words, each piece in response to a given prompt. Doing that takes 1-2 hours out of every day. So I’m writing, and writing creatively, but not working on my longer projects.
• The First World War. I read about it. I write about it. I think about it. I’m looking at postgraduate study for it. And all of that takes time.
• It’s my last semester of college. My final weeks on campus, spending time with my friends and enjoying all the amazing things my school has to offer. So that even when I have a free evening (as I do tonight), I’m opting to go to a friend’s poetry slam rather than snag some writing time. Because pretty soon, I won’t be able to attend this friend’s poetry slams—but I’ll have plenty of writing time.

All of that said, I miss blogging, and I particularly miss my novels (I’m itching to get back to editing them). I spent last night brainstorming several sticky plot points with friends, and another couple of friends helped me out a few weeks ago when I was desperate to work out some worldbuilding logistics. So I do what I can when I can.

Anyhow, the upshot is: you probably won’t be seeing all that much of me on the interwebz in the next month or two, but it’s just because I’m trying to squeeze every last drop out of my undergraduate experience and not freak out too much as Commencement approaches. So never fear, dear readers and raptors—I shall return anon!

Much love,

Ari

Where On Earth Have I Been?

First of all, before I do anything else:

HAPPY 2013!!!

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Thanks, Ari! But, uh…we’ve reached the Ides of January and you’re just now wishing us a happy new year?”

The answer to that question is a bit complicated, and I shan’t endeavor to explain it all. But the basic story can be broken down into three interconnected parts:

1. I’ve been at home on break. And what have I been doing, if not blogging? A brief list, in no particular order:

• spending time with friends and family
• holiday celebrations
• holiday cooking (just cooking in general, really–I miss having a kitchen when I’m at school)
• taking walks in the great outdoors (THE GREAT OUTDOORS ARE GREAT YOU GUYS)
• drinking tea
• reading books
• writing/editing

And in order to do these things, I made a concerted effort to spend less time on the internet than I usually do. The success of this endeavor is questionable, but:

2. I’ve been writing and editing. Questionable degree of success here too. For several weeks (basically as soon as the holidays were over) I tried to dive back into editing UNFAMILIAR SPELLINGS. I cut some stuff, rewrote some stuff…and then hit a wall.

An awful wall.

The kind where you become convinced that everything you’re writing is crap.

The kind where you honestly can’t remember why you even liked this story in the first place.

The kind where you find yourself staring at your screen at 2 AM and moving punctuation around just so you can have the illusion of being productive. (I wish I were exaggerating.)

Needless to say, my actual output dwindled to nothing. I desperately wanted to go work on SHADESHOCK (my WWI novel) instead, but I’d promised myself I’d finish the US edits before I did, so I found myself in a depressing pit of doing nothing. Finally, in despair, I sent off a rambling, panicky email to my friend Marieke in the wee hours of the morning, an email that could essentially be summed up in the sentence, “WHAT DO I DO????” Her thoughtful response: “Well, what do you feel like you should be doing?”

It was what I needed to hear. Because I felt like I should be taking a break from writing, but I hadn’t been giving myself permission to do that, even though the angst and burnout clearly weren’t worth it. So that’s what I’m doing now. Granted, I’m in the midst of reading/critiquing a couple of manuscripts, so I’m not entirely out of the writing world, but I’m doing my best to take a break until I’ve got my feet under me and my head screwed on straight.

3. I’ve been obsessing about the First World War.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but this is a large part of the reason I haven’t been blogging. It’s not that the topic is somehow not conducive to writing (QUITE THE OPPOSITE). Rather, it’s that I’ve already subjected my friends and close family to my excited rambling, obsessive reading, and indignant outbursts—I’ve been hoping to spare my readers.

Sassoon!

But blogs are like journals, and journals are for honesty, so honestly? This what I think about 70% of the time that I’m not in class or talking to people or whatever. In the past month, I’ve acquired nearly a dozen books about WWI, many given to me quite unexpectedly by incredibly generous friends (who took me at my word when I joked about how I would not object to people giving me books about WWI—<3 you guys). I bought a book of WWI poetry at Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. I bought a book about the Somme on AbeBooks.com. I’m currently halfway through a biography of Siegfried Sassoon and the autobiography of Robert Graves. I just checked out World Without End, by Helen Thomas (wife of the poet/soldier Edward Thomas) from my university’s library.

And on some level I was only about 51% facetious when I told my parents on the phone yesterday, “So, this whole college thing. Can I do it over again and major in World War One?”

My point is that I’ve been shielding you all from the brunt of my mania by refusing myself an outlet here on the blog, because I’m afraid I’d talk about nothing else. I’ve missed blogging, though, so…I’m  back. But I’m giving you all advance notice: I may occasionally ramble passionately/emotionally about my new favorite topic.

There. You’ve been warned.

And again, happy 2013.

First Look Challenge (or, I Can Haz A Different WIP Excerpt?)

Well, will you look at that!

I have once again been tagged by Amy, this time as part of the First Look Challenge. The idea is to search your manuscript for the first instance of the word look and then to post the surrounding scene. Even though I talk about UNFAMILIAR SPELLINGS ad nauseam, I do—get this!—I do have other manuscripts. (It’s okay if you need to sit down. I understand.) US is my only complete manuscript, which is why you always hear about it so much, but I write other stuff as well.

So! For a change of pace, I present the following excerpt. It’s from a speculative fiction story that I am expanding into a novel (the story is called “Watchers”). There’s no good way to introduce this scene, really, since it’s so early in the story. But just to give a bit of context:

For days, the men of Kumi’s forest-dwelling tribe have been tracking a band of strangers at the edge of their territory—but when the strangers’ trail leads straight to an eerie meadow known as “the Watchers’ Place”, the men call off the hunt. As Kumi puts it, “We don’t go near the Watchers’ Place unless we have to.” But Kumi and his brother discover that you don’t need to venture into the meadow to find strangers. Or the Watchers.

————————————–

“Who do you think they are?” I say.
Tano isn’t leading a patrol today, so Sita and I are free, and we’ve found a little berry patch at the edge of the river. Not all the berries are ripe yet, but there are enough early ones to make it worth risking the thorns.
Sita knows where I’m going with this. He shakes his head, pulls off his shoes, and wades into the shallows, working his way around so he can reach the berries hanging over the water.
“Strangers,” he says.
That’s obvious. Of course they are. He might as well have said that they’re animals or something. I kick off my own shoes and wade in beside him. The water is so cold that I can feel my legs going stiff already. A thought occurs to me.
“Sita,” I say. “Do you think they could be—”
“They’re not Watchers,” he says firmly.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” he says, and pops a berry into his mouth. “But they leave footprints like ours. Let’s not talk about this anymore.”
“What can we talk about?”
“Anything you want the trees to know,” Sita says with a little grin, and throws an unripe berry at my head. I splash him with water and he yelps, then laughs and moves further along the river bank, following the berries. The water is swirling above our knees now, tugging us downstream. I put my hand out and grab Sita’s shoulder to steady myself—
—and then I feel it.
The prickle on my skin and the smell of a lightning storm.
My heart kicks against my ribs, and I squeeze Sita’s shoulder, purse my lips, and let out a slow breath that is almost a whistle. His eyes flick sideways to meet mine. I can tell he feels it too. I let go and move past him, but we don’t speak. The berry picking becomes a show; we’re not interested in the fruit anymore.
The hairs on my arms are standing up.
Sita is better than I am at pretending. He’d be a perfect liar if he weren’t so honest, and his face is open and clear as he pulls a berry off a branch and turns to offer it to me. The only sign of his concern is the tiny crease between his eyebrows. I reach out to take the berry—and in that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I see a flicker of something behind us on the far bank of the river. There’s a thudding in my ears and throat, and I swallow and glance sideways.
What I expect to see is a tall column of rippling, prickly air.
What I see is a girl standing on the other side of the river.
She’s short and plump. Her skin is darker than ours, and her hair is long, much longer than I’ve ever seen before. There’s a cut on her face, and the blood has dried in a crusty trail down the side of her cheek. She stands with her feet apart, gripping the branch of a nearby tree.
“Sita,” I say, and reach down to clasp the handle of the knife in my belt.
He turns to look at me and then follows my gaze to the girl. For a long moment, we stand and stare, the rush of the river and the Watchers’ prickling air between us and her.
She must be one of them—the strangers we’ve been hunting—but she doesn’t look like a normal stranger. The cloth she wears wrapped around her hips and shoulders is so pale; I’ve never seen anything like it. The girl stands as still as a deer, her dark eyes fixed on us. Then, slowly, she lowers her hand from the tree.
“Wait,” Sita calls.
She freezes, and even from here, I can see the fear flash across her face. Sita begins to wade across the river, the water swirling up around his thighs, and as I follow him, her eyes go even wider.
“Stop!” Sita says, and throws out an arm in front of me, but I think he’s talking to the girl too, because she’s backing away from the water now, stumbling a little on the smooth grey stones. I pause, angling myself so I can lean into the current, but the girl scrambles heavily back up the bank, and as she does, I see the little bundle strapped to her back. A moment later, she vanishes into the trees. Sita isn’t moving anymore, and I can’t understand it. She’s a stranger. We have to chase her off.
“Why are we stopping?” I say.
Sita doesn’t speak, but as he glances at me, his expression is almost angry. He lunges forward and sloshes across to the other bank. I follow.
But by the time we reach the other side, the girl is long gone. There are no footprints in the jumble of rocks, and the only signs she was ever here are the places where her bare feet scattered bits of leafy mulch at the top of the riverbank.
We stand there, dripping and shivering, on the edge of the forest. Our forest. We should chase after her, or track her down—she’s a stranger; she doesn’t belong here. But my legs are heavy with cold, and the prickling of the air is even stronger on this side of the river. I shiver and glance around but still can’t see the Watcher.
Beside me, Sita stares at the place where the girl vanished into the undergrowth.
“Go home,” he says. “I’ll do this by myself.”
I heard what he said, but for some reason, the words don’t make sense to me.
“What?” I say.
“Go home,” Sita says. The bright afternoon light is filtering through his hair; he looks like he’s glowing. “I’ll take care of this. It’ll be easier alone. Go pick some more berries and take them back to camp.”
My brother steps forward into the shade of the trees, and the light in his hair vanishes.

————————————–

Aaaaand tagging five of my lovely writer friends, but there are SO MANY of you that I can’t possibly tag you all—everyone, please feel free to participate regardless of whether you see your name here:

1) Caitlin O’Connell

2) Annalise Green

3) Megan Whitmer

4) Hali Baumstein

5) Juliana Brandt

ALSO, IMPORTANT REMINDER: This week is Banned Books Week! I’m hoping to tackle The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, if I can find the time on top of all my crazy classwork. What will you be reading?

Ohai there

Yes, it’s me.

Yes.

Shocking, I know. I don’t think I’ve ever had an unplanned blogging hiatus this long before. I honestly had every intention of blogging regularly while at school, but the truth is that doing so is more challenging than it was last year. There are lots of reasons for this; I won’t bore you with them. The point is, I’m not going to make any guarantees about how often you’ll hear from me, but I’ll do my level best to be more present than I have been in the past couple of weeks.

I had these grand plans for writing a proper blog post this evening, and I tried, but I think the feelings I’m sorting through are a bit too personal for teh interwebz (at least not without a veil of anonymity). And there’s nothing else I really feel inclined to write/think about at the moment. So for now:

Ohai.