Viking Girl Scribbles

There's been so much going on lately. I was sick, Pumpkin was sick, twins went back to daycare after the summer holiday and I've started work again. Really, I haven't got a clue as to where to the days have disappeared on me. One day there was lots of holiday left and now here I am at the beginning of the semester. I would be lying if I said that I didn't feel stressed out thinking about school starting. Feels like I haven't planned a minute of lessons, though S and I have planned one course up to the autumn holiday ... only three courses left to plan then. I do have some ideas as to what we should be doing, but other years I’ve had time to plan some before going on holiday, having something half-ready when I get back to school in August.

Last week was my husbands last week of summer holiday and I had thought that with him wanting to be as much as possible with the kids I could get some writing done. Yeah right! Who was I kidding! Tuesday morning I woke with a sore throat and a few hours after that my voice was gone So instead of sitting down at my laptop, I lay flat out on the sofa drinking tea and feeling sorry for myself. The day after Pumpkin started to sneeze, and we had some fun nights with a very fussy baby resulting in me feeling even more poorly. All the writing and editing I had planned didn’t happen, but I did get to write some poetry.

A while ago I wrote a short story (YA): “Samuel & Alexandra”, a story of how love sometimes comes to us when we least expect it. I spent quite some time on it, writing about one page per day and skipping between the characters; one part from her, and the next from his point of view and so on. Hers I wrote as a first person narrative, his as a third person. I don’t know why I did this, maybe because I could relate to being a teen girl, but not a teen boy. I tried writing him as “I”, but the words wouldn’t come to me and I had to change back to “he” (this happens to me all the time; my male characters just won’t let me get inside their heads! Stubborn men.). They gave me more trouble than that, about three days they spent sitting in his car and not getting on with the story! I mean, come on! They could just have told me what they wanted instead of just sitting there waiting for me to get the story going again, right? Finally I asked two of my friends what they thought, their sug...

1. They deal with young people. Are you / have you been young? Then YA is relevant to you. 2. They are about growing up. Are you growing up / have you grown up? Then YA is relevant to you. 3. They often start straight away and keep good pace. You don’t have to yawn your way through 50 pages of boring introduction. 4. The dialogue in today's YA often kick butt with the dialogue in today's adult novels. 5. You would miss an enormous amount of awesome novels if you didn’t read them.

It was Virginia Woolf who said that women need a room of their own, a room where we will be able to write (fiction more specifically). I was lucky in that respect when I began to read and then later on when I started to write poetry and prose as a teenager. I was always encouraged to both read and write, and my father would take me to the library and introduce me to the wonderful world that is Science Fiction. Growing up I was sort of an only child, I never had to share my space with anyone. Okay, the “sort of an only child”-thing might need some explaining. My older sister, by 6 years, was severely handicapped ( Retts Syndrome ), so we could never have any kind of sisterly bond or do anything together. When she was 17 she died from heart failure, leaving my parents and I to continue life without her. Yes, it was an easier life because she needed so much help and we could never take any long trips; or if we did my parents had their hands full with her and sometimes I was l...

I have for a long time had unfinished novels lying about (I think the oldest one is close to 10 years) and I wonder if I’ll ever finish them. But recently, or perhaps all the way through spring, I have taken some time to think about how I should proceed. There are so many loose ends and some days are so overwhelming that I tear at my hair and curse those voices inside my head that demand to be heard and to get their stories written down. In moments like these I comfort myself by checking out my favorite authors' websites. I have read over and over again on different websites (Neal Asher’s and Ursula K LeGuin’s among others), that writing is like everything else: If you want to be good at it you have to do it often, write every day and accept that much of what you write is (more or less) rubbish. I listen to that and write and write and write and reject much of what I scribble down. But sometimes, sometimes , it’s good and I feel I can believe in myself and my projects aga...