Today and yesterday

Last year, around this time,  I was going through hell. One of the off shoots of that is that a dream of mine got shelved. It was a competition, and will probably never come around again, but oh well.

Life goes on.

The main thing about that competition was that it married two of my absolute favorite things, travel and writing. I won’t ger mentored, or helped, but…

Today, I am not at home behind the keyboard.

Today, I am wondering the coastline of  a new place.

Tonight, I will be camping on the beach.

Hopefully, tonight will also include roasted marshmellows 🙂

Because really, what would camping on the beach be without roasted marshmellows?

And yes, I like them BURNT.

 

Ta, my lovelies, I hope you are having a wonderful weekend. I will catch up with you all soon!

 

Authorial Intent & Readers

First, when speaking of authorial intent, I’m not talking about when you write a tragic love scene but somehow everyone who reads it is laughing hysterically when they should be crying.That is craft and beyond the scope of this 🙂

No, for today, we’re talking about the task of trying to figure out what a passage means (as dictated by the author), or who a poet is writing to. You know, fun stuff.

But is it? I know in college we had to play these games, and back it up with “proof” from the manuscript, but the truth of the matter is… None of it mattered. Not one whit, to my reader self.

My reader self saw a line from one of the cannon and went “oh”, quiet and small in the beauty of the phrase. I wasn’t concerned about the implications of the phrase, about who the narrator was speaking to, or any of that.

I was wrapped in the beauty of the words.

And that is what, ultimately, we writers want. We want readers to become wrapped up in our worlds, our words.

Does it matter to you who I wrote the following to:

 

We danced in
the kitchen,
sunshine just
kissing the sky.
The whole world
wrapped in my arms.
We sang your
favorite lullabye
before the day came
to take us our
separate
ways.

 

Does it matter who I wrote it to? What I wrote it about? Or does it ultimately matter more what you get from reading it? As writers, we map a journey. We do it artfully, with any luck, but we map it out. The reader must take the journey.

So.

Authorial intent.

I never really cared who Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to. I only wished someone loved me enough to try and pretend they had written one for me LOL

 

Have a wonderful weekend, my lovelies, filled with writing or reading. Or both.

 

 

Do you know…

When you pick up pen and put it to paper, do you know who your audience is? Does it make a difference to you, whether you’re writing for an audience or for yourself?

Do you know who you write for?

Does it matter?

Cover Art for Dragon’s Champion

I wrote this completely for myself (Dragon’s Champion). I started with a situation, one that normally might give a girl a fainting fit. Instead, my heroine, Constance, found it to be better than what she left. I wrote the story simply because I had to know what happened next. I met a vivacious, funny heroine who saved herself along the way.

I’ve written some stories for specific publications. With fiction, it sometimes works. I have a little story in

My story is a homage to one of my favorite stories of all times, The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I have another steam punk story coming out in an anthology as well. I’ll have more on that soon 🙂

And then there’s The Golden Apple and Other Stories. This one is personal. It’s a retelling of a few different fairy tales, as well as a couple of personal fairy tales. Again, I wrote most of these stories for myself. Not an editor, or a specific reader other than me.

And then there’s my nonfiction. I tried writing what I thought the editor wanted. It wasn’t, and to boot I didn’t enjoy the writing. If I’m not going to get published anyways, then I am just about on the point of saying if it isn’t fulfilling me in some way, I’m not going to write it.

I used to write for work. That was part of the job. I write my letters, some short fiction, poems and non fiction. I’m longing to find my peg-hole, because I’m tired of being shoved into the wrong one. For what I want to do to work, it’s going to take a whole bunch of creativity, all the writing that I love and a wee bit of formatting skills.

Even if my only audience is myself, I think it will be worth it. I’m going to try and bring Wynwords to life.

 

Be well, my lovelies. We’ll talk again soon!