Category: Writing

Writing

Floored by Rejections (in a Good Writerly Way)

Chrys Buckley

pnwarejectionsindex

Here’s another old post from my old blog. Still importing, and lots more posts from the vault still to come.

I take it as a distinctly good sign that the rejections I receive as a writer are getting more and more flattering. It’s just got to be good.

A few months ago I entered three things into the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA) contest. I didn’t place in any of the three categories, but did receive two critiques on each piece, which offered some suggestions and things to think about, as well as some positive feedback.

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Writing

A Totally Transformative Solstice Week

Chrys Buckley

It’s been awhile, but I’m still importing posts from my old blog like this one from June 2008.

183674_1003284655197_2458_nThis week, my friend Leo came to visit. She left this morning. I am sad that she’s gone, and at the same time, just so glad we had this time together. It was the best. Leo and I have had some wild times over the last eight years of knowing each other – shared concert experiences, drunken debauchery at her house with friends, trips to Seattle, trips to the Gorge, a “porn hotel room” (it had a hot tub, and the doors or windows or whatever between the hot tub and the rest of the room wouldn’t stay shut), rituals of feminine spirituality, trips to Philly with her kids to the science museum, discussions about books and politics and the meaning of life, commiseration over unrequited love. I saw my first Tool concert with her.

I used to call her in the mornings, when Adrian still lived with me and things were horrible and I was careening in desperation, and whisper all my troubles to her. She once took the craziest trip ever (including buses, trains and an insane ride with a friend’s younger brother) to come see me at my parents house in NJ when I was visiting. We’ve turned each other on to music, to authors, to concepts, to spiritual principles, to philosophies, to movies, and on and on and on. This really only scratches the surface of what we’ve shared.

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Writing

Err on the Side of Audacity

Chrys Buckley

secretlifeofbeesindexToday I was perusing Sue Monk Kidd’s website (and discovered that The Secret Life of Bees is being made into a movie and will be out in October), and came across this little tidbit she posted in a list of advice she’d give to writers. Here was number seven:

“Err on the side of audacity.

One day it occurred to me that most writers, myself included, erred on the side of being too careful in their writing. I made a pact with myself that I would quit playing it safe when what the story really wanted… what my heart really wanted, was to take a big chance. The best writing requires some daring– a little literary skydiving. Look at your idea and ask yourself: how can I make this larger? The novelist E. M. Forster once said that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. After I finish each chapter, I read it with an eye toward figuring out where I’ve played it safe, where I backed off, where the small astonishment was lost.”

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Writing

Feeling as bland as the weather

Chrys Buckley

blandweatherimagesI’ve been sick for the last week or so. It’s been no fun at all. On the good side though, it’s given me a lot of time to think. It’s funny how when an illusion shifts, there’s really no going back. Once you see something, it’s hard to pretend you never did.

So, while sick in bed, watching old episodes of The Office and (of course) House and coughing up a lung, it kinda became clear to me that my current life isn’t really working for me the way I wish it was. I’m not really happy with where I’m at. It’s a sobering realization.

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Writing

"Ribbons Undone" – Tori Amos (Chapter One Title Explained)

Chrys Buckley

ribbonsundoneimagesI’ll just preface this by saying that there are two sections of my book. The first is called Eclipses, with four chapters about childhood and adolescence before I left for college. These are not named after songs. The next section, Waxing Crescent, is the main body of the book, and I still think of the first chapter in this section as chapter 1. This section (the bulk of the book) is where lyric-as-title comes into play.

In this post I decided to go through my chapters that are named after song lyrics and say why I picked the lyric with the chapter, because I picked them all for such varied reasons.

Chapter One is titled “She’s A Girl Rising From A Shell” from the song “Ribbons Undone” by Tori Amos.

Some songs I picked because that’s what I was listening to at the time I’m writing about. This was not the case this time. I titled this chapter about leaving for college with a line from a song that I didn’t hear until six years after the fact.

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Music, Writing

My Table of Contents Looks More Like the Song List on a Soundtrack…or Something

Chrys Buckley

call her moonchild

So, all my chapters (except for the first four that cover childhood), are named after song lyrics. In fact, I’ll just put the list of songs on here, to give an idea, and then I want to talk about the general motivations. Some songs come up more than once, (“Moonchild” by Chris Cornell, for example), different lyrics are used in each chapter. That song is the repeating refrain of the story, for sure. Anyway, for now, I’ll just give song title and artist.

Here’s the current table of contents:

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Writing

Pausing to Say…

Chrys Buckley

expansionyoimagesBefore I get into the subject at hand, I just want to say that I know my posts here have been pretty sporadic. Sadly, that’s probably going to continue for awhile, possibly through October. This is the busy season at work, and I’m working full-time, and working on my book (reading it through again), polishing the manuscript and the proposal in preparation to send to agents, taking a yoga class, going to a writers group, and oh yeah, having fun.

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Writing

Published Again! In Shark Reef!

Chrys Buckley

beyond_smallWhen I got home from Hawaii, I had a message about this acceptance on my machine. Trying to figure out which was better was a total toss-up – tropical paradise or publication is always a tough call.

Shark Reef is a local online literary journal, part of the Writers Guild on Lopez Island. I was especially excited that my piece made it in for two reasons.

The first is, I’ve heard that Shark Reef is difficult to get into, that they’re pretty choosy with what they publish, so it felt pretty good to get in.

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Writing

If You Write It, It Will Come

Chrys Buckley

IMG_0055Alluding to Field of Dreams there, if that wasn’t already obvious.

I actually meant to write this post before my trip to Hawaii, but didn’t have enough time, and this post definitely would have been more timely if I had.

So, maybe because I’m a writer, I believe in the power of written words, but not necessarily in the typical way, like that people can read something and be affected by it. Yeah, that’s a huge thing, but I also think there’s a much more invisible power, something ethereal and unseen, subtle.

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Writing

Moonbeams Over Paradise

Chrys Buckley

Full Moon Over Coconut GroveSo here is my totally unconventional Hawaiian vacation. I’m calling it that b/c when I think of Hawaiian vacations I think of big resorts or scenes from MTV’s Maui Fever, and thankfully, this was nothing like that.

Tallie and I left the island super early last Wednesday morning and talked the whole ferry ride and the whole drive down to the Seattle airport. We’d both had kind of shitty/crazy weeks, so we got it all out of our systems as much as possible. We flew to Oakland first, which surprisingly wasn’t that warm. Then we flew to Lihue. An eclipse took place when we were on the plane and so I didn’t see it at all.

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