On Crows and Craft, Or Something

I haven’t run a reblog post here in a while. Usually when I do, it’s when someone writes something that I’ve been thinking myself but haven’t figured out how to say yet. This time I did write about it, and after I hit “publish” I read something that made me think, “That’s what I meant to say!”

On Friday I wrote about signs. I got it partially right. I got that the crows in Seattle are more than just urban opportunists (they made their way into a post I wrote for Dave’s Garden last week, too…), and that it had something to do with developing as a writer. But author S.P. Sipal, whose new novel Southern Fried Wiccan (she had me at the title) has just been released, explained it so much better and more beautifully in a post on Adventures in YA Publishing. That blog is on a different platform, so I can’t embed it here, but I hope you will click through and read it – HERE.

And if you don’t know what we’re talking about with the crows, the story is HERE.

I just remembered that crows (specifically, Seattle-based crows) featured in the short stories read at the Reykjavik Writing Jam I attended last fall. I wish I could include one of those stories here, especially Karen Finneyfrock’s, in which the crows were significant, but I couldn’t find them online. I think they were only printed zine-style for attendees of the jam. Maybe that’s what got crows percolating in my brain. Or maybe it’s because they screech outside my window all day as I work (like right now). Or maybe the appearance of crows in tandem with creativity popping up everywhere in my universe lately is some kind of sign.

I would like to include a picture of a crow here, but technology hates me this week and I’m just not going to put myself through that stress today. Instead, here is a picture of the stories I mentioned that include crows.

Reykjavik Writing Jam

I took a Reykjavík city break last weekend without ever leaving Seattle, thanks to the Taste of Iceland event sponsored by Iceland Naturally and KEXP (among others). After visiting the Odin’s Eye exhibit at the Nordic Heritage Museum, the next item on my itinerary was the Reykjavik Writing Jam.

Seattle Writes with a Little Help from my Friends

My computer is littered with false starts. Somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 words, I run out of steam, run out of ideas, fall into a plot hole, and don’t know how to continue. So my stories sit, unfinished and abandoned in a folder on my laptop. Last Friday I made it all the way to 16,000 words before I realized I had no idea where I was going. I closed my laptop in disappointment and that night I went to bed a failure.