Posts Tagged "Mazarkis Williams"

• Great Halloween Tunes

  Uncategorized

  The theme for this week was “favorite Halloween reads,” but since I don’t have any, I thought I’d list my favorite Halloween music instead.

  In my teen years, playlists were an important part of any holiday. My sister was the best at making them. She had the patience to slowly lower the needle onto the vinyl and pause the cassette tapes at just the right spot. Besides that she had a good sense of how to arrange the music so that the slow bits were mixed perfectly in with the funky and rock-y bits. My tapes were always filled with hisses, pops, and snatches of stray music.

  Now we have iTunes and similar, and while we might complain about the digital sound, transitions between songs are no longer an issue. Also, if a playlist is not the right balance, you can just rearrange it – no screaming and kicking the stereo, or throwing your records out the window. It’s easy and anybody can do it (provided they have a computer). So, true to my family tradition, each holiday in this house is preceded by weeks of careful playlist creation.

  This year’s Halloween playlist represents years of experience fussing with such things. Here are nine of the best songs: (more…)

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• Rules for a Mostly Sane Writing Experience

  The Life

  Like Courtney I’ve never had a light bulb moment, except when I discovered how much I could delete without ruining the story. For example it’s nice to talk about the engraving on an ivory brush, but in the second half of the second book, people already have a sense of the world and the things in it. Or sometimes a friend can help you see that a character twisting his lips for the fortieth time doesn’t really get the point across – it’s just annoying. So as far as deleting, I’ve had these moments when I realize how pointless so many of my lines and paragraphs are. But other than that? Not really. I do however have some rules.

  1. Take a walk. Or a shower. Or a bike ride. I find that continuing to write when I’m just stuck does not work. I end up with pages that don’t go anywhere that I later have to delete (see above). If I remove myself from the situation, a better solution will come to me. (more…)

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• Pseudonym starts with ‘p’

  Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms.

  Here’s the thing. I did not expect to get published. I had enough to think about in even finishing a book, let alone sending it off to an agent. Still, in my far-off dreams on the subject I had considered that any form of my name(s) would not work well on the cover of a book because, just as Courtney Schafer complained about her own, nobody spells them correctly. Ever. So when people were suddenly using words like “contract” and “payment” and then I also heard “pseudonym,” decades of correcting credit card representatives and RMV workers had me primed to agree.

  There is a strategy to pseudonyms. You want to appear on the right place on the shelf; send a message about your identity (‘Raven’ sends one message, ‘Suzy’ another); show some musicality or rhythm your real name doesn’t have; and leave certain bits of information out of the picture, in many cases  gender. (more…)

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• Mazarkis Williams on Halloween

  Guest Post

  Mazarkis Williams has degrees in history and physics, and a passion for cooking and cats. Mazarkis has roots in both Britain and America, having been educated and working in both, and now divides time between Bristol and Boston.

  First, a recognition that Halloween, or Samhain, is a high holiday for many of my friends. It is for honoring the dead, recognizing the end of the year, and putting forward hopes for the next. With apologies, in this post I will write instead of the Halloween we see on television.

  The television specials that pop up around the year reflect our own understanding and our own hopes for the holidays. We want to start fresh at the New Year, make dates for Valentine’s, and gather together with our families for Thanksgiving, and TV faithfully represents that—usually in a banal, comforting way. But Halloween is not suited to pat answers and easy emotional resolutions, so there were never many shows for Halloween until recently.

  During my childhood there was only It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which shows Linus waiting all night for the spirit of the pumpkin patch to appear. I knew it had a deeper message to share about faith and patience, something I was too young and areligious to understand, but it also had Snoopy, and that was enough for me. By the time my kids were old enough to watch it, it came so early in relation to the holiday, and was so peppered with commercial breaks, that something felt lost. Whatever cultural relevance it would have offered my children had vanished.

  My children found their own way to Halloween on TV. They found Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (more…)

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