Spring has sprung, and the world here in the Pacific Northwest is turning green. We have rain today, and should for the next few days, but so far, April has been unusually dry. Drought this early doesn’t bode well for summer. Snowpack levels are currently at 68% of normal.
We rely on water generated by glaciers on Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountains in general, so the low snowpack means trouble later down the road.
Dry forests in this part of the world mean dry underbrush—if we remain in drought conditions, we could have a repeat of 2018’s West Coast Wildfires. 2018 Washington wildfires – Wikipedia.
That August, one couldn’t escape the smoke. We thought we would find fresh air by going to the beach, but it was just as bad there. The following is an image I shot on August 23, 2018, in Cannon Beach. That year, smoke from wildfires burning all over the West was so thick one could barely see the water from our beachfront condo.
At the time the photo was taken, the sun was still an hour above the horizon, and it should have been full daylight instead of noxious twilight.
The brown haze was so dense that the above image appears grainy and overexposed. But as you can see by the red sun, brownish-gray smoke obscures the view of the ocean, hiding the rocks of Tillamook Head. The temperature had risen to 90 degrees at the surf’s edge, an unheard-of temperature for that area of the Northern Pacific coast. Those of us with asthma suffered, as the sun was obscured for most of the day, with intense humidity not helping.
In so many ways, the scene in Cannon Beach that day was unreal, apocalyptic.
The following image is the same view of Tillamook Head as seen from the same condo on August 13, 2016. That was a year of fabulous sunsets, deep blue skies, and perfect kite-flying winds.
Sunset at Tillamook Head, Copyright 2016 Connie J. Jasperson
But spring always brings the hope that better days are ahead, that the rain will fall, and that the traditional methods of forest fire management as practiced by our tribes will keep our forests safe. Indigenous Fire Practices Shape our Land – Fire (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)
Drought is something thing I can’t change. It’s a thing to consider for world building, a distraction for when life gets crazy here at Casa del Jasperson. Some medications my husband has been taking are not working as well as we wished, and some have caused severe problems. He’s improving since we stopped the offending meds, so life is good.
Writing happens in short bursts. I have several manuscripts in the works so I work on whichever one interests me. I have basically scrapped one novel that had too many storylines. I’m parting it out into several novellas, which has rekindled my inspiration.
Alas, poetry has infiltrated my senile brain again, my secret love affair. I love the many ways words can be manipulated on a blank page. To me, poetry is something beautiful and visually simple, a thing that looks like it should be uncomplicated. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
I grew up in an isolated rural environment, and summers could be lonely. My sister and I would get away from family dynamics by reading. My favorite “We Don’t Have Anything to Read” book was the volume of collected works by William Butler Yeats. That book shaped my view of poetry and literature in general.
Yeats was an unconventional person. His penchant for finding romance in most things meant his personal life and politics were sometimes messy. And yes, his love affairs were famous, especially his enduring but unrequited love for the Irish revolutionary/actress Maud Gonne.
Some might call that an obsession.
Yeats was probably not an appropriate literary hero for a ten-year-old girl in 1963, but he was just that to me.
As I grew into young adulthood, I admired how he struggled against the conventional morality of his day, as did all free-thinking artists and writers. It seemed as if his troubles and those of his contemporaries powered their writing.
Yeats’s poetry has rhythm and rhyme, and some consider it too old-fashioned. But while modern poetry doesn’t always rhyme, it must have tempo and rhythm.
Some might ask, “If it doesn’t rhyme, what makes poetry ‘poetic?'” It is prose with syllabic tempo and visual words. It conveys images, both auditory and visual.
Sometimes, poetry is long, even epic in length. The epic poem, Manfred, by George Gordon, Lord Byron clocks in at around 250 pages and contains supernatural elements, as ghost stories were popular in England at the time. It is a Romantic-era closet drama, a play that is intended to be read aloud by one narrator rather than performed.
Poetry is a primal form of communication in the human species. It’s a literary invention that emerged as soon as we had words. Before we had written languages, poetry preserved our thoughts and feelings. It conveys them in an abstract way, passed down verbatim from generation to generation.
Our species remembers the words and the stories our ancestors told. Nowadays, we consider those sagas of the gods and heroes as allegories to explain historical natural occurrences.
We who write fantasy draw upon and recreate those stories in our image.
Poets select words for the impact they deliver. An entire story must be conveyed using the least number of words possible. Choices are made for symbolism, power, and syllabic cadence, even if there is no rhyme involved.
I try to do the same when I get to the revision process, eliminating weak passages and strengthening others. Sometimes, I have better results than others, but I keep trying.
So, now you know where I’m at in my writing life, the worries and little things that either hinder or spur creativity. I hope your writing is going as well as mine is.
Credits and Attributions:
Images © 2018-2024 Connie J. Jasperson, All Rights Reserved
When prepping a novel to send to Irene, I use a three-part method. This requires specific tools that come with Microsoft Word, my word-processing program. I believe these tools are available for Google Docs and every other word-processing program. Unfortunately, I am only familiar with Microsoft’s products as they are what the companies that I worked for used.
Part two: Once I have ironed out the rough spots noticed by my beta readers, this second stage is put into action. Yes, on the surface the manuscript looks finished, but it has only just begun the journey.
The most frustrating part is the continual stopping, making corrections, and starting.
I am wary of relying on 
If you read as much as I do (and this includes books published by large Traditional publishers), you know that a few mistakes and typos can and will get through despite their careful editing. So, don’t agonize over what you might have missed. If you’re an indie, you can upload a corrected file.
Last week, we talked about how punctuation is the traffic signal that keeps our words flowing smoothly.
If the meaning is understood when two words are combined into one, and common usage writes it as one word, again a hyphen is unnecessary.
But what about !? These mutant morsels of madness are called “interrobangs.”
One of my favorite authors, Ann McCaffrey, set off telepathic conversations with both italics and colons in the place of quote marks.
I certainly didn’t. If these authors hope to find an agent or successfully self-publish, they have a lot of work and self-education ahead of them.
If you are writing in the US, you might consider investing in 
Let’s get two newbie mistakes out of the way:
All three of the above sentences are technically correct. The usage you habitually choose is your voice.
Why are these rules so important? Punctuation tames the chaos that our prose can become. Periods, commas, quotation marks–these are the universally acknowledged traffic signals.
Artist: Mário Navarro da Costa (1883-1931)
So now, we realize that we must submit our work to contests or publications if we ever want to get our name out there. We have looked at our backlog of short stories and gone out to sites like 
The first thing we’re going to look at is the problem. Is the problem worth having a story written around it? If not, is this a “people in a situation” story, such as a short romance or a scene in a counselor’s office? What is the problem and why did the characters get involved in it?
Worldbuilding is crucial in a short story. Is the setting I have chosen the right place for this event to happen? In this case, I say yes, that it is the only place where such a story could happen.
Point of view: First person – Oriana tells us this story as it happens. We are in her head for the entire story. Do her actions and reactions feel organic and natural? After some work, I think yes, but again, I’ll have to run it by someone to be sure.
I am not the only person who experiences these moments of low creative energy. When this happens, I set the longer work aside and go rogue—I write poetry and drabbles and short stories.
Maybe you are writing, but so far, you have written nothing novel or even novella-length. Perhaps you have been writing a little of this and a bit of that, and now you have a pile of disparate, exceptionally short fiction, and you don’t know what to do with it.
Microfiction is the distilled soul of a novel. It has everything the reader needs to know about a singular moment in time. It tells that story and makes the reader wonder what happened next. Each short piece we write increases our ability to tell a story with minimal exposition.
When submitting to a publication, you send your work directly to the publisher. In return, you can expect to receive a communication from the senior editor, either a rejection or an acceptance.
To wind this up—take another look at that backlog of short work. Edit it, read it aloud, and edit it again. Then, consider submitting that work to a contest or magazine. It’s good experience for indie writers, but more than that, you might hit the jackpot!
Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
I do a lot of rambling in my first drafts because I’m trying to visualize the story. While I try to write this mental blather in separate documents, the random thought processes often bleed over into my manuscript.
40,000 words in fantasy is less than half a book. That makes it a novella. But I send it to my beta reader to see what she thinks. If she feels the plot lacks substance at that length, I let it rest for a while, then come back to it. Then, I can see where to add new scenes, events, and conversations to round out the story arc. That might bring it up to the 60,000-word mark.
In the second draft, I will discover passages where I have repeated myself but with slightly different phrasing. My editor is brilliant at spotting these, which is good because I miss plenty of them when I am preparing my manuscript for editing. I wrote that mess, so even though I try to be vigilant, repetitions tend to blend into the scenery.
I have learned to be brutal. I might have spent days or even weeks writing a chapter that now must be cut.
Even if this story is one part of a series, we who are passionate about the story we’re reading need firm endings.
The Emperor’s Soul, by Brandon Sanderson
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 