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Wise Words from Samira Ahmed

Author Samira Ahmed, writer of the amazing YA novel Love, Hate, and Other Filters as well as others, recently appeared on one of my favorite podcasts, 88 Cups of Tea. Her main takeaway that she pushed hard was the need for creative people to “say yes to themselves”, because we live in a world that puts up an awful lot of roadblocks in front of creatives. We don’t need to add to the roadblocks ourselves; self-obstruction is not healthy. It was a wonderful conversation (this podcast is always full of them), but there was one particular quote from Ms. Ahmed that knocked my breath away. Seriously, I almost had to pull my car over, so amazed was I to hear this.

She specifically referred to the habit a lot of writers have of describing their first drafts in extremely non-complimentary terms. There’s even a quote that gets shared on the online writing communities a lot that goes along the lines of, “The first draft of everything is crap!” I’ve  been pushing back on this notion for a long time (here’s an old essay of mine about it, over on ForgottenStars.net), but to hear a published professional author echo my thoughts was unimaginably refreshing. And Ms. Ahmed frames the problem in a way that I had never considered. Here is what she said:

SAMIRA AHMED: One piece of that kindness to myself–and I say that this is just for me, but I hope maybe it can speak to just one of the other storytellers out there–which is, I am gentle with the language that I use about my writing. So what that means is, I never say to myself that my first draft is ‘trash’. This is something for me; maybe this is OK with everybody else, your mileage may vary, but for me, when I was little one of those racist experiences that I had was a grown-ass man telling me, a kid, that I was ‘trash that America needed to take out.’ Words can be weapons, and I’m not going to use weaponized language against myself. So I don’t say that my first draft is ‘trash.’ I don’t say it’s ‘garbage’. I say it needs improvement. I say it needs work. I say I could make it better…but I don’t say that it’s trash.

I could not possibly agree more. Be kind to your own work, folks. It’s yours, after all!
(I featured the Samira Ahmed quote in a new post over on ForgottenStars.net, just in case you’re wondering how writing is progressing of late!)

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Four-month Check In

I'm trying to break out of a miniature writing rut. Not sure how well it's working, but.... #amwriting #writersofinstagram #writerinoveralls #overalls #dungarees #biboveralls #vintage #washingtondeecee #washingtondeeceeoveralls #hickorystripe #denimoveral

So, here we are, four months since my last check in! And so much and so little has changed. The pandemic continues, and for a while it seemed as if things might be slowly getting better…and then, for a lot of reasons, they stopped getting better and started getting worse again.

Anyhow…life goes on for me. I’m still writing and still reading, and I now have Book II of Seaflame! over 60,000 words, which is a roughly-projected one-quarter of the way done. This one is not progressing swiftly, and I’m pretty confident that after I’m done with this project, I’ll never tackle anything this long again. I have too many stories that I want to write to get bogged down in doorstops of this magnitude! But it is fun to write this one, and I will miss these characters when I’m done, so there’s that.

By way of announcement, I am planning to get The Savior Worlds released sometime this fall, most likely in late November, so work will be ramping up for that pretty soon. I will definitely have more to say about that as we progress toward that particular finish line.

Finally, I have a quote to offer on the subject of how one should treat one’s own writing. This comes from author Samira Ahmed, young adult writer of the brilliant novel Love, Hate, and Other Filters as well as several others that I haven’t read yet. She appeared on 88 Cups of Tea, one of my favorite podcasts, and one point she kept driving home was the need of storytellers to “say yes to themselves,” because creative life is hard enough as it is that we don’t need to be putting up our own roadblocks to our own work, in addition to the roadblocks the rest of the world erects. You should definitely listen to her entire episode, but for now, just this one bit absolutely floored me when I heard it:

SAMIRA AHMED: One piece of that kindness to myself–and I say that this is just for me, but I hope maybe it can speak to just one of the other storytellers out there–which is, I am gentle with the language that I use about my writing. So what that means is, I never say to myself that my first draft is ‘trash’. This is something for me; maybe this is OK with everybody else, your mileage may vary, but for me, when I was little one of those racist experiences that I had was a grown-ass man telling me, a kid, that I was ‘trash that America needed to take out.’ Words can be weapons, and I’m not going to use weaponized language against myself. So I don’t say that my first draft is ‘trash.’ I don’t say it’s ‘garbage’. I say it needs improvement. I say it needs work. I say I could make it better…but I don’t say that it’s trash.

That is, in my opinion, utterly correct. I’ve actually written about that before in this space, but Ahmed frames it in a way that I hadn’t thought of: you should not use weaponized language against yourself. I could not agree more.

With that I’ll wrap up this check-in, but do keep looking in! And you can always find me on Twitter, Instagram, and my personal blog, Byzantium’s Shores. See you ’round the galaxy, folks!

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Tone Poem Tuesday

You may remember a hilarious sketch comedy show from the 2000s called Key and Peele; and if you do, then you likely know that Jordan Peele, one half of the comedy duo from that show, has gone on to an impressive career in filmmaking, mostly in the horror genre. He even won an Oscar for one of his screenplays a couple of years ago.

Peele, like many directors, seems to have established a partnership with a particular composer for his filmscores: a man named Michael Abels, who in addition to his film work has composed a number of meaningful works for the concert hall and who has worked hard to increase the visibility of composers of color. This particular piece dates back to 1990, and its title–“Global Warming”–refers not to the ecological challenge of our time, but the specific feeling of international goodwill that was emergent in the handful of years immediately following the end of the Cold War.
The piece opens with a coldly stark sound that gives way to exuberant dance which blends a number of elements from national music all over the world. One might expect that character of music, given this theme…but at the end it returns to that coldly stark sound, as if to express skepticism and a return to wariness even as old enmities were seemingly falling by the wayside. In this Abels may well have been prescient.

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Not even a pandemic can stop summer!

True, the pandemic has put the kibosh on a lot of things we normally do this time of year: no trip to the Sterlink Renaissance Festival for us, nor will there be an Erie County Fair. But we still eat like it’s summer, though! Every year when the ripe tomatoes start showing up at the Farmers Market, it’s BLT time.

Since work I have: walked doggos, listened to 1/3 of #folklore, eaten this BLT, and quaffed this beer. #ahhhhh #yum #blt #beer
Sweet corn can’t be far behind!

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Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

Yeah, the usual disclaimer: a busy week full of activity has led to a day’s delay. I don’t have a great deal to say about this song, so just listen to it. This is one of those songs that takes you places, which is fitting given its title and lyrics. Here is “Midnight Train to Georgia”, by Gladys Knight and the Pips.

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RIP, Pizza Hut

Every Pizza Hut restaurant in Western New York has permanently closed.

I’m not going to pretend that this is a loss, except in the sense that this is a few hundred jobs down the drain. I worked for Pizza Hut back in the 1990s, when we lived in Olean, NY, and I posted years ago what that was like. It wasn’t a horrible place to work back then, but it sure wasn’t great, either; pay was a joke, and for all the lip service paid to the idea that Pizza Hut was supposed to be a step above fast food, it was clear that even then the higher-ups had no idea what they were doing with respect to the shifting restaurant scene.
I have no idea how long it’s been since I’ve even eaten at a Pizza Hut, and it’s something of a long-running joke in this region that the number of buildings that used to be Pizza Huts far outnumbers those that house actual Pizza Huts.
Oh well. Support your local pizza joint, folks. Let the chains figure it out on their own.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Ulysses Kay was a Black composer who lived from 1917 to 1995. Born in Tucson to parents who encouraged music-making in the home, Kay went on to study music at the University of Arizona and the Eastman School of Music, working with such musical luminaries as William Grant Still and Howard Hanson. Kay’s music is (so I’ve read, having not heard much of it at all!) mostly written in the neoclassical style, which makes sense from my hearing of today’s piece. I don’t hear a great deal of jazz or African influence here. This work has an almost academic kind of feel to it, which may be simply because the piece is called “Fantasy Variations” and does not seem to have any programmatic content at all, which puts it in a different category, more of an “absolute music” kind of piece, than a lot of what I’ve been featuring over the last few weeks.

This work rewards several listens, I have found. It opens with a lyrical passage that quickly gives way to stark modernism, and then the mood alternates several times before arriving on an almost hymnlike conclusion. The piece stands in much the same kind of musical tradition as a great deal of American 20th century music, and I am entirely unsurprised to read that Kay studied with Still and Hanson.
Here is Fantasy Variations by Ulysses Simpson Kay.

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Hot!

This has turned into a hot, dry summer in Buffalo Niagara. Even the streams at Chestnut Ridge, up in the wooded hills, are beginning to dry up.

Very hot day makes a pretty short hike. I'm better with heat than I used to be, but I am still not made for 90 degrees. #ChestnutRidge #wny #orchardpark #summer #nature #hiking #trees #TooDarnHot
I’m not nearly as bad about hot weather as I once was, ten or fifteen years ago, but even so, too much time north of ninety degrees still makes me grumpy and/or lethargic. The week before last, we endured something like eight consecutive days above the ninety degree mark. That is highly unusual for this region.
I’m hoping that this doesn’t become the norm for summers around here. While we do have our share of hot-and-humid, one selling point of summer in Buffalo is that it doesn’t get as sultry as the summers in Philadelphia, New York City, or Boston. Every year we hear anew the fact that since authorities started recording temperatures, Buffalo has never hit one hundred degrees. I suspect that this streak is likely to end one of these years.
I’m ready for August, though!

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Tinkering, complete! (Mostly)

I spent a bit of time this past weekend making a few changes to Byzantium’s Shores, which you may notice if you’re particularly eagle-eyed and you’re familiar with the old lay of the land here. Some of these changes were long overdue, and given that Blogger has recently updated its interface, I figured I should make some of the obvious (and less-than-obvious) changes.

By way of itemizing the alterations, here’s what’s up:
::  New masthead image, obviously. I think I did a pretty good job at creating a masthead that reflects my personal branding!
::  I updated the blog tagline, to run beneath the masthead.
::  I moved the menu of Blog Pages up, so now it’s the first thing you see on the sidebar. You may notice that the Comments Policy is not there anymore; the page still exists but I want to tweak it a bit. That link will reappear when that’s done.
I have also created an information page for my books! As of this writing, the page contains nothing at all, but getting that page done is a priority for the next week or two. It seems weird that this particular blog, which is in many ways my main outpost online, never had direct information about my books and their availability. That changes…well, soon. Stay tuned!
Also note that I have removed the blogroll. This is, sadly, permanent, at least as far as I can foresee. Blogging is more and more of a niche thing, and as I clicked around my blogroll’s links a few days ago I discovered a distressing number of links that go to blogs that are, sadly, no more. An on-site blogroll is just not an important resource anymore.
::  I tightened up the wordage in the “Informational” section of the sidebar, which is now titled “Greetings, Programs!” (This is a geek reference to the movie TRON, if you must know.) This includes a link to ForgottenStars.net, as well as a link to my LinkTree. LinkTree is a service that manages links, so links to all of my various social media and other web hangouts are there, instead of taking up lots of sidebar space.
::  There was a section for old blog aggregation services; I’ve removed this entirely.
::  All that remains is the shifting about of the photo sections and my sidebar quotes.
Does all this mean that I’ll be posting more frequently? Ummm…look, over there! [runs away while you’re distracted]

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ForgottenStars.net

The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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