Meet the Character: Centauri Starr
The next point-of-view character in my soon to be released novel, Flowers of Dionysus is Centauri Starr.
Yes, she knows her name is unique and somewhat ironic. For most of her 19 or so years on the earth, he parents have told and retold the story of how they named her after Alpha Centauri, one of earth’s closest star neighbors. (Actually, it’s two stars. She knows that as well.) They would have named her that anyway, even without the dumb luck of having “Starr” as a last name.
In many ways Centauri is like the star(s) she’s named after. Bright, in some ways beautiful, and to others, further away than she appears. By some unfair first impressions, she is deemed as cold as outer space itself.
Yet she isn’t, really. She’s very much an introvert. An intellectual. An artist. Not at all fond of crowds and noise, Centuari nevertheless has tried over the years to befriend a few people. But she always seems to get in her own way, as she is not at all comfortable with social norms.
Recently, the sophomore English student at Cornell, (yes, that one) tried out for and got into the summer production at the local community theater, the Little Dionysus Playhouse. Her hope was that being in her first play would ease the labor of making friends. But much like high school and Cornell, she’s finding it difficult. Still unintentionally coming off to people as distant and uninterested Centauri Starr is finding it somewhat difficult to shine. She doesn’t want to change what she is; she only wants what she is to matter to someone for a change.
Will she meet people with whom she can finally be open during this summer production? Or will she find that she is best suited to stand at a distance from other people and accept that? Find out this summer in Flowers of Dionysus.
Meet the Character: Tanya Hayes
The latest character I’d like you to meet from my upcoming novel, Flowers of Dionysus Tanya Hayes.
Tanya is a talented dancer in her early 20’s. So talented in fact that she might have made a go at dancing professionally, had she not found such satisfaction giving private dance lessons instead. Her patience and calm demeanor may in fact help her land a teaching job at a prestigious dancing school, thanks to her parents’s connections.
But for now Tanya is content with her private lessons and with choreographing and sometimes appearing in local community shows that have a dancing element. That’s how she found herself in the somewhat disjointed summer production at the Little Dionysus Playhouse this year. Though the show is not a musical, there are dance elements involved, over which Tanya has been given free reign to design as well as perform in. (Along with a small collection of teen dancers who remain fiercely loyal to her.)
Tanya is quite disarming, and more than one normally private person finds her easy to open up to, for some reason.
When not dancing or preparing to dance, Tanya enjoys meditation, playing her football video game, and friendly bickering with her younger brother, Kurt. (The lighting guy for the summer show.)
Yet even the normally confident and patient Tanya feels somewhat at a loss when she begins to receive phone calls from an odd man and potential client. Who is he? What does he really want, and why does he sound vaguely familiar over the phone?
Find out more about Tanya and her phone calls in my upcoming community theater novel, Flowers of Dionysus, coming out in June.
Must I Bear Being a Bore? Not Yet.
I think I might be boring.
All right, that might be a tad harsh on myself. Still, this week I’ve been forced to wonder.
Twice in the last week I started a blog post, only to be struck with a sort of deja vu after a paragraph or so. In both cases I discovered, upon researching this blog, that I had addressed both of the intended topics before.
When it comes to craft posts, such as about writing, there is going to be some repeat over time. I accept that. If as a writer I struggle with a certain question related to my work, it’s not so weird that after some time I’d explore it again on this blog, particularly if I had gained new insight.
Yet only one of the would-be posts from this week was craft-oriented, and I had no new insight to offer. I just overlooked the fact I had written about the topic already. The second article was about my personal life, and didn’t involve writing.
Granted, several years have elapsed since I wrote the post on my personal life. Yet still, coming back to the topic without immediate knowledge that it had already been addressed here made me wonder if I need to get out more. Am I so stuck on the same concepts in both writing and life-experience that I’ve officially run out of fresh things to say? Has the well run dry? Do I do so little in this world that I have a finite number of experiences and thoughts on same to share with readers? That thought is almost depressing enough for me to go buy a beer, and I almost never have beer during the week, or at home.
Yet, I’ve calmed down a bit. This near-repeat has not happened often in the history of my blogging. In fact, only a handful of times before, to the best of my knowledge. This week was the first time, as far as I know, that I got far enough to start a post twice before catching myself, but I did in fact catch myself. And it all may say more about this particular week than my life as a whole.
Still, there may be a slight lesson in this brief, accidental flirtation with being a bore. While I can’t leave the country or dine in some exotic restaurant in the near future, I can probably branch out a bit more than I have in the last year. Heaven knows I will never be on the run constantly, as I am still me, after all. Even if I could afford it, I wouldn’t bury myself in activities all day every day. However, poking around a few tiny, local unexplored corners, both physically and mentally is not such a bad idea. Of course I’m not running out of things to write about, but I may not so readily fear that I am if I look a bit further than I’ve been looking over the last few months.
Maybe I do need to get out more. Or if not, in the very least, I need to get out differently. If so, I imagine I’ll be more likely to gain new experiences that have more than a passing impact on me, about which I can write in the future.
And I can save on beer money for the time being.
Know Thyself. (And Thy Audience.)
An author must write what pleases them, first and foremost. You will find that advice all over the writing world. The concept does have its detractors, though. You’ll also find people advising authors to determine what is selling, and to replicate it as much as possible in as little time as possible. I wish I could say that such an approach never worked, but of course it does. It probably doesn’t lead to long-term success as often as would a more authentic approach to one’s material, but the fact is some authors stumble into fame and even money by catering to the trends of the times. We all know it’s true, or we should know it’s true. Formulas to capitalize on this model abound. With some luck, one could work for you, let’s be frank.
If you’re like me at all, however, you don’t consider mass creating cookie-cutter stories in which you do not believe every few months in hopes of catching a passing gravy train a satisfying writer’s life.
This sometimes effective extreme has a polar opposite that’s just as problematic to my aspirations as a writer. This is the, “I don’t care if anyone else ever likes or even reads what I write. I do it for myself, and the experience only,” camp. I’m somewhat more sympathetic with this view, though I am also skeptical. Do I feel that some people write for therapeutic purposes, and have no desire for anyone to ever see what they have written? Yes. Do I believe that everyone who says this truly doesn’t care if anyone reads their work? No.
When you care about what you’re writing, it’s hard work. Hard work worth doing, but it is a labor. To go through all that a dedicated author goes through only to have it ignored en mass is not, I would guess, most author’s idea of success. It certainly isn’t mine.
All this by way of saying that I do pursue stories that I myself believe in, that speak to me as the author, ones that I would enjoy writing. Yet that isn’t the only criteria. In the end, I want my work to be read and enjoyed by other people. Making money for doing so would be excellent, I won’t deny that. Yet if I write something that moves enough people the money will come, eventually.
That’s why even as I pursue fiction first and foremost that speaks to me, I have to also consider readers. I have plenty of stories I’ve thought about writing that I’ve ultimately deemed “too internal,” meaning that they probably work best within my own thought patterns. True, movements have been started by people presenting to the public untried, experimental forms of fiction which might have been considered “too internal.” It’s not that I never share such of my writings with the world. Yet I don’t feel that I’m robbing myself of artistic merit by asking myself if the story I have in mind is likely to speak to other people. (As opposed to thinking this may be weird enough to start a movement of some kind.)
How do I determine if an idea is likely to appeal to readers? That’s the golden question for most writers, isn’t it? If we could answer that every time, there would be no reason to worry about publication or agents or that sort of thing, would there? But we try to make educated guesses.
I don’t have a strict set of questions I ask myself as to the appeal of my fiction. Some common considerations though involve whether I’m exploring something that is near universal in the human experience. Or, like my upcoming novel, Flowers of Dionysus, I try to determine if there may be a definable niche of people to whom this particular story with these characters would speak loudest. (In this case, theatre geeks and people in the arts who believe in a touch of the fantasy.)
I also think of the language of the piece as it’s evolving. I enjoy playing with words, and developing complicated sentences at times. I think all writers probably do. Same with metaphor. Most good writing probably needs a bit of metaphor. Yet if that sort of writing seems more likely to alienate most readers as opposed to drawing them into the world I have created, I generally feel I’ve missed the point of my fiction. I want readers to experience something, as opposed to study something. In the end, if there is some kind of measuring stick, that might be it for me. (Though of course even that changes over time.)
So, when writing fiction I try to start with something that matters to me. I say try because the temptation is still there to think of something that will have wide appeal, or impress high school English teachers first. Yet once I get past that temptation and listen to what my soul wants to say in a story, I still ponder if it has the potential to touch others before I commit.
In this lonely, mysterious, heartbreaking, mind-numbing chaotic swirl of business and imagination that is authorship, I like to think my standard isn’t a horrible place to begin to find some purpose. Do you?
Why I Am Reading the Quran
I’m reading the Quran.
I’ve read excerpts and quotations from it before, but now I am reading the whole thing. At least I am reading a particular translation of it. An old one. I picked up my copy at a used book sale last year sometime; it was published 60 or so years ago. I don’t know where scholarship stands on this translation. Perhaps I should have done research into that aspect before I started reading it, I don’t know. Maybe I messed up in that regard. But this is the version I have, by an esteemed publisher I might add. Though decades old, I’m going with the assumption that it’s probably still a respectable translation, unless and until I learn otherwise.
As I said, I’ve had it about a year. I’ve not been putting off reading it. I just wanted to make sure I had a consistent block of time on a regular basis to read it, as opposed to skimming through it every few days. Thanks to a morning routine I established about a year ago, I have the time, and I’ve made my way through a cue of books that have been waiting.
I am not a Muslim, nor do I intend to become one. But I have over the years read the religious texts of other religions, and I plan to do so in the future. A time would have come for me to read the Quran, regardless.
The timing isn’t purely circumstantial, though. With both fake and legitimate Muslims in the news so much in recent years, fear and misinformation have spread around the globe, especially here in the United States. I am proud to say I already have a basic working understanding of Islam’s mechanics which I use to deflect some of the ignorance as needed. Yet until I read the sacred book of the religion, I can’t claim familiarity with the heart of Islam. Only perhaps with its mind in some ways. In these difficult times I think all literate people owe it to themselves and to Islam to rely on more than pundits and speeches and movies and news reels to establish an understanding of this religion. If we can’t do that, we are obligated to shut up about it, in the very least.
This isn’t about parsing Islamic theology, or arming myself with quotations. I won’t be offering public thoughts on the literature of the book or in this case its translation. And I will be light years away from being a Quran scholar by the time I finish reading it. At that time I will in fact just be a somewhat better informed non-Muslim.
In another lifetime, years ago, I ran for the United States House of Representatives. Obviously, i was not elected, nor even nominated by my party of the time. Yet from the moment I came in last in that primary election, I could stamp one of my cards, so to speak. “If you don’t like what’s going on, why don’t you do something about it,” is a question I can answer with pride by saying. “I have.” I have a similar feeling about reading the entire Koran. In these times when Islam plays such a critical role in world affairs, and when lunatics corrupt it as many lunatics have corrupted Christianity over the years, I want to at least be able to say, “I’ve read it,” when I observe something. I don’t want to bloviate on something with which I have no direct experience.
I also refuse to fear something I know little about just because much of the world assures me I should. I fear ignorance far more than most things, anyway.
Ty Unglebower 