The final book of this order was a novel I have had my sights on for a year or so: “The Girl Who Circumvented Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.” I have read slightly longer descriptions of the book which caught my interest but the blurb is not only interesting it is simply awe-inspiring: “Gather up your courage, scoop up some wishes, grab a little pinch of luck, and prepare to be swept away, in a ship of your own making, to a land unlike any other…” It is nothing less than wonderful poetry. I do so hope this book will meet my expectations.

Knock on the door you never realized was there. There will be no answer. Enter only if you’re certain that you will embark on an adventure. When you walk past the scare crow in the field ask yourself if you’re scared. If you find yourself so then beware that adventures are often scary but not very often dangerous. When you reach the castle enter. Not by the front gate. You must go through the garden to find the alternate entrance.

You can get lost in the maze in the garden. If you dare to enter it. It would be easy simply to avoid entering but you could learn a great deal and so I’d advise you to consider carefully before declining this opportunity. It is not always wise to take the straightest path.

If you do find the alternate entrance to the castle you’ll find yourself in the hall of mirrors. Everything you ever were and everything you are will be there for you to behold. Only that which is to come is still open to opportunities.

If you want an awfully big adventure you’re well advised to accept what the mirrors tell you. Now you have a choice. There are two doors. One of them is open. You can see everything in there. The other one is not yet open but it is unlocked and hence this path is a possibility as well. The secrets behind it will not unfold itself though before you choose to take that path.

Maybe it will take you a while to decide which door to choose and that is perfectly fine but make sure you do choose one because time spent in the hall of mirrors should be relatively short. If you don’t walk out of either door in time they will close on you.

Still I do believe it is worthy of a small celebration to have a completed the first draft. And I was crying my eyes out as I wrote the final two scenes of the book as it was a bit like saying goodbye to the characters. I will be spending a lot more time with them yet but the story is now set, they will no longer do the wonderfully surprising things that characters sometimes do that require an interesting plot twist or change the story completely. I am so sentimental about my writing and I love that!

Our great postman (who knows everybody – we’re in the countryside after all) delivered my latest stack of books from Amazon. I have already read the first book out loud to my son this afternoon: Neil Gaiman: Instructions. It is awesome, a very quick and short read but a wonderful and very inspiring story. I’m actually contemplating writing my own version, a set of instructions, just for fun, sometime soon. I’m very inspired by other people right now, trying out things. As for instance my version of an Erin Morgenstern inspired tale earlier on the blog. It’s a lot of fun to try out writing different things. This is of course especially the case when you sometimes feel stuck on a certain big writing project. But I am no longer stuck. Now it’s on to work on the second draft and I am so excited about that!

I also have the rest of the new stack of books to look forward to:

Philip Pullman: The Firework-Maker’s Daughter. I think it was my brother, a great Pullman fan, as am I, who told me that this was an awesome story.

Anna Sewell: Black Beauty. I want to read something to my son that I remember fondly from my own childhood. I was very much into horses when I was a girl and had my own horses so of course I loved this story. I hope it is as good as I remember!

Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden. I have never read it but it sounds fabulous.

Brian Selznick: The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Having lived in Paris for a while I am looking so much forward to reading this story. It sounds magical.

Alain de Botton: The Architecture of Happiness. Until reading The Art of Travel I wasn’t really a fan of de Botton. I have a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and tried to read his Consolations of Philosophy but it really couldn’t keep me interested. However the topic of this book, architecture, interior decoration etc. is really on my mind right now as I have spent the last year planning and designing the renovation of my grandmother’s and my father’s childhood home, a wonderful farm in the countryside. E.g. I am pondering why it seems to make a difference to me that my family history is tied to this place. Because to me it really does. More on that later on the blog, I suspect.

Oh and I almost forgot: Neil Gaiman: Odd and the Frost Giants. I read the first chapter to my son this afternoon. It seems promising!

The concept of making a new piece of art by detracting instead of adding is interesting. We seem so preoccupied with what we can add that the idea of actually looking at the beauty of that which already is and the possibility of emphasizing certain elements in it is forgotten. This also seems to be true on a more philosophical level. My fascination with detraction is that it enables us to focus on certain details in the original work and even create a new meaning. This to me is very creative and a great way of creatively engaging with the original work.

I also get the thought that by literally opening up a book in this way you achieve some sort of transparency. It opens up the book to you. It appeals to me in much the same way as an art print of an original painting by Danish painter Otto Frello that I was given by my cousin for Christmas almost ten years ago. It depicts a square in Copenhagen and the interesting thing about the painting is that it shows the square in several different time periods which overlap in the picture:

I love the symbolism of this kind of lucidity of time and space and this is often a theme in the fiction I write. As I have taken a day off from writing fiction today it is great to have the opportunity to ponder a bit and Brian Dettmer really gave me the opportunity to do so. After all Sundays are – at least ideally – days for contemplation and dreams. This Sunday I will dream of owning an artwork by Brian Dettmer.

A Destiny-Altering Performance

The first time he saw the late night performance in the circus he knew nothing would ever be the same.

The implication of these magic tricks was almost incomprehensible.

He knew deep down in his heart and mind that he too was meant to achieve great things in the world of magic. Even change the world.

Making his first experiments on people he realized that the consequences could be grave indeed but considering the purpose of his actions he knew he needed to pursue his destiny.

The first time he saw her he knew that their destinies were intertwined. She knew too but none of them knew exactly how.

He was falling in love with her and utterly seduced by the magic she was able to perform.

She was falling in love with him too but uncertain of his emotions towards her she wanted to make sure that he loved her.

When she enticed him with her magic she created an illusion that was too strong and too far removed from reality.

He walked right into it and got lost.

And so it was that because she didn’t trust him to feel the same way she did her love remained unrequited and her fears turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just because it is possible to write a short story in two minutes will not mean that it is good (as Erin’s are!) but I think the idea of using such small tales as a breathing room from all the writing that has to be good, at least at some point, and just write something for the fun of it. I think it could be quite interesting to write a number of tales without revising them and then at some point to be able to look back at them and review which subjects and writing styles one was preoccupied with at that time. It might even open doors into an unknown territory of writing that you wouldn’t even have discovered if you only write on your large and serious projects.

So maybe it will be a weekend project for some of you to write your own tale! It is a lot of fun! Erin’s tales are accompanied by photos by Carey Farrell so if you’re into photography as well (as I am!) then you could incorporate this into your tales as well.

A lot of inspiration comes from music. It engages our minds in a unique way and is an easy way of setting a certain mood. A lot can and should be written about using music as a source of inspiration. This post however is about a certain song and the way it explains my relationship to my characters. It is also my favourite Depeche Mode song – or one of them I should say, as I really do have several – In Your Room.

The opening of the song says it all: “In your room, where time stands still, or moves at your will […]” Writing is my room. This is where I decide everything. I create characters and stories and although they often seem to magically appear out of thin air I am actually the one who decides what will happen.

In my interpretation of the song it is about a character who sings to his writer. To me the chorus of the song supports the interpretation of a character acknowledging his dependency on his writer: “I’m hanging on your words, living on your breath, feeling with your skin, will I always be here?”

To create and write a character is not simply the same as thinking for a short moment about someone who does not exist. Of course characters are fictional but writers spend so much time with their characters that they become something more. Hopefully they do for readers too. It’s an amazing concept that as readers we are able to laugh and think and suffer with fictional persons who has never drawn a single breath. For writers the relationship is even more intense and I would like to say that as for the character’s question – “Will I always be here?” – That yes, if you are a character of mine I will always keep you somewhere inside me. You are in my life and I will think of you. When a writing project is done I will not think of you every day but from time to time I will think of you. I will wonder how you’re doing now. Who you’re with. Whether or not you’re happy.

In the song the room is described as “Your favourite half-life, your favourite consciousness.” I think this is interesting too. Because to me the act of writing actually feels a bit like switching on a button that transports me to another way of being conscious. It’s as if I am experiencing things through my characters. In fact, when the writing process is going well it makes me feel alive like very few other things do. In short: It simply feels amazing. It’s like another way of being alive and another way of experiencing the world. I am grateful that I get to experience the world like this. It makes me feel like I have more than one life. And I love it.

If you have never tried writing a story yourself and want to know what it feels like to create your own room then try it out. It is mind-blowing. Happy writing!

“[…] once you’ve wound up a clock, there’s something frightful in the way it keeps on going at its own relentless pace. Its hands move steadily round the dial as if they had a mind of their own. Tick-tock, tick-tock! Bit by bit they move, and tick us steadily on towards the grave.”

In this story the clock takes on an important role, in fact it becomes a character as much as the other characters in the novel. At the same time it affects the action as well as determines it. Pullman warns us against the dangers of the clock: “Some stories are like that. Once you’ve wound them up, nothing will stop them; they move on forwards till they reach their destined end, and no matter how much the characters would like to change their fate, they can’t. “
Always being afraid that I will never manage to experience everything I would like in the limited timespan of my lifetime I can relate to the warning in the first quote above. As for the second quote this seems even more important as it concerns the ability to make decisions about your own life. Sometimes it seems as if the clock is ticking so fast that we have no control over our own destiny – the time simply flies by and the danger is that we don’t fill the time with the things most important to us simply because we never manage to find out what these things are. Time is simply filled with day-to-day living without much reflection.

Maybe the poetic musings on the meaning of the clock was what made me re-read Clockwork already after I read it for the first time only a couple of months ago. Maybe it was the fact that when a baby is born it seems like a new clock starts ticking and like a new story has taken its beginning. My son’s story began right after the new year did and seeing as I always tend to feel that the clock is ticking much too fast (and there are so many books out there to read that I never have enough time) I didn’t want to start off his life as a reader too late. I want to offer him the possibility of a lifetime with the enjoyment and the kind of reflection that I feel reading offers us. Hence we needed to get started and Clockwork was the first book I read to him. So before he was a month old we had already finished reading his first novel.

Why did I think it was important to start reading with him already? I’ve read somewhere that it is important to start reading for your kids very early to instill in them a hopefully never-ending desire to keep turning the pages forever. And the key is in fact supposed to be in the action of turning the pages – it seems that turning the pages while reading will make a child like reading because the action of turning the pages while holding the child creates a connection between something nice and safe and reading. This is why I have decided to put my awesome friend Kindle on hold for a little while and focus on the extensive library of printed books I possess and this is why I have decided that I need to read for my son. Besides it’s a great way of preserving my own sanity while being otherwise totally emerged in everything baby. I get to go to Glockenheim with Pullman as my guide or to Asteroid B-612 (We read The Little Prince as the second novel). And though I love all this baby stuff as much as the next mum I really enjoy an excursion!

My advice to all parents of small children: Read to your babies and your toddlers, read, read, read! And do read Clockwork sometime soon, it’s an incredible novel. When you read to your child you make an effort to pass on to your child the joy of reading and as an added bonus you get some time for an activity you enjoy while not having to feel guilty that you’re taking away time from your child. Of course I can imagine that it gets old to keep on reading the same Peter Rabbit story so the advantage might be bigger when your child is still too young to understand what you’re reading (my mum was in college when I was very young and she read out loud when she studied for her finals!) but there is some really great children’s fiction out there, so chances are that at least some of the time you’ll actually get a nice reading experience for your own sake as well as the child’s, besides of course the sheer enjoyment of sitting down to read with your child and experience their fascination with a story.