POV thoughts

The WIP, the novel currently titled The Sabbatical, seems to be asking for at least two alternating point of views. I feel having two narrators will give the novel more depth--almost like adding several new dimensions with one additional POV. It will be much more fun to write, that's for sure. However, as a reader, I strongly prefer novels with a single point of view. Whenever I encounter a second POV in a novel, I tend to stop, or at least pause. I hate switching between characters. At best, I'd be putting such a novel aside for a couple of days. At best, I'd be flipping through the pages, searching for the original POV, and reading ahead one character's story only, then going back for the second character.

However, I love novels in stories, and enjoy various POVs in them. How can that be? I've tried to figure out what's the difference. A novel in stories, offers, by design, a somewhat disjointed world view--I love this. The more gaps I need to fill in, the better. A new POV is almost an independent entity. It is a photo album of snapshots. In a more traditional novel, I wonder if adding a POV is a bit like cheating. It is a portrait, in one big frame, but there are other people competing for my attention, and one of them is necessarily more in focus than the others.

Now back to my novel. I think I'm going to stick to a single POV. I find this more challenging, and therefore, it is a different kind of fun. I wonder if I can achieve the dimensionality I crave with a single POV. If not, I can add a POV later.

I am wondering whether I'm the only one who is not so keen on multiple POVs while reading, and more excited about them while writing? Please share!

Three little things plus one

I was scrolling through forums on absolutewrite.com and instead of "Ask the Agent" I read "Ask the Therapist." Maybe the Universe is throwing a hint.

My new washing machine informs me of the end of the cycle with a nice melody, instead of a simple boring beep. This is rather delightful.

The phone company screwed up, and we won't have the phone connected for another week. I'm enjoying it.

MS Word keeps highlighting in red "I'm enjoying it," and I'm too sleepy to figure out if there's anything wrong or Word is messing with my mind. We are back to square one: maybe I need a therapist.

I sent spam

So something happened and a virus got into my email account and spammed my friends with a link to Viagra. Pretty embarrassing, huh? Especially as some of my friends turned out to be so convinced in my infallibility, good nature, and absent mindedness, that they opened an email from me with no subject line and no content, other than the link, and actually opened the link (Pssssssst! Never do this again!). And then I got emails asking me why on earth I would send them a link to Viagra. Oy.


When I tried to email all of my contacts with an apology, and spent 5 minutes clicking on the contacts in my address book (yahoo wouldn't let me select them all), I got a notification from yahoo that I was trying to spam my friends, and that I needed to go into time out for that. I wasn't allowed to email anyone for 2 hours. Nice.

Then I emailed a big sorry to everyone in batches. Only to have friends tell me they never got any spam from me (other than the apology spam, that is.)

If you receive an email from me with no subject line and no content--well, that's not me! I'm all for the subject lines. I even think too much about them. I noticed that if I receive an email with a "hi" in the subject line from an unfamiliar name, I tend to delete it without opening (yeah, I suspect spam / virus). So I tend to have subject lines like "Hi, this is Ania, and we met in the store last week" or something like that.

So my apologies to those who opened "my" spam email. And my apologies to those who haven't received the spam email and now claim I have an exclusive spam list, and they are not on it. When I decide to spam you with my novel publication date, you will all be on my spam list. And I will have an elaborate subject line and lots of text inside, and some links too.

Cold and Hot

Staying under the blankets was so delicious, it took some willpower to drag myself out. I had a little dialogue with myself going, and I don't know how the responsible part of me managed to convince the sleepy part of me so early in the morning. The house is poorly insulated and gobbles up quite a lot of heating oil, so we are trying to keep it cool. I'm not a big fan of cool. I'm dressed in three layers now, but I'm sure most people would be comfy just in a long sleeved shirt, or maybe a thin sweater. Yesterday the blankets won. Today I was quite stern with them and kicked them off. 1000 words--ta DA--done!


After completing my morning chunk of writing, I'm procrastinating. I need to start re-reading (I'm dreading this part) Swearing in Russian, as I need to make some factual changes and who knows what other changes to the novel before I hand it over to my editor.

Instead, I find myself thinking about this: Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab -- 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe.

The year of the tiger!

Rrrrrrrrrr! Today we suddenly recalled that in Toronto,  Chinese restaurants 'Mandarin' usually had fabulous feasts on Chinese New Years, and decided to go and celebrate (we are always eager for a celebration and good food!) in the local Dragon King Buffet. There was not a single mention of the New Year. There was a small sign about Valentine's Day. The restaurant was half empty. The good thing was that for the month of February children eat free, so it was like my husband and I were no a date sans kiddos (financially speaking). The food was okay, but definitely not a celebration, and definitely, no comparison to 'Mandarin'. Though of course superbly cheap.

The new house makes me inspired to tidy up in the evenings, so that I can have peaceful solo mornings while the kids are still asleep. I'm looking forward to writing tomorrow, sitting by the fireplace that we will fix next year. But sometimes imagination is just enough. My coffee will be real and fresh. And I should be only moderately sleepy.

The Sabbatical--my new WIP

I've been thinking about this (new) novel for over a year. I had the setting, the characters, the opening, the ending, and a vague idea of the middle. I remember the dinner I had with my friend C. in Iqaluit at the Frob, just over a year ago. I told her about the plot, and we brainstormed a little. She's a writer too, so she understands. I remember being stuck on my protagonist's intentions--why would she do this? I wasn't sure. Then for the entire year I thought about writing it, but something held me back. Meanwhile I revised Swearing in Russian for yet another time, moved to Halifax, bought a new house and moved there, and didn't feel like writing. I convinced myself that thinking about writing was actually good enough. And actually, it was! I came back to the novel (tentative title is The Sabbatical) and the outline came out of me. This is pretty new, as I usually struggle with outlines and do better without them. But after working with Victoria, I started to internalize some of her principles of tension building and pacing. And this is how the outline just happened, with this basic idea that one conflict leads to another and yet to another. I don't have a very thorough outline, I don't think I will enjoy that, but I have a functional outline that helps me to navigate to the ending, with some basic ideas of how relationships between my characters develop.


This morning I woke up 2 hours before the first kid woke up (3 hours before the second, 4 hours before my night owl who will go to bed after midnight)...This is all courtesy of the City of Halifax, who needed to dig up our water pipe this morning, so that the plumber could replace the shut off valve, so that he could hook up my washing machine. Did I tell you we just moved into an OLD house? Yeah, most things don't work. Yet, I love being here.

I wrote about 900 words. What a pleasure to be finally writing it! I feel like I'm weaving with words. It is the joy and the energy of a first draft--rough weaving, no worries, just the process. But I can see the characters are already much more defined that in my previous opening chapters. (I had written about 15000 words of it already, but I'm writing from scratch now, and might use the previous work in later revisions, or I might not. The focus is somewhat different--there's much less of the supernatural in this version. I simply don't want to have a ghost in every novel!)

Lessons learned: thinking about a novel, even for more than a year, is a good thing; outlining can be learned (but I think it comes easier to some than to others); writing is a true pleasure; quiet mornings are an inspiration.