Jennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞

Jan 29 #writerscoffeeclub Describe the saddest moment you've written. Share an excerpt.

This is an excerpt from the project I refer to in the linked #WordWeavers post. I rewrote it more than ten years after the first version, unfortunately informed by the sudden loss of someone young and close to me. When my protagonist screams, "It's too much! Too much!"--that was me, screaming in the parking lot of Target, where I was when I found out.

https://wandering.shop/@JenniferdeGuzman/111840541170096596

Jennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞 (@[email protected])

Jan 29 #WordWeavers (cont'd) In 4th grade, my teacher Mr. Crane had us write short stories once a month. He gave me an A with so many pluses that they went to the edge of the page on one about my friends and me becoming invisible. It was called "Where Are We?" His feedback was so helpful. I still remember how he wrote "wonderful!" next to my sentence (in a different story) "Belle sat on her haunches and whimpered." (Belle was Santa Claus's dog.)

The Wandering Shop
Jan 29, 2024 at 6:27pmWeb
Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Jan 29, 2024
Hey, #WordWeavers, please stop saying the stories you wrote as a kid are “terrible”! We should be as kind to our child-selves as we would be to any child who is creative and earnest and brave enough to make something up and even show it to other people to be judged! Those stories were you striving to become who you are, and no matter what the spelling, grammar, or plot is like, that’s beautiful!
Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Jan 30, 2024

#WordWeavers Jan 30: Has your main genre changed with time?

No, not really. I've always written a genre that exists at the edges of other genres. It's speculative fiction rather than science fiction, fabulism or magical realism rather than fantasy. For a moment in the early 21st century, it was called "slipstream." I wish I could remember who wrote this; I only have the screenshot and I can't find the original source. But it's how it was being talked about at the time.

Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Jan 31, 2024

#WordWeavers 31Jan Would you ever cosplay as one of your characters? Which one?

Clothes are a huge part of My Sky All Hung with Jewels, since it's a court intrigue novel. Everything that Meryt wears is something I'd love to wear myself.

Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 13, 2024

#WordWeavers 2/13 Favorite thing in your writing space?

I have so many items in my writing area are that are meaningful to me. So I’ll just pick one: the porcelain mug with a rabbit on it on my desk. I bought it at Liberty London in 2013, my first trip to London. The art is by Rory Dobner. I drank tea in it every day until it cracked. Now it holds pens, and I have a new tea mug with a detail of the same art on it.
My books are important, too.

Feel free to ask me about anything in the photos!

Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 15, 2024

#WordWeavers 2/14 If you had to date one of your characters, who would it be?

Hmm, I guess it would be Victory from If I Never Saw the Sun. She's a super-cool artist in post-punk Manchester. But it would have to have been, like, 20 years ago because I'm too old for her now. Here's a scene with her best friend Bard, who is besotted and forlorn.

Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 15, 2024

#WordWeavers 2/14 (cont'd)

Here's their meet-cute

Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 22, 2024

#WordWeavers 2/22 Does reading your own words bring you joy?

Oh yes. One of the reasons I write is for the joy of seeing the words appear from out of my head. I read my own writing for pleasure sometimes. I like reading my hobby writing (fan fic) the best--and not even for sexy reasons, just because I enjoy the characters.

Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 27, 2024

#WordWeavers 2/27 Have you written poetry?

Yes. I wanted to be a real-life full time poet (lol) from the age of about 17 to 20. Then I had my first short story published when I was 21, and I refocused my attention on my first love, fiction.

I've had a poem published that was nominated for a Rhysling Award ("Carnival"), and one of my favorite things I've written is my poem "The Turnspit." You can read some of my poems on my blog! https://jenniferdeguzman.com/blog/category/Poetry

Poetry — Notes on Creation — Jennifer de Guzman

A blog including essays, short stories, poems, announcements, and thoughts on the creative life.

Jennifer de Guzman
Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 27, 2024
#WordWeavers 2/27 I also have a chapbook eBook that includes a poem that doesn't appear anywhere else: https://jenniferdeguzman.com/store/elegies-and-fantasies-9-poems
Elegies and Fantasies: 9 Poems (ePub) — Jennifer de Guzman

A jewelbox containing nine crystallized moments of thought and emotion, Elegies and Fantasies is a work of grief and revelation, reflecting the world unique to the author’s mind. Introspection is action, imagination is experience, and metaphor is solidity in this world, creating a liminal space be

Jennifer de Guzman
Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 27, 2024
Related to today's #WordWeavers: I've seen some people lament that they don't really "get" poetry so I thought I'd share this example of how literary weirdos "unpack" and explicate a poem. It's an explication of one of my favorites, "Musée des Beaux Artes" by W.H. Auden. Bonus: It's about a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, so you get to look at a painting, too. I learned about details in Bruegel's art that I didn't know about! https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/06/books/auden-musee-des-beaux-arts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Yk0.dvr7.5NC4Ywx-xWxM&smid=url-share
A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight

With war looming, W.H. Auden stood in a museum and was inspired to write. The resulting poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” is one of the most famous ever written about art.

The New York Times
Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 28, 2024

#WordWeavers 2/28 How often do you back up your work?

Daily. And I don't trust iCloud on its own. I have an external drive where I save anything I worked on at the end of the day.

I wasn't as vigilant until last month, when I got a new laptop, screwed something up transferring data, and ended up with a Scrivener file that was missing the last chapter I had written. After screaming and then wanting to throw up, I scoured for Scrivener backup files and found a version with the chapter intact.

Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Feb 29, 2024

#WordWeavers 2/29 What’s one of the weirdest things that happens in your story?

I'm writing a magical realist novel, so lots of "weird" things happen (though see graphic below). My goal is to try to make everything in it, "supernatural" and mundane, on the same level of weird so none of it seems more unlikely than anything else. In that spirit, a mundane weird thing: my protagonist goes to a hardware store and ends up seducing a young man who advises her on aphid control.

Show threadgeoffreygevaltFeb 29, 2024

@JenniferdeGuzman

I so agree with you on the cloud. do the same -- daily on my external drive, one for the laptop, one for the desktop.

Show threadKagan MacTane (he/him)Feb 15, 2024
@JenniferdeGuzman Awww. She's a good friend.
Show threadLeah BobetJan 30, 2024
@JenniferdeGuzman Ideo! She lives on! 🍻
Show threadJon OlfertJan 29, 2024
@JenniferdeGuzman And come to think of it, the same applies to things written as a young adult.
Show threadGrace PKMJan 30, 2024
@JenniferdeGuzman I don't see it as being unkind to say my writing as a kid was terrible. Giving the child within me permission to fail helps to divest myself of any leftover perfectionism. That kid made "bad" writing so that one day I'd make "good" writing. Thank god she wrote all that bad writing.
Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Jan 30, 2024
@gracefrench were you failing, though? We all write better as we work at and we build on what we did before. Improvement isn’t failure. I have a problem with the “if I’m not great at it at first, it’s not worth doing it” part of perfectionism, and this is what has helped me.
Show threadGrace PKMJan 30, 2024
@JenniferdeGuzman Well, it depends on your definition of failure. I just failed to build a website umpteen times, but now I've just succeeded.
That's what I mean by giving myself permission to fail. It's redefining the meaning to give it less power, or, indeed, to make it impower me.
Show threadIxtli Dekami 🍕⚾🖖Jan 30, 2024

@JenniferdeGuzman
I once thought that what I wrote and draw when I was a kid was trash, but, viewed now with my adult (‽) and more experienced (‽‽) eyes, I can say, happily, that it certainly was trash…=)

(with my most insincere apologies to Groucho Marx)

Show threadKagan MacTane (he/him)Jan 29, 2024
@JenniferdeGuzman That's powerful. Thank you for sharing.
Show threadJennifer de Guzman 🪲🦋🐝🐞Jan 29, 2024
@kagan thanks. I never specifically thought about how that scene changed until today.
Show threadcaillech MaeveJan 30, 2024
@JenniferdeGuzman

The dad's words, honest in the way only life can forge from us with it's hammer of experiences