I do talk to myself sometimes, yes.

The summer’s really finally over now. The temperatures are plummeting and it’s time to summarize.

We were in England this summer. All the way from Edinburg to Cornwall to Brighton we went. It was the best event of the year, there were lightning bolts and sun and lots and lots of rain. I wrote a lot. I really did. It was mad how many thoughts went through my head at the most inconvenient of times.

I made the mistake of bringing The Hound of the Baskervilles along today, on a sunny day! I don’t know what went into me, but there I was in Bath, on a bench, reading Sherlock Holmes next to ice-cream-eating Germans.

It was just wrong.

I cannot for the world understand people who only read one book at the time. What if it’s sunny and all they’ve got is Sherlock Holmes? Or  they’re sad and the only book they have is Pride & Prejudice? They must read really fast.

I loved Bath. It is, quite possibly, the friendliest city I’ve ever been to. I can’t tell why it’s friendly, but it is. It is also beautiful, in a weird, uniform way.

You don’t really notice that you’re in a different city if you look at the architecture only. Not really. At least not in Britain. I don’t, anyway. We arrived in Edinburgh three days ago and it wasn’t ’till I saw the Scottish moors and mountains surrounding it that I really accepted that we were, in fact, in Scotland. I was standing on the National Monument -…-what’s-it-called-again-hill and only then did my brain say “Oh yes, we seem to be in Scotland.”

I actually finished my old journal on that trip. A journal that was started in London in 2007. This tells us two things; that I’m good at wrapping things up in style, and that I used insanely much time finishing a not-that-thick book.

It was a lot easier getting used to York than Edinburgh. Maybe this city, despite that I love everything about Scotland and Edinburgh, is slightly more appealing to me. It’s got a tiny second-hand book shop on every corner. Night-clubs and restaurants are flanked by mediaeval churches and port-ways. There’s something magical about York, and I’m not only saying that because of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. A lot because of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but not only. This city really is magical.

The accent, of course, is lovely too.

In short; I’ve spent two fantastic weeks this summer watching people, listening to different accents, reading, writing, exploring, experiencing, living, and everything else England got for foreign tourists. I’ve stocked up on Doctor Who and watched it night after night. I even was at the Doctor Who Exhibition at Land’s End. I’ve had an amazing time and enjoyed about every moment of park-walking, café-sitting (we even were to the café where J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter), tea-drinking and dancing weird dances while talking loudly in Norwegian. There’s really nothing for it, I’ve got to live there.

Our last day in England. It’s been wonderful, magical, life-changing, or something. Yet I look forward to sleeping in my own bed and not having to be so fucking polite at eight in the morning.

Tags: bath, books, edinburgh, england, scotland, sherlock holmes, summer, tea, Writing, york

Because the summer’s all gone

(Maybe not yet, but it’s never to early to start preparing.)

I would love to be able to convey the feeling I get when listening to Autumn Almanac or … Manic Monday. The feeling that everything’s okay. School and stress is nothing as long as you find time to sit indoors watching the autumn storms through thick windows with a great big cup of tea in one hand and a great big book in the other.

Friday evening, people come together,
hiding from the weather.

About friendship and huddleness and pubs and talking philosophically. It makes you work even harder when you do work, which can only be good.

—-

And I know. Manic Monday … I don’t choose these songs deliberately, so what can you do, eh?

Tags: autumn, autumn almanac, bangles, book, kinks, manic monday, tea, work

I inspire myself sometimes

It’s fun reading something you wrote ages ago that is good. I have written a lot of crap during the years, but there are some highlights as well. I love to read something I wrote on a special occasion and it just puts me straight back. Like just after I’d seen Speaking in Tongues at the Duke of York’s in London. I was a bit tired and over-excited and in euphoria and now, every time I read it, I become euphoric and excited again.

By words! It’s truly wonderful.

—–

Another source of inspiration at the moment is Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes. Songs like Home and Desert Song are … well, simply amazing. And the videos are breathtaking and so very different. In addition they look like such a nice bunch.

Kisses Over Babylon is maybe the best of them all.

Tags: edward sharpe & the magnetic zeroes, inspiration, speaking in tongues, Writing

What can possibly go wrong?

I want to write.

Writing is something I want more than anything else. I want to have my words transformed into thrilling stories and amazing, life-changing experiences for anyone that read them. I will live in a house by a lake

(not a big house, but not too small either. If no lake is available, a pond will do).

I will take a walk around the lake every day

(in the case of a pond I will have an off-piste walk through the forest nearby).

I will have an amazing husband and fantastic children. But, most importantly, I will write. The rest (husband and children) will come along when life (,or faith, or God, or whoever) says so.

I will never be able to understand people who doesn’t want to write. It may be scientifically proved that fauns and unicorns doesn’t exist in this universe. But if you read and write then surely they do? (I’m not too sure about the unicorns, but when it comes to fauns I’m in no doubt. I’ve seen them plenty of times.) Who chooses what’s supposed to be in this world anyway? People who say that books such as Harry Potter and Narnia is set in a parallel dimension that seems so much like our own! make me angry. How dare they even think that? To think rationally on fiction, they should be sentenced. Fiction is both reality and imagination,

that’s what makes it fiction.

That’s what makes it so real.

Pictures from www.weheartit.com

Tags: book, Dream, faun, fiction, husband, lake, unicorn, Writing

Of magic and … stuff

You’re saying that magic doesn’t exist. No magic, in an Universe so big that it contains 100,000 galaxies, galaxies so far away that whatever little light is possible to see now left them even before there were dinosaurs walking this Earth.

No magic yet the changing of hydrogen to helium inside the sun makes the foundation for all life in our galaxy. What if it just

stopped?

There are billions of people out there with the constant ability to see the best in others, to forgive. And you’re telling me

that there’s no such thing as magic?

——–

Facts from The Science of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials by Mary and John Gribbin.

Tags: earth, galaxy, john gribbin, magic, mary gribbin, philip pullman, sun, The Science of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, universe

I believe most people are normal with a twist

What I enjoy in writing fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, is that there are no clear rules. Sure, someone might tell you that the story you’ve just written doesn’t qualify as a short-story, there are simply too many words; or doesn’t qualify as a novel, it’s only two words, after all, but as long as you like it, there’s nothing they can do about it. You might say that my punctuations and commas are wrong. As a matter of fact, it isn’t, I’m only being artistic.

I don’t think … that I view myself as an aspiring author, or writer, or journalist. I am more a person dedicated to words and ink, paper and fingers so full of ink that they’re black.

Maybe it’s just saying the words ‘aspiring author’ that disturbs me. It puts you too much in the same pile as all the other aspiring authors out there who really end up in banks and small-corner-shops who sell tobacco and chewing-gum. Maybe I will as well.

Or maybe I’ll write.

Tags: aspiring author, blotchy fingers, chewing-gum, ink, tobacco, words, writer, Writing

My body’s at school but my head is with Caspian

I believe in the power of the written word as well as the power of words uttered aloud. It is my experience that you get a lot closer to the words by either uttering them aloud or writing them by hand. This goes for your own compositions as well as other’s. This I’m writing now, for instance, I wrote down some weeks ago. Since that time I haven’t thought about it at all, but I found the note yesterday and liked it. It said

You get closer to your words when you utter them aloud just as you get closer to them when you write them by hand. Be close to your words.

I especially like the “be close to your words”-part. Really, I see few sights as pretty as a page full of writing. It is a wonderful thing and highly under-appreciated. I stand by what I said earlier, it is important to be close to your words

something that can never be achieved on a computer.

——

I have also been thinking frequently about Caspian and Narnia lately. I wonder how he’s faring. During many a long and dreary day at school I’ve wished that I could’ve been there with him at the end of the world. Oh, education first I guess.

Tags: closeness, Narnia, prince caspian, Writing

“Happiness is … reading on the potty!”

“Something’s either there or it’s not. Isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it?”

It’s quite a small girl, I mean, she can’t be older than 6. She’s just learned how to tame words and letters and, consequently, does so to any word that comes in her way. She and her family is at their small cottage by the sea. It’s quite beautiful, but the little girl is at the loo which truly isn’t more than an outhouse. On the wall there is this small picture of a boy and a girl on the potty and underneath it reads “Happiness is … reading on the potty!”

The girl reads it over and over, but cannot manage to give meaning to the words. They were so strange. So foreign. She consults her father and he confirm that it is indeed another language. It doesn’t help much, the little girl still doesn’t understand it.

A year later  the no-longer-so-little girl is yet again sitting in the little outhouse. Yet again she reads the little text. She has read it so many times that it has become a little chant inside her head.

“Happiness is … reading on the potty!”

Then, all of a sudden, Understanding drops into her head like a weight. “Happiness is … reading on the potty!” But of course. Happiness is reading … on the potty! This is English. It is words with meaning! The world open up to the girl. Surely, now she can do anything. There are languages to be learned and stories to be plucked out of the air and written. She is the world. She is the word.

Potty.

The little text and picture is still hanging in that little outhouse.  I read it every time.

Tags: language, little girls, neil gaiman, nevewhere, potty, reading, word, world

“Brute, Glob. Hello.”

Over the years, my dad has, from time to time, forced me to read books that did not include magic, which I thank him for. I am not a very fantasy-reading person, to me there’s no such thing as fantasy. They are just books including magic. Point is, I never fail to finish one. Ever. With books of a more “real” kind this has actually happened once or twice.

I remember trying to read a book called Juniper when I was younger. I’d got it for christmas. I never found out if it was any good because half-way into the second chapter they started talking about racism and I fell asleep before I’d even finished the word.

So I returned to fairy-tales.

I am not one of those who solely read fantasy and SF. I’m not. Thus I felt disgusted and guilty by being bored by a book that was actually pretty well written. The truth is that books concerning politics of any kind bore me to death. Apartheid, racism, critical view of modern society, I’m asleep already.

Politics have nothing to do marching into the world of fiction. Not in the obvious way, anyway. If they are lurking behind the story and not showing themselves, then that’s fine. It is when they take out a megaphone and starts yelling “Listen up! Blah blah blah” that they ruin everything. Everything

Funny thing is, I’m not bored by books like Jane Eyre or Sense and Sensibility. Neither by Poirot or Ruby in the Smoke (a fantastically exciting detectiveish novel by Mr Philip Pullman). Because politics don’t interfere in the obvious way.

Also, people who analyze every book they read to be about McCarthy or global warming or apartheid. This is over-analysis, no matter what the author intends. Let fiction be fiction and keep reality out of it (let it at least seem so). We read for a reason, that reason isn’t always wanting to stop global warming or getting depressed by oppressed kids in Somalia.

———–

This post is dedicated to my cousin Henrik, who didn’t believe I’d be able to post twice in two days. Hah!

Tags: apartheid, book, fantasy, fiction, henrik, over-analysis, politics, racism, reading, sandman, SF

We are Seven

A simple child, dear brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

I met a little cottage girl,
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That cluster’d round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad;
Her eyes were fair, and very fair,
–Her beauty made me glad.

“Sisters and brothers, little maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.

“And where are they, I pray you tell?”
She answered, “Seven are we,
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.”

“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother,
And in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”

“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet you are seven; I pray you tell
Sweet Maid, how this may be?”

Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.”

“You run about, my little maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”

“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.”

“My stockings there I often knit,
My ‘kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit–
I sit and sing to them.”

“And often after sunset, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.”

“The first that died was little Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain,
And then she went away.”

“So in the church-yard she was laid,
And all the summer dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.”

“And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.”

“How many are you then,” said I,
“If they two are in Heaven?”
The little Maiden did reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”

“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
‘Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”

It is quite a long poem, but We are Seven by William Wordsworth is so beautiful that I can live with that. It works best when you read it out loud to yourself in a big, empty house. Preferably with drafty doors and windows and a secret thing sitting in a corner without you knowing it. The secret thing we listen very closely to every word that comes over your lips, and it will cry. You will then look up, be startled to find that you’re not alone and walk over to the thing. Together you will then read a happy poem.

The happiest day- the happiest hour
My sear’d and blighted heart hath known,
The highest hope of pride and power,
I feel hath flown.

Of power! said I? yes! such I ween;
But they have vanish’d long, alas!
The visions of my youth have been-
But let them pass.

And, pride, what have I now with thee?
Another brow may even inherit
The venom thou hast pour’d on me
Be still, my spirit!

The happiest day- the happiest hour
Mine eyes shall see- have ever seen,
The brightest glance of pride and power,
I feel- have been:

But were that hope of pride and power
Now offer’d with the pain
Even then I felt- that brightest hour
I would not live again:

For on its wing was dark alloy,
And, as it flutter’d- fell
An essence- powerful to destroy
A soul that knew it well.

Like The Happiest Day by Edgar Allan Poe. You will read every other verse and then you will sit and cry together. Crying is good. Even more so is crying with a secret thing.

Because the secret things never ask any questions.

Tags: crying, Edgar Allan Poe, poem, Poetry, secret things, the happiest day, we are seven, William Wordsworth