New things at the year’s end

I hope everyone has had a lovely relaxing holiday! I had a nice time: plenty of alone time combined with family. Alone time was spent eating leisurely breakfasts and writing my Finnish short story.

…My short story which I’ve now sent off to the competition! I’m so pleased that I managed to get a story written in Finnish, and that I submitted it to the competition. Never done such a thing in Finnish before! I suspect it won’t be a winning story, but finishing it was a personal win, so I’m happy even now. Perhaps I’ll be less scared of embracing Finnish as an additional fictional language in the future. :)

I’m going to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a very happy New Year! Going to be interesting to see what 2013 brings with it. 2012 has been a full year, what with writing and finishing my MA thesis; graduating; being unemployed; finishing a proper novel draft; Nanowrimo; getting a job; and most pleasingly, getting some of my poetry published.

Here’s to a new year of writing!

Poetry in Chantarelle’s Notebook

My poem ‘October’s End’ is now online in issue 29 of Chantarelle’s Notebook: you can read it here.

On the topic of poems online, a note on my poems in Snakeskin: the website went down for a while, and they’re still updating the archives. Hence the old links to my poems there don’t work. I’ll add the new links when they’re available!

I notice I haven’t posted at all so far in December. Life has been keeping me busy. I haven’t been writing as intensely after the end of Nanowrimo, but I have been writing. Not every day, but still: writing. I’ve started editing the snail story. I’ve written a couple of poems. And I’ve been working on a short story in Finnish for a competition (deadline 31st Dec).

The Finnish short story is a new and exciting thing. Despite having done Nanowrimo in Finnish once, I’m much more unsure of any writing skills I may have when writing in Finnish. I wrote in Finnish as well as English when I was younger, but after my teenage years, I let my creative-writing Finnish get rusty. But I’m trying to relearn writing in my other native language too. There are some things that I think I could write better about in Finnish, if only I could be comfortable in the words, if only I could sink into the flow of it again. Like the story I’m trying to write now: oh, it’d be a very different story if I wrote it in English. It wouldn’t carry with it any of the personal meaning I attach to the setting and certain words.

It’s like relearning to play an instrument you haven’t touched for years. Which reminds me, I should do some fiddle practise. It’s a matter of months, not years, with my fiddle; but still, I need to find the old ways again, so that I can learn new tunes.