This summer, as many before, my beach read is a book by Guy Gavriel Kay. This year, it’s Tigana in Greek, translated by Augoustinos Tsirimokos.
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Author: Eva
Changing the scenery
For a while now, I have been flirting with the idea to make myself get out every day and go to a café to write. From previous experiences, it has always helped me when I was serious about the work I wanted to do and the fact that I needed a distraction-free environment (yes, I mean the internet).
I like being around of people when I work. I like the voices around me that make no sense, the random noise in the café, the music in the background that most times is unbearable, people moving around endlessly. All these create a kind of white noise that helps me focus. It’s enough for me to shut it out, and not enough to distract me.
Friday Reads
A couple of weeks ago, a very good friend of mine gave me as a gift for my birthday The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Fantasy is not her preferred genre and, still, she searched for a good fantasy book for me, for which I’m extremely grateful.
Camp Nano Finished
As predicted, Camp Nano finished without me succeeding to reach my goal. I would say I’m totally fine with it, but I’m not. Not because I didn’t win, but because I didn’t make the progress that I wanted on my book.
Almost Poetry: Mirrors
The thing about looking yourself in a mirror isn’t about washing your face or shaving your beard or putting on makeup.
It isn’t about spotting all those new freckles on your nose or that new pimple that is still soft and tender or making sure that hickey is hidden.
Looking yourself in the mirror isn’t about seeing your eyes red and puffed and swollen after you’ve cried to the break of dawn just because or checking the angles of your chin that you think they don’t flatter you, reimagining, redesigning, wishing.
It’s not even about those times your reflection talks back to you, mocking, smirking, blaming you while you do nothing but stand there on shaky legs and sobbing breath and scream and scream and scream on the inside and nobody hears a thing.
The thing about looking yourself in the mirror is to remind yourself that you’re there, too. That you are like everyone else. Your whole life you’ve been looking through your eyes all day long, going through the automatic motions that you’ve learned to repeat day after day, hour after hour, seeing a world in which you are the audience as much as the center, the point of reference. It can make you forget that you, too, are there.
Because the thing about looking yourself in the mirror is to remind you about your physical existence; one face among millions. Similar but not alike. Not special but oh so different in every single aspect that makes what you are, you. That no matter what, those eyes will be there with you to meet you back, red, haunted, alive.
CampNano Progress Day 8
You’d think that by deciding to participate at CampNano, and a goal of 30k, I would have been consistent and on time and totally up to this, but you’d think wrong. The funny thing is, I don’t mind.