Time for Tea!

I saw this teashop mentioned in Lukuhoukka's blog, and immediately googled it. They have a tearoom and two shops in Helsinki (and one is Saint Petersburg, apparently), but lucky for me, there's also a webshop. They sell tea by the ounce (28g), so it's easy to experiment; if you don't like the blend, you're not stuck with a huge bag of the stuff. 

The order arrived in a few days in these wonderfully crinkly brown paper bags. I loved their custom envelope, too. The teas also have the water temperature and steep time written on the bags, which is nice. And they serve afternoon tea at the tearooms. Yay, scones! I'll have to check out the shop when I'm next in Helsinki. 

Here are the addresses and opening times for the shops, if you're in the neighbourhood:

Freddrikinkatu 55 ma - pe 11:00 - 20:00 la 11:00 - 18:00 su suljettu puh: 044-0866 665

Iso Robertinkatu 17-19 ma - pe 11:00 - 19:00 la 11:00 - 18:00 su suljettu puh: 050-3798 877

America Has Spoken

Hear that? That's the sound of millions of Europeans choking on their morning coffee.

Trump. Really?

I guess truth is stranger than fiction.

How Writers Write Fiction: Storied Women 4

This week we talked about character and structure in immersion. A lot of the videos were the same as last year, but no worries, still interesting.

Author Leslie Jamison talked about world-building and using a world glossary, with the idea that you can pick elements of your world and let your mind play with the possibilities, even if you're not writing speculative fiction. She also talked about how it's important to create the physical world but also the emotional world, to view the world through the lens of your character's moods, memories, and feelings. The aim is to make your world almost a character of its own. I think this also has to do with specificity, as in which details are important at that time, in that place of mind, to that particular character.

Russian fiction writer Alisa Ganieva spoke to us about using an orchestra of voices. In her novel The Mountain and the Wall, she used multiple voices to create a tapestry. This involved crowd scenes and  disagreements, gossip and rumours, but also clippings of newspapers and letters written by the characters, a kind of collage style. There is also an orchestra of language in the book, with so many different characters. But the thing I liked was that she also emphasised the power of silence.

Shenaz Patel, author of the novel Sensitive, talked about the writer as god, in the sense that when you're writing, you get to decide what happens to the characters: you can save them or abandon them to their doom. When writing her novel, she struggled with deciding the character's fate. She wanted to save her, because she was attached to the character, but in the real world the character would have been lost. She decided to write the more realistic ending, because she believes that books can change people and change the world, and that maybe this kind of ending would affect the way people saw similar girls as the main character in her story. She also talked about the importance of research, but also about the importance of knowing when to put that aside so the voice of the novel can come through.

Naomi Jackson talked to us about researching her novel The Star Side of Bird Hill last year, too, and  we got a quick replay of that. She told us abut the importance of research and actually having the experiences your character has, if possible, and about that "purposeful inquisitiveness" that you should embrace when doing research, so learning about a culture, for example, with the purpose of using the information in your book. She also talked about researching language and speech patterns, because even one word can take the reader out of the story. (No pressure. Thank the gods for beta readers!) She also reminded us that it's important to use all your senses when doing research to help your setting come to life, and that you can do research without travelling. It involves maps, magazines, period accounts, and lots of googling.

This week's assignment had us write a scene where something has happened that changed the setting, and to write an immersive scene that shows the world before and after it changed.

Reading the Classics: Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust

Whew, finally finished this year's leg of the Proust Project. With a name like Sodom and Gomorrah, I thought something might actually happen in this volume, but not so much. Sodom and Gomorrah is 80 % boring dinner parties, 10 % beautiful description, and 10% clever insights into human nature. The problem is that you need to wade through that 80 % to get to the good stuff. Proust could have used an editor, I think.

In this volume the narrator (Marcel) discovers that same sex relationships happen in his social circle and starts obsessing about them. Homosexuality is explored through Charlus' relationships, and Marcel also suspects that Albertine has something going on with her girlfriends.  Then he spends most of the book seething with jealousy of the girlfriends and his male friends, too. Saint-Loupe gets him really paranoid by just talking to Albertine on the train. The other half of the book he is a huge jerk to Albertine, saying that he could never marry her and how it's a  pity that she's missing out on having a yacht and stuff by not becoming his wife. And then, in a last minute reversal, he decides to marry her anyway. (Spoiler alert! Okay, not really, because the French name for The Fugitive is Albertine disparue (Albertine Gone). So you know that will end well.) My edition lumps these two volumes together, so that means two more volumes to go. I'll be done in 2018, finally. I just can't handle more than one of these a year.

Many reviewers (the ones who like the book, anyway) say that this novel is full of sensuality. Okay, maybe I can see it in some of the descriptions, but to me these moments get drowned under the social climbing, gossiping, and sniping-at-each-other aspects of Proust's society scenes. If you like tempests in a teacup, this is the book for you.

Proust's view of relationships seems pretty bleak: there's not a happy one in the bunch, except maybe for Marcel's parents. The relationships are full of petty jealousy and possessiveness, slights and cruelty, and, okay, moments of passion.  I wonder if this is a Proust thing or a French thing? I've been watching a lot of French movies, and this seems to be a feature in almost all of them.

I did kind of like that infamous etymology lecture bit at the dinner party, but I'm not sure I trust Proust to give us the correct info. Is he just doing it for character building reasons and screwing with us? Yeah, that kind of took the fun out of it for me.

The bit in Balbec where he reminisces about his grandmother was one of my favourite parts. And there wasn't much of Bloch, whose pretentious way of speaking really annoys me, so that's a plus.

What I like about Proust are those gorgeous descriptions and the insightful passages about why people do what they do. There seemed to be less of these in this volume than in the earlier ones. I'm not actually that interested in the intrigues of early 1900s French salons, and I pretty much dislike every character in the book. (Why anyone would want to marry snivelling little mama's boy Marcel is beyond me.)

It is worth noting that Proust himself was gay, so it was quite brave of him to write something like this at the time. That's probably why his descriptions of the liaisons feel real. So this book does show you a version of what it was like to be a gay aristocrat in early 1900s France. It's just not as interesting as it sounds.

So not my favourite volume. And the next two are apparently the hardest ones in the series, because Proust was sick and started losing track of which characters he had killed off. Great. Something to look forward to.

Nova News

I got some good news yesterday. Remember when I wrote about the Nova writing competition? My story, Vedenneito (translates as water nymp, or near enough), made second place! Yay!

You can view the full results here:http://www.tsfs.fi/?toiminta/nova.html

Pixietails!

Does anyone remember Lady LovelyLocks? I used to love that show as a kid, and when I found these at the '80s Toy Shop on Etsy, I couldn't resist. And yes, I'm totally going to wear them in my hair. Why not?

Huudi at the VPK House This Week!

Have you heard of the Petri Ruusunen? He makes awesome custom motorbikes and art with a retrofuturism and steampunk aesthetic, maintains the Huudi Museum, and he also has a jewellers shop on Humalistonkatu, Turku, called KultaSarvi.

This week there's an exhibition of his work at the VPK house in Turku, 3rd to 6th November, open from noon to 8 p.m. Entrance is free.

Ready to get retrofuturistic? Okay, here we go. . .

Just look at this one!

Lovely steampunky contraptions.

Read more at http://petriruusunen.fi

Here's a link to a youtube video of the Huudi museum. The website above looks like it's only in Finnish, but it makes for fascinating reading. Their facebook page is in English, though.