Personal

Inspiration

8 September 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting in my sunny garden, drinking coffee. Organ music echoes through the neighbourhood and black smoke rises from the old steam mill’s chimney. It’s Open Monuments Day in the village.

My five year old loves music. He asks me if I’ll take him to the church. He wants to listen to the organist. We get dressed and head around the corner.

As we sit there, the sun uses the stained glass windows to paint the walls in all the colours of the rainbow. A group of elderly people sit there, some with their eyes closed, enjoying the organ sound as it fills the space. And I’m looking at them. Wondering what’s on their mind. What they have gone through. What their life has been like. Ups and downs, happiness and sorrow. Different times. Times that I will never know. They are approaching the end, but they have experienced things I never will.

And I thought of a scene in Under the Black Sand, where the protagonist walks into a church. Suicidal, as all seems to be lost. And I saw the scene in a new and different light. I saw a way to make it engaging, colourful.

Inspiration is everywhere. We just need to get out the door and open our eyes.

Keep Writing

3 September 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

I have no time to write. I have just finished a nine-day working week and I’m tired. The attic needs attention before the workers come in next week. The kid needed to go to school. Maybe I should give up this novel-writing nonsense. Who am I anyway? Who am I kidding?

Kiddo was out the door at eight. If I go upstairs with my hammer and nails at ten, I’ll still have all day. That leaves two hours to write. Two hours that just ended, but I did manage to polish and fix a whole chapter. Instead of going upstairs, grumpy that life is playing me and stealing my opportunities, I now take that hammer in hand, knowing that the writer in me has been satisfied. I am that bit closer to the goal of finishing the novel.

So, no matter how life plays us, we can always write. It is not about having time, because we never do. Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans. It is about making time. It’s about grabbing the little pockets of opportunities and making the most of them. Watch less TV, don’t let that mini-game on your smartphone eat up your spare time. Make the most of whatever time you find.

A clique, a well known and worn truth, but we sometimes need to remind ourselves of the simple things we already know.

Thank You!

23 July 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

My novel isn’t quite finished yet. In fact, I don’t think any work of art is ever “finished”. It gets abandoned when the creator has had enough, has other ideas pushing for attention and deems that the current one is good enough. Under The Black Sand isn’t quite there yet. Give it a few weeks, a month, and I will happily abandon this story and send it off on its journey.

Under the Black Sand test copies

Most debut novels are years in the making. After a few false starts, endless rewrites and self-doubt, they finally emerge. This one is no different.

I think my first attempt at novel writing was Life Is A Bitch, which I started writing in 1996. It was as bad as the title suggests. It mutated into Plastic and could have become something, but it wasn’t to be. Then it became The Box. Vastly different from the first version, but still it didn’t rock my boat enough to finish it.
Fast-forward to 2005. I wrote a script for a short film, The Small Hours. It was the first thing I’d written that became something more than bytes on a hard drive. After film school, I wrote and shot another short, Black Sand. The idea was born after watching Mulholland Drive by David Lynch. Not that it bares any resemblance, but the film ignited a spark when combined with a real-life event from years earlier.

I got in touch with my favorite novelist, William Kowalski. He read the screenplay, came up with a few suggestions and I implemented some of them. The short wasn’t the correct format for the story. It was too big, too complicated. I wrote a feature length screenplay based on the short, but by the time it was completed, the world economy had collapsed and nobody had money for me. And so I followed the advice of a friend and fellow filmmaker, Hjálmar Einarsson. I adapted the screenplay into a novel.

It all seems fairly straightforward, but if anyone ever got to read the first drafts, they would’t recognise the story. There is also the small matter of being demotivated. When you have 60.000 words in a document, things start to blur. I had no idea how far I was, where the story was and how to move forward. I was copy/pasting dialogue from the screenplay and it was all turning very uninspiring.

Until I came across Scrivener. It is a word processor for writers. I imported my scribblings into the program, split it into chapters and I saw the light again. I had already written eleven out of thirteen chapters. I saw where the different parts of the story were located, how some parts were too short and some dragged on. Scrivener took me by the hand and helped me finish the novel.

There are no shortcuts. I had to come up with the story myself, I had to write it myself and I will have to push it myself once it’s “done”. But I doubt that I would have been able to finish it without the help, feedback and support of countless people around me. Thank you to all that helped, inspired and supported the effort, those that I did and didn’t mention here.

This post, originally from 23 July 2012, was recreated on 6 January 2016, after my site got deleted as explained here.

Opening Doors

18 July 2012 by villia 1 Comment

When faced with a hard decision a few months ago, a good friend told me I was opening doors and that could only be fun. She was right, but I listened to the nay-sayers that said I didn’t have what it took. What was I thinking? I had no place in that world! I had a life, a family to take care of. I should be old enough to know my place. I had said that I would start with volunteering and only get paid if I got elected. Volunteering? At your age? That is crazy talk. If you were eighteen… as if age has anything to do with passion. As if making money was the only measurement of success.

And what if I didn’t get elected? They believe that would be failing, while I saw it as an experience either way. But it is easy to do nothing, and so I am still here. That door may have closed or it may still be open, but other doors have opened up. They always do. Thing is, we are never out of options. There are always choices and it’s up to us to grab our chances.

So, I didn’t go into politics. For better or worse. I did finish my debut novel though. More or less. There are still a few rough edges, but that is because I want it to be perfect. Not because there is anything wrong with it. The doors to a political career opened up briefly, I peeked through them and was intrigued, but untimely didn’t dare to take the leap. But the door to a writing career may still be open. It will probably remain open as long as I can write, and feel like doing a whole lot of it.

I have held out two blogs up to now. Both in Icelandic. Both more focused on politics and current affairs than on anything I was doing. While it is necessary to comment on what is wrong with the world, and I did have a lot of readers at one point, I feel that I must communicate what’s in the heart. Head is full of ideas, but they all come from the heart to begin with. This blog will be rough, unpolished, unapologetic and naive.

You will be able to follow the progress of the novel and my general thoughts and ideas as they are born. Because, like the Pirate Parties that are popping up everywhere show, the times they are a changing. No information is witheld. We say what we think and share ideas of how we want the world to be. I may post ideas for new stories or twists and I may continue rambling on about how the world needs to get a grip.

This door to my mind is open. Welcome. I hope we’ll learn something together.