starfishstar

I spent all summer traveling – to Germany, briefly to Belgium, to Iceland. Now that I'm looking back on it, I realize even more how unbelievably, stunningly lucky I feel to have been able to do that. (I mean, I was able to do it because I work at a school and have the summer off, so it's not that weird. But still!) I'll try to share a few pictures, whenever I finally find time to organize allll of a summer's worth of photos.

Okay, actually, here's one to start with... I walked past this view every day for three weeks, up in the West Fjords of Iceland:




The only unfortunate thing about this whole amazing, beautiful, stunning summer? I barely wrote at all. I'm still between writing projects, and it still feels deeply weird. (I posted the final chapter of "Raise Your Lantern High" just days before I left the US in June, and haven't posted anything but a tiny fic translation since then.)

I did manage to get about halfway through the first draft of a small follow-up story to "Lantern" early in the summer, but I keep trying to pick that back up now and finish it, and I just can't seem to get inspired. Even the process of writing feels unfamiliar – I've fallen out of the habit of it, while focusing so hard on other things (language course, music, etc.)

So:

• Does anyone who's in HP fandom feel like bouncing around ideas with me? Specifically about an 11-year-old soon-to-be-Hogwarts-student's first experience of Diagon Alley, a la Harry's first visit there in the first book, but with a very different backstory.

• Anyone have a go-to place for getting prompts and inspiration? (I do have a few pages bookmarked, I should browse through them.) I basically need to remember how to write anything at all, and a short fic off a prompt (not a daunting story that I've been working on forever and feel a lot of pressure to get right) might be just the thing.

• Or I should sign up for a fest or two. Maybe I'll do Holmestice again? Or dare to join Yuletide for the first time? (There's also maybe maybe maybe going to be a revival of hp_holidaygen, which is very exciting!!)


I've also been thinking.... I want to do NaNoWriMo this year.

Every year, there's some reason why that's not a good year for it. (Like, you know, the year I was packing up eight years' worth of life and moving internationally...) This year, too, is probably not quite the right one, given that I've earmarked this fall for "figuring out what I'm doing with my life professionally, and whether I'm applying to grad schools, and if so, applying to them." But there's never going to be a perfect year with nothing else going on. And I'm in a stable work/apartment/etc. situation for once, and I even have a local friend who wants to do NaNo too. So......?

huldrejenta, I thought of you when I saw this in the library of a tiny town in northern Iceland today!



For all the rest of you, here are a few more favorites in Icelandic ("The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" by J. K. Rowling and "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien – which delightfully becomes "Hobbitinn," because in Icelandic, the definite article comes at the end). YA fantasy favorites in obscure Germanic/Scandinavian languages I can almost understand? I'm in heaven!