muse-inspired thinking on the road through barren black fields of lava rolling hills of yellowed grass rainforests crawling up steep cliffs i open the window and let the wind brush my skin the camera ready i put my feet up and smile all the way from the warmth of the valley of the kings to the icy winds on sky father’s mountain and think up new adventures
Tagged: Big Island, boreas, hawaii, Valley of the Kings, Waipi'o Valley
Four weeks on the road and I moved from San Francisco to Hawaii, not just to write but also to research the third book of the Boreas series, and more specifically Wayfinding or Polynesian navigation, finding your way without instruments, like compasses, maps, or GPS but solely on what you see around you, the stars, the rising and setting of moon and sun, the ocean swells and how waves lap against the hull of your ship, the currents, the winds, the direction birds fly. There’s several ways you can research stories. One is sitting at your laptop and surfing the Internet. You can also go out and meet people, pick their brains, hear their stories, learn about their lives. Obviously, the latter one will most likely…
Tagged: #amwriting, boreas, Flypside, hawaii, here be dragons, Polynesian navigation, research, Shy, Wayfinding
So… method writing. A friend forwarded me a link to the BBC article: “Could ‘method writing’ be the future for novelists?” The article reports of the author Hodgkinson who launched his Method Writers project, for which he invites other authors to try techniques similar to method acting to find out if that works for their writing too. Similar to Lee Strasberg’s method acting, in method writing the author would immerse himself in his character’s life by using his own memories of emotions and sensations to identify with his characters. Is that a novelty? From Strasberg’s website: “Strasberg meant that what is called “Method Acting” is nothing new, but rather as old as Western Civilization itself. For centuries, cultures used different words and phrases to describe “good” acting:…
Tagged: #amwriting, bbc, boreas, Haleakala, Maui, memories, method acting, method writing, YA
Last year has been a bit of a self-inflicted overload, work-wise, and after summer I realized that I had no brain space or energy left for what I love doing most: writing. Spurred on by my best friend Sieneke, I mapped out jobs, tasks, responsibilities, assignments, school visits, teaching gigs, mentoring projects and whatnot. On my page – or my three pages – appeared a staggering number of commitments. No wonder my brain refused to engage in new writing projects. It had already way too much to process. I knew that if I wanted to go back to writing I had to whip my stubborn self into change. Luckily, it turns out I can be pretty persuasive with the whip. I shelved all my commitments until further notice, and…
What’s on my mind Facebook wants to know. That’s an easy one: books are what’s on my mind and one in particular. Next month my Dutch middle grade adventure novel will hit the shelves. And this is what it will look like: Action and adventure at sea! The story? 12-year-old Boreas is convinced his parents are getting divorced. They’ve been acting weird, lately. Secretive. When they, at last, tell him what’s going on it’s not a divorce but something else and it will uproot Boreas’ life just as much: the family is going on a three-year, round-the-world trip on their sailing boat. Everything’s arranged, up till the final details like enrolling Boreas into a distance learning school. At first, Boreas hates it. He misses his…
Tagged: Adventure, boreas, middle grade, Mina Witteman, Ploegsma, refugee, seven seas, tractor race
Mina Witteman 