Brittany Maresh

writer

Wrock (Wizard rock) has been one of my favorite genres of music for a while now. It’s nerdy, upbeat, and just fun. I love how positive the fan community in Harry Potter is, and wrock is an auditory version of that.

That being said, here are my top ten wrock songs, in no particular order, limited to one song per artist:
1. Sly in House of Slytherin by Swish and Flick
2. Slytherins Don’t Dance, by The Remus Lupins
3. I Believe in Nargles by The Whomping Willows
4. End of an Era by Oliver Boyd and the Rememberalls
5. I’m Going to Hogwarts by Lauren Fairweather
6. Alone by The Butterbeer Experience
7. This Isn’t Hogwarts by Hank Green
8. Lovegood by Ministry of Magic
9. Potions Yesterday by Draco and the Malfoys
10. Save Ginny Weasley from Dean Thomas by Harry and the Potters

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Ask me in five minutes and it’ll be a completely different list, though.

Michael and I decided to make cookies for valentines.  Because he’s five, and I really liked my new cookie cutters, and we figured our mom might like them.

See? Dinosaurs. They correspond with each of the characters in Land Before Time — Ducky, Spike, Petri, Little Foot, Cera, and even the antagonist, the Sharp Tooth.

Curse your sudden but inevitable…

Nope, laughing too hard to say it.  I pity the person who was on webcam with me.

Mixing colors, because food coloring does not come in enough colors.

This is before I broke out the jellybeans, gumdrops, and other silliness. Also, before the five-year-old got too involved in the process.

I couldn’t find our cake baking kits for playing with the frosting.  I’m not sure if they went home with my sister for Valentines stuff, or if they got moved downstairs with the Christmas stuff back in December.

Not a bad way to spend my first day back in AK.

And Happy Valentines Day!

Everyone has someone in their life who doesn’t believe in them. That person who is negative, and nasty, and is always going to put you down. Tell you you’re worthless. That you can’t do anything. That you’re a waste of space, and nobody cares about you. Maybe it’s someone in your group of friends, who for some reason just doesn’t like you. Maybe it’s someone you know at school, that you don’t really like. Maybe it’s someone in your family.

For your sake, I hope it’s someone you don’t have to see too often.

For a long time, that person in my life wasn’t just a little negative. They belittle me. Call me names. Tell me I will never be good at anything but sitting in my room alone, playing with myself.

In their opinion, people on the internet aren’t real, whether they’re those people you hang out with all day Saturday, or your sister halfway across the nation going to college, or those nerdy friends you visit once a year because you all live so far apart. This individual has said that everything that has to do with the computer is just playing games, that my writing is a joke, and that every dream and goal I have is pointless, because I am worthless, useless, and will never be any good.

Nothing I do is important. Nothing I do matters. I’m too fat, too ugly, too stupid. I don’t deserve to live.

It took me a long time to realize that this person was abusive. Emotionally, but also physically threatening, at times. They’re bigger than me, older, and trained in combat, albeit a long time ago. It’s a person who has killed people in the past – as part of the military, where it was their job, all on the up-and-up – and has told me more than once that they could kill me, and nobody would ever know they’d done it.

They’re negative as it gets, and though they’ve never hit me, I’m pretty sure if they were a little bigger, a little younger, a little stronger? They would. It’s the way they come at you, arms wide, trying to make you shrink away. To back down.

But y’know what?

There are so many people who believe in me. Who understand me, and like me. It took me so long to find them – years and years, where I felt like maybe I would go insane, trying to manage everything myself, and keep it all in without exploding. I felt like I’d always be alone, a lot, like everyone was just waiting to stab a dagger in my back, to prove that I was wrong for having trusted them, or liked them.

But I did find them. And I do have them.

And y’know what else?

They believe in me, and I believe in me, and I don’t care what one negative person has to say. Or even a hundred negative people.

I’m going to be a novelist.  To hell with the nay-sayers.

So my friend Jean Tatro introduced me to this one week one submission thing, for 2011.  It’s a sort of Ray Bradbury inspired challenge, from what I gather, on a monthly ( 12 / 12 for the year) or a weekly (52/52 for the year) basis. We’re of the adventurous sort, so we’ve been sincerely thinking about this.

I think I’ll try it.  I’ve never been the queen of short stories, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to work on more.  And hey, anything that gets writers submitting their work, finishing their work, and trying to learn more about writing, trying to improve?  To me, that’s a good thing.

I’ve been thinking about writing a book in Alaska, about Alaskans, but not Alaskana — a ghost story that just happens to be set here.  Someone I trust and adore dearly was thrown by a character name that to me is just a normal sort of name. It occurred to me that I was wrong, but in Alaska it wasn’t weird.  So, I thought, what if I wrote a story about Alaska, where such things are normal?

I can honestly say I’ve never done that before.

-Brittany Maresh

While Soul Eater is an anime/manga, and has visualizations it can use to create the amazing world it works within, the writing behind the characters is what really tips it the realm of awesome. Everyone in the world has motivation – and all at different degrees, and for different things.  It ranges from “do as little work as possible” to “escape from the mad clutches of fear,” or even, “resist my own inner urge to dissect things.”
Maka is the main character, a girl intent on becoming better — the best, even. She’s out to get stronger to best her cheating father by making her partner even better than her father ever was. She’s bookish, and loses focus at times, but she always works towards that goal, in the end. It moves her—and the plot—smoothly forward.  Her father’s really earned her wrath, and it motivates her through the whole story.
Her partner, Soul, is intent on being the best, to escape the shadow of a more talented older sibling. He’s also out to protect Maka. He wants to be better for a dozen destructive reasons, and worries at the same time about being cool – and by cool, he doesn’t just mean popular. He’s internalized this ideal, and he’s trying to live up to it.
Their friend Death the Kid is all about balance, symmetry. He’s taken OCD to a comical level, and made it a part of his divinity. He doesn’t want to be a slacker-god, and thinks not being perfect and symmetrical will work against him. He’s got goals – beyond being perfect – but that one really gets in the way of all the others.
Every character has something that pushes them through each day. While that’s not realistic, necessarily, it does make the story more engaging. And really, who wants to read a story about people who don’t want to accomplish anything?

Dream big – even if it’s only on paper.

Also, the laptop is back, and as good as ever. Thank you, Dell, for that.

Brittany Maresh

I love stories, so it should be no surprise to anyone that instead of watching the lengthy anime Soul Eater over the course of a few weeks or months, I devoured it greedily in one weekend (in between writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month and obsessively listening to Darren Criss’s renditions of Teenage Dream and Hey, Soul Sister) with my older brother.

I’d like to say our witty commentary was startling accurate and shockingly in tune with the story, but it wasn’t. Plot threads were dropped, story was hastily wrapped up, it was a mess at the end (though fun — watch it, because it made me happy).

In short, it suffered from something the show’s older brother Full Metal Alchemist also was afflicted with — surpassed-the-manga-itis.

Here’s hoping their future siblings are able to avoid this particular disorder, because it really takes away from my desire to talk about the characterization (which is awesome, and deserving of a post in the future, when I’m not on a borrowed laptop).

Oh yes, my laptop. Is back in Texas being repaired. Again. I love my Dell. Love it like something that I love a lot. But this particular one has to be under a voodoo hex of some sort, the way it’s had things going lately.

I’ll be back with a real post regarding the characters, stereotypes, flaws, and dynamic versus static (which seems to be gnawing at my pretty little brain lately).

-Brittany Maresh

When I was little, I was so excited about Thanksgiving Dinner. I loved it — everyone gathered around, we all talked, the whole family was there, and we had all my favorite foods, including home made pie and whipped cream from a can. Before that, we watched the parade on TV and feasted on orange danishes. We watched the dog show, after, and everyone was together, and laughing, and really happy.

Now, I see another side to Thanksgiving: the hours spent in the kitchen, the frustration of overcooking something, of having to wait for one thing to make another, of having to do endless dishes because really, who has twelve mixing bowls? It’s about trying to find room for sixteen people around a table designed for six, and a lot more frustration in trying not to hurt anyone’s feelings.

For me, the night before Thanksgiving is a lot better, now. I watch movies with my family while pies bake, we discuss what we’re thankful for, we have a different sort of fun.  This year, my mom made four pies completely from scratch: two pumpkin, two apple. She made a fifth, cherry, but the filling for that came in a can.

Tonight, my brother and I were watching Doctor Who, the New Adventures, season four finale. There was this quiet moment where the character had to decide how much he was willing to give up to get what he wanted, and my brother pointed out that those were the moments that Russell T. Davies and Joss Whedon were so famous for. There’s this moment where sacrifice has to be made, where the character has to give as much as he’s willing, in order to get what he wants.

It’s heartbreaking, and beautifully done, and something a lot of writers just don’t have the skill to pull off.  Some of my favorite books work because the author is able to push the main character into that crisis moment, and find a resolution that involves a high sacrifice, and a higher pay-off.

In television, Whedon and Davies are the two writers I see that insane mastery from the most (and that’s a good thing — if more writers played on that balance, I’d watch way too much television).  They’re a lot better than I am, better than I hope to be.  In books, I can name a good half-dozen examples, including masters like King, and this year’s most inspiring (to me) new author, Seanan McGuire.

I’m pretty sure the apparently instinctive awareness of that balance is something I’ll always admire, and something I’ll always struggle to work towards, myself.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be good enough to get it right, even most of the time, but it’s something I try to look out for in my own work and something I try to remember to comment on when I’m doing critique work for other people.

I was really glad my brother pointed it out — having something to keep striving for, and writers who keep inspiring me, is something that I am thankful for.  I really hope that some day my own work can make people want to be better, too, and I’m thankful for the chance to try and achieve that goal, too.

But mostly, I suppose, I’m thankful for the quiet moments with my family before the insanity of all the baking starts in the morning.

Much love and a happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Sincerely,

Brittany Maresh

P.S. It’s 1:00 a.m.  I’ll try to remember to edit this for coherency and grammar and what not later, but I make no promises.

It was pretty, and I was glad I attended. I am glad to say there was more laughter than tears, and that everyone looked so lovely.
I know it’s silly, and that the words are so vague as to be useless. Just now, I can’t find it in me to care.

Amy, Mandi, the world to you, and my heart as well.

-Bri

One of my dearest friends is getting married in a few days, and it really hasn’t sunk in yet. I know she’s happy and in a committed relationship, but sometimes I think of her as this singular unit, not part of a set.
In fact, I always think of her as a singular unit, and not a set.
It’s not that she’s not mad in love—because as far as anyone can tell, she’s mad in love. And it’s not that the other girl isn’t amazing, and a huge reminder daily that the world isn’t full of lousy people. She is.
I think—suspect—that it comes from my own inability to escape the egocentric universe wherein writers are gods, and anyone who is not a writer is somehow something other, something different and in some cases, less. Writers, actors, artists, they all have this reality that they exist in that extends so much beyond that of everyone else. It’s looking at everything in your life and asking, “why?”
My friend is getting married in a few days.
And as a writer, I find myself looking at all the whys of it.
And the best one I have – because in a world that is both dangerous and amazing, both lonely and comforting, it truly is the best question anyone can ask about anything – I find myself asking “why not?”
Anything is possible, even true love and happy endings.
And that, my friends, is a happy thought capable of taking you past the third star on the right and straight on ‘till morning.

I like to go on adventures, when I can get away with it.  This year,  I’m taking two, all in two weeks.

I’m going to Boston, for a wedding.  Also, to see people I miss greatly.

And then I’m going to Florida, for Infinitus 2010.  It’s a whim. I haven’t had a summer in so long, and my boss okayed it.  I wanted to bring a friend, but car trouble means I’m going it solo.

It’s far into uncharted waters for me. This is probably the single most frightening thing I’ve ever done.

But I think it will be a lot of fun.

-Brittany Maresh