Happy Birthday Percy B Shelley! August 4, 1792

 It's Percy B. Shelley's Birthday today, a day I ALWAYS celebrate. I've been lying in bed this morning, composing in my head a post and tribute to this polymathic genius that I adore and who is my number #1 influence since I was a sixteen year old girl. Of course, I lay there long enough to where the post turned into a small paper, some of it filled with pithy comments on those in his circle. No film has ever captured him correctly. His critics are often foolish and biased, especially those who see him as cruel, sexist, and misogynistic. How absurd. He was a young man, brilliant, and way ahead of his time. A man of our current time. No other Romantic poet is so fitting for the 21st century. It literally breaks my heart that he died before he was 30 years old. I am not one to believe in so called "destiny" but the moment Percy B set foot in Geneva in 1816, a series of events were set in motion that would lead to his drowning in 1822. Lilliputian ties and I can trace them in my mind as I did this morning, lying there in bed. I suppose out of all his circle, I adore Claire Clairmont and Thomas Peacock the most, the rest all deserve my contempt (I even give that grudgingly) and this morning I recounted their sins in my head for hours and that includes Mary Shelley, who out of guilt and desperation, slaved over compiling an edition of his poems until she had a nervous breakdown, one of the many she already had experienced. I pity her. I do. But she was Godwin's true daughter and if you don't know what that means, go read about Godwin. Shelley, himself, made two serious mistakes, and they both concerned his so-called marriages, something he never believed in or held to and it cost him. And he paid the ultimate price. Of the two, Harriet Westbrook is the one that haunted him emotionally. It is easy to see how all that happened, when ones considers Shelley's nasty upbringing with a neglectful mother and sadistic father, where the poet's only emotional respite was the adoration and love of his sisters. This pattern never left his emotional make-up. It ruled him. He was flawed, of course, but he was genuine and warm and generous and good. I feel so blessed to know his work, to understand his life, and to feel his visions. To share those visions. I was one of those women who was a prisoner, too, until his work freed me to see the world very differently, to embrace independent thought and skepticism and live in doubt and uncertainty with the grace that he possessed. What an incredible human being. I am not into mythmaking and I make none of him. I am team Human. He was human. That's enough.

Crimson and Clover - Tommy James & The Shondells

The Walkabouts - The Light Will Stay On

This, always.

"Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." ~ Henry James

Why All Writing Sounds the Same Now — Robert Macfarlane

June 1 = Jane

"And then one fairy night, May became June." — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Of Monsters and Men - Destroyer (Official Lyric Video)

I want to be the king of my body and mind
Gravity let me go
Before it bruises and blackens me and you
Bury me in the glow… Of Monsters and Men.

A dark beauty

"for whatever I don't ask and you don't give me
will be for death that does not leave
even a shadow on trembling flesh."

            — Federico García Lorca

Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909 and was a gardener.

“People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.”

                                     

                                   — Eudora Welty

Spring 2025 April

 Lots of work to do in the garden this season. It rained all last fall, it snowed all January 2025, it rained with tornadoes all March, and I've been under the weather myself. But I have flowers everywhere, some wild like these.

Trying hard.

“Rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything.” — Jack Kerouac

This is my life right now.

"Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement." 

             

                               Albert Camus

Reading Divine Rivals and Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross

 

Reading Divine Rivals and Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross. I promised myself to do a little reviewing and talking about books this year. Mostly I just read a book and keep my thoughts to myself. Sometimes I make comments on Goodreads. But they are personal. I wanted to do a bit more this time around. So, I am going to create new labels for 2025 reading and comments. Been really thinking about how much time has passed since 2015. I don't think I really became fully engaged with social media until 2019. I sort of phoned it in. I was not here. First thing to note on these books...they have absolutely stunning covers. Rebecca Ross did some stunning writing, too. More on that in forthcoming posts. A note. I bought the audibles and I am reading and making notes at the same time. It's all good.

Writing Fantasy

"Genre has great trappings, no doubt about it. We’ve got dragons and space ships and murders and kissing, and the skilled creation of great trappings is an essential part of writing genre, and an awesome part, but I don’t think it’s the heart of it. The test of a genre book is in the purity and potency with which these elemental harp strings are played. Underneath your dragons and space ships and murders and kissing, you’d better be connecting to these primal human cravings." 

              — Laini Taylor

Patricia McKillip, a major influence

“The idea of fairyland fascinates me because it's one of those things, like mermaids and dragons, that doesn't really exist, but everyone knows about it anyway. Fairyland lies only in the eye of the beholder who is usually a fabricator of fantasy. So what good is it, this enchanted, fickle land which in some tales bodes little good to humans and, in others, is the land of peace and perpetual summer where everyone longs to be? Perhaps it's just a glimpse of our deepest wishes and greatest fears, the farthest boundaries of our imaginations. We go there because we can; we come back because we must. What we see there becomes our tales.”
― Patricia A. McKillip

Why I write stories with fantasy in them.

“At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries. Fantasy changes with the changing times, and yet it is still the oldest kind of tale in the world, for it began once upon a time, and we haven't heard the end of it yet.”
― Patricia A. McKillip

t

I Know.

“Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion...”

― Victoria Finlay

(If you had only one try, one story, and that was it, what would it be?)

Writing 2025

 

So I am able, after 15 days, to talk about my future plans. This year, I am going to continue writing and finish my current project known as #BeeFlyCrow. After numerous starts and stops, I've finally finished a detailed outline and proposal for what I am doing and chosen not only what I want to tell, but how. Stylistically I am moving into new territory. I also saw this image posted by Zoe on Facebook last year and snatched it up, because I had read all the books besides Fourth Wing, which I am now reading. But I began to understand how to focus my work by rereading the discussion that went with this image. I am writing a Fantasy plotted book with Romance Vibes, what some people might call a pastoral fantasy with a scattering of action scenes. It is plot intensive like Uprooted by Naomi Novik, written in the third person present tense of The Once and Future Witches, and has the fairy tale feeling of The Night Circus. Romance is not the plot, but its vibe definitely is. It's my tribute to Victorian and Portal fantasy. It will be finished in 2025. That is the promise I gave myself last November when I chose a new MMC and a new way of telling the story. I would never have suspected a few years ago that I would write anything in present tense. It's almost ironic. I did have help in making these decisions.

In order this make this dream come true, I have had to make some hard decisions on how I spend my time and what I give my attention to, because I need space to create and think. I cannot do all things. So I have reduced my social media time, my TV time, and yes, the time I give to people and other interest. Self care is needed to do this work, which requires a lot of emotional and physical capital. I had to break some stubborn habits. This post and others on social media today all bring together my desire to make real change. Later...

Dream on.....

“Wildflower; pick up your pretty little head,

It will get easier, your dreams are not dead.”

― Nikki Rowe

Besides Hoping for Peace and Good Health

"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible"

— Richard Feynman

#2025Resolution

Happy New Year to All!

2025 is here

“I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.”

              — Stephen Fry

P.S. (Purity is overrated, the rest is great)