Egzod & Maestro Chives - Royalty (Lyrics) ft. Neoni

Of Monsters and Men - Human (Official Lyric Video)

Crimson and Clover - Tommy James & The Shondells

The Walkabouts - The Light Will Stay On

This song inspired the core idea of the novel but is not on the soundtrack. But it is very much a song I am grateful for because all my thinking of this story began here. It was over a decade ago, I think around 2011. Of course life often interferes with art and the years between 2011 and 2022 were reserved for loss, pain, therapy, and finding a life again. The story I am finishing is not the story I began, but the core ideas where I sat down and began writing was in Nano 2015. I didn't have much of a draft and it took me months in 2016 to finish something that was merely an idea that was eventually used in a much different story. I believe stories are like this, they are created, then evolve in the womb where they are fed, thriving over months or even years as we write new drafts and discard them over and over, maybe due to boredom or because we are transformed ourselves by what life can become and what life can do to us. We are not the writers we were previously. This is what happened to me. All those years of loss and anxiety and pain, of learning to be a decent human being again, to build a new life in what was strangely becoming an unstable world. In 2021, I was barely human after Covid and there was more loss. I had lived along for an entire year, too, rarely seeing the face of my own children. I was a widow not knowing what I should do with myself. I was always working a little on this story, but by 2023, I had a very different book. In 2024, I wrote a draft that needed a lot of work. It was much too big, too full of plot, too full of everything. In 2025, I almost lost my vision and I could not write at all until the summer months. And that is where I am now, starting work again. I either give up or start again. I am not known for giving up and if the fates are kind, I will see this story published. Failures have taught me a lot. Loss has taught me a lot. I am a better writer now. (Dated October 4, 2025.)

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.

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

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

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?)

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)