July WIP Day 1

 

Due to life, (laughing) I am behind schedule on the WIP and will have to work all July to catch up with work. Work. Work. Work. So the other day, I decided to make a schedule of what needed to be done first. I can't believe this year. I was writing so well, until the middle of March and since then I have been ill every month with something different, the last being bitten by some unknown insect while gardening (ants are suspected) and I've had serious hives and rashes since June 12th. It's hard to accept that this happened, but I still am taking medication for persistent hives right now. Now I have to get back on track. I started last Friday, looking and reading the work and making decisions on what I needed to do and in what order. I feel shaky coming back into this 2023 Nano Project but better late than never. I've hardly written a word for three months. Scary. I just want to make this note on the blog, because it's an important day for me. Making a renewed commitment to the work.

Gothic Vampire

But there are yellow bruises on my body

And violet stains

Though no white vampire came with lips

blood-crimsoned

To suck my veins!

— Théophile Gautier

This is what many on both sides have done.

“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” ― George Orwell

My swamp Rose Mallow this very hot June morning.

 

Rose Mallow (swamp)

This is true for me.

The author & naturalist Andrea Barrett once said: ''I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. Different experiences in our lives may enforce or ameliorate that, but I think if they ameliorate it totally, we stop writing. You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world. We write about the world because it doesn’t make sense to us. Through writing, maybe we can penetrate it, elucidate it, somehow make it comprehensible. If I had ever found the place where I was perfectly at home, who knows what I would have done? Maybe I would have been a biologist after all.''

(Terri Windling posted this on her Facebook)

The toddler in June

 

Another June, long ago. 

I haven't changed much and yet, I am someone else other than this child while retaining the child.

My brother was several years older than me so our lives were very different in many ways.

I love summer. I love the heat. It started here, in the delta of Mississippi. 

“One night you will ask me for something I cannot give.” 

          ― Gavriel 

              from Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Iris Murdoch on how she composes.

IRIS MURDOCH on how she composes.

"Well, I think it is important to make a detailed plan before you write the first sentence. Some people think one should write, George woke up and knew that something terrible had happened yesterday, and then see what happens. I plan the whole thing in detail before I begin. I have a general scheme and lots of notes. Every chapter is planned. Every conversation is planned. This is, of course, a primary stage, and very frightening because you’ve committed yourself at this point. I mean, a novel is a long job, and if you get it wrong at the start you’re going to be very unhappy later on. The second stage is that one should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself. One piece of imagination leads to another. You think about a certain situation and then some quite extraordinary aspect of it suddenly appears. The deep things that the work is about declare themselves and connect. Somehow things fly together and generate other things, and characters invent other characters, as if they were all doing it themselves. One should be patient and extend this period as far as possible. Of course, actually writing it involves a different kind of imagination and work."

(This is how I work. No one ever said it better. Right now I am sitting quietly and letting it invent itself.)

June 1 2024

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

        P.S. This year is a very important birthday, for lots of reasons, not about numbers, but desires and goals. However, the number is symbolic and my ambitions have been rearranged, and many of my feelings changed. It was indeed a fairy night and all the nights to come will be fairy nights, too.

I miss Graham Joyce

“Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.”
          ― Graham Joyce

Wood Speedwell, Veronica (lilac colored)

 

Wood Speedwell, Veronica family, lilac

wildflower

This is one of my favorite wildflowers. I adore this bloom. The color, everything. I've seen it before in my Twitter feed. I stole it. Laughing.

Lion confronting a dragon, 1505, by Domenico Beccafumi of Siena.

 

       Lion confronting a dragon, 1505, by Domenico Beccafumi of Siena.

Revisions Part 2

 

Image is of Lewis Carroll's revisions.

It's May 12, and I have not really completed any revisions. I was ill much of April (better now) and spent the time examining content. In other words, I became my own editor and I decided I would probably end up rewriting everything I had written. Laughing. But that is how it goes sometimes. Some scenes I will keep most of what I have written in dialogue and things like that. I have made some major changes in content. I felt the book had too much plot, especially along two subplots and I wanted to focus these threads and tighten the manuscript. So my manuscript on paper looks a lot like Lewis Carroll's and became smaller, which is a good thing. My reader was so disappointed he did not get to read, but he knows me and I gave him the usual talk on "why read something that is going to be gone soon?"

Needless to say, I moved some scenes, all this happens around the last third of the book and the first third, the last third being a mess and the first third being deleted completely. 

People around me weep when this happens. But I never do. It's hard, but I do know when something needs to be rewritten. Revisions are really about rewriting. No, let me brutally honest—writing a novel is 85% rewriting, at least. And that is where I am at now. I love this part. Smiling. I do. I see the book for what it can really be now. Its potential. Its purpose. Its plot, its themes, and the characters are developing into the people they need to be. It's a beautiful moment, but it's so much work. Writing is so much work. But this is a good place to be. I am sighing. I can see the book I want. I can see my vision. We, as writers, never fully write our visions perfectly, but we try to get as close as we can to what we wanted in those early days.

And so now I just keep doing the work. I show up. I write and write. I stay in the story.

Staying in the story is the key thing here. Because it's such a messy process, I work to organize all the time. It helps. I am so tired right now. So very, very tired.

SYML - Where's My Love (Acoustic)

Attempting to add all songs from the updated playlist. As of this date, May 11, I have not updated the list on the blog, deleting songs I no longer use. I am going to talk how I use music when writing. It's plot centric, a device I used long, long ago and have decided to continue with this novel. In other words, I can look at my song list and see nearly every scene in the book. A person who does not know the plot will not be able to see it. But my lone reader can and also my friends who have followed me as I work. This allows me to stay in my story, but there are also other many benefits for me as a writer when working on such a complex story.

Happy May Day, 2024

 Ballerina rose.

Can we forget?

To want to forget something is to think of it

— French proverb

Revision and Rewriting

"During periods of frustration and hold-up you must think of yourself as Edmond Dantès during his dungeon phase."

Bernard T. Joy, Twitter

Faulkner and Modernist scholar

Revision and Rewriting the WIP

I don't know what I am doing. This is not the book I want to write anymore. It has changed in my mind or perhaps I have changed. See Nano 2024. Because that is when I found the story.

The Dragon Slayer

The Dragon Slayer by Franz von Stuck, 1913

A Love Poem

“She was a beautiful dreamer. The kind of girl, who kept her head in the clouds, loved above the stars and left regret beneath the earth she walked on.”
                                               — Robert M Drake

Of Monsters and Men - Wild Roses (Official Lyric Video)

I will be the gladdest thing
    Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
    And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
    With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
    And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
    Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
    And then start down!  — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love feels small in stormy weather.

“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
                   

                                    ― Siri Hustvedt

Loving your work is a joy.

“Do anything, but let it produce joy."

— Walt Whitman

Love. Love. Love. Longing.

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call saudade, an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world.

                                —  Nick Cave 

Love. Love. Love.

“It’s all messy: the hair, the bed, the words, the heart. Life” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love. Love. Love.

Things I Love. A night sky dotted with millions of stars Writing with a fountain pen on 100% cotton paper Tea with some sugar Warm breezes The sound of a bee buzzing on my flowers Books Flowers My lost boy.

Love. Love. Love.

I believe that love is the only balance to death and the only antidote to ego. I believe that kissing a woman with your tongue, as good as it is, is better when you are also making love to her with your penis. I believe that sex and love, when they come together, become the strongest human force on the face of the earth. Directly flouted, they become violence, wars; sublimated, they become art; acknowledged and lived, they become happiness.”

— Sebastien de Saint Vallier, Dance, Judy Cuevas

Forbidden Love

"The idea of a connection so irresistible that you’ll defy everything to be together? It’s the ultimate swoon. Part of what I find so alluring about it is the idea of seeing someone, really seeing them and being seen in return, cuts through layers of bigotry, hatred, and social conditioning."

                 — Laini Taylor on Forbidden Love

Love Among the Fauna

"Some days I am yellow and warm-hearted, living in tune to place and people, eyes opened, soul stirring, skin pricked, attached to nothing and everything." — MJ

(Personal Note: Today it's Spring and I am so grateful. Winters are always unkind to me. I do not like the cold and as I have aged, I like it less and less. Mentally, I sink under the weight of a gray sky and frosty temps that chill me to my bones. I can't ever get warm, never fully relaxed, and to distract myself, I usually over read or write until I can no longer see straight. I tried not to do that this year. But there were days of failures. I also tend to get a little gloomy and worry over my work and this year I exiled myself from my writing desk around the middle of February. I just could not go on any longer and knew it was destructive. This week I began again. I did allow myself to make notes. But only by handwriting. The only writing I allowed myself was free writing that would not be used in the WIP Fantasy. This decreased the tension I was experiencing, a success story if there ever was one. I learned this from writer Laini Taylor who talks a lot about process, free writing that is not used, day dreaming, keeping notebooks, and learning to love how you work on a novel. Working on a novel for me is extremely messy. I don't simply do all these drafts people talk about. I do things as I go. I write a chapter or section of the book until I feel it is something I might keep, until I like it, then I move on. This latest project has been more complex. I changed ships (who is the hero and love interest subplot) on my novel in December and then in January, I decided I wanted to write it in a new tense and use lots of vignettes. This meant I would literally have to revise the entire novel at some point. The decision to do this was so complicated, so resisted even by me that I wrote little in January and wondered if I had lost my mind. Part of my reasoning for this is a long story and I shall explain one day, but not today. I am motivated. It's spring. The sun is shining, flowers are budding and some are about to bloom. I can't complain. I made it through another winter. I survived and I am still in love with my story.)

Love. Love. Love. Fauna.

Violet : Introverted, profoundly introspective. It doesn’t hide itself, as some would say, out of modesty. It hides in order to understand its own secret. Its scent is a glory but demands that we go in search of it: its scent says what cannot be said. A bunch of violets means, Love others as you love yourself.

                  — Clarice Lispector

                        Fauna

Love with an Owl aka A Fairy Tale about Love.

 

This drawing is by Mary Jane Begin from a character in Terri Windling's The Wood Wife. Owl Boy.

It's a haunting image to me and when I saw it, I had to post, because I too, have an Owl creature which I wrote a fairy tale about a few years ago. The Owl King is my own creation, not really inspired by Terri's work though Terri and I love transformations in fairy stories or wonder tales. Terri herself is the inspiration, because after looking at her online presence for years, I became more comfortable with the idea of people changing into other forms, a bird or a wolf or even a butterfly or moth. I saw these images in films, of course, over the years. But I had never thought of my work going the way of transformation until about 2009, the year my mother died when I thought, maybe she just changed into something I could not see as she left this world. Maybe she is still here? Birds are my biggest inspirations. I love birds. And the owl is one of my favorites. The crow is another. I made friends with a crow last year in my garden. He came nearly every day for the longest time and he seemed to talk to me. The Owl King is very different from how I find the crow transformations in my fiction. The Owl King is partly inspired from Greek myth though I don't literally use the actual myth of that time. Just partly. I have created my own myth and loosely taken from another.

Halsey - Young God (Official Audio)

Profound. Reminds me of something I'm after.......

THIS

Once I saw at Cumae a Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when boys asked ‘Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied 'I want to die'. Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent Σιβυλλα τι θελεις respondebat illa αποθανειν θελω. — Petronius

It is always in motion, this Life.

"This empire of suffering and pain. There is no end to it. There cannot be. When we are poor we wish to be rich, when we are rich we wish to be loved, when we are loved we wish for freedom from pain and endless life and unchanging happiness. It is a great, unstoppable conundrum."

— Stefan Bachmann

THIS

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”

― Toni Morrison

 

A slew of Patricia McKillip's book. McKillip was always a favorite read. The first book I read by her was Winter Rose, a sort of retelling of Tam Lin. After that, I bought her Riddle-Master books and then bought everything she wrote. I am rereading her at the moment, while I pause and relax. It was such a loss to lose McKillip in 2022. Covers are by artist, Kinuko Y. Craft.

Taking the rest of the month off.

 I made a post on Twitter/X that I am having a difficult time working right now.

In fiction, tone, mood, voice, and style interrelate, — things I am learning to improve. So at the moment, writing is hard work for me. All learning and practice is. But I crave process. That's the artist/creative/messy in me. [MJ]

I posted an image of Francesca Woodman in her studio for several reasons, but to hint that emotionally, I am exhausted. I attribute some of this fatigue to winter and illness, to what it simply is as seasonal depression, but there are other reasons, too. My process as a creative is very messy and immersive and I've been working for months, relentless. Even obsessively. I tend to neglect other aspects of living when I do this.

I have been sitting in this creative corner since last November. In December, I made strides, but they were costly. Francesca Woodman always sat in this corner, metaphorically and it destroyed her. I don't do that. I am too self-aware. I know then to pause, to rest, and yes, I should not wait to do this when I am this flat and lost in feeling. Pausing is not a failure. It's a salvation. During my pauses, I usually go to handwriting and reading, to reflection. To a sort of reinvention of the work in my mind and notebooks. These allows me spaces. I need these spaces. I need to be alone. I need to be away from social media, but it all just becomes noise to me, chatter, and I become overwhelmed as though the images and words of so many people are:

 'abnormally rapid and even auditory.'

 That's a metaphor but it fits.

  

I have to do something. I have to make a change. And I do.

Alan Garner is a rare mind.

"I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, 'literature' is: words that provoke a response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is a but an option. "Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world. "It is a paradox: yet one so important I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth." 

                        — Alan Garner

                     The Voice That Thunders

Failure is part of a writer's daily life.

 

"If you are writing well and failing and submitting and persevering, there is no more that anyone can ask of you, even yourself."

— Stephen Marche

Berthe Moriset, Girl Writing

(Writers are always making decisions. Some of them are failures and will be cut, pasted, and moved, or even deleted. Some will stay and be published. But failures and mistakes are part of the writing process. Revisions are like purgatory. Dante's.)

48 Days until Spring

 

The countdown begins. I survived January. Spring is coming. My late mother's Heritage Iris, surrounded by spiderwort. I am going to work both the gardens this year. Do, as they say. Get some sunshine, be with nature. Spring is coming. The spiderwort is the first to pop up after early bulb plants. Spiderwort and irises are always springtime. I didn't really make plans this winter. I am going to play it day by day this year. Have fun. This is one of the most beautiful flowers I know. I love gardening so much. I do. I do. I do.

The perfect quote to describe my main character..

“It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy." 

                                       — Richard Matheson

Genre writers I love.

Naomi Novik, Juliet Marillier, Patricia McKillip, Holly Black, Laini Taylor, Katherine Harbour, Anne Rice, Anne Bishop, Rebecca Ross. Grace Draven, Maggie Stiefvater. In no certain order. That's 11 because Anne Rice is really an out of the box fantasy and paranormal writer. These are all wordsmiths, too, exceptional prose writers. Writers who have romance in their stories. Writers who like girls and goblins.

So far, so good

My mother told me once that "disappointment" was a feeling that destroyed more dreams than failure. Genuine disappointment in people or personal expectations or predicament. Its cousins are frustration and despair. Disappointments are always cruel and sharp and cold. But she reminded me, there are worst things than disappointment and most of us, if we are lucky, only read about those things in books.

Gray 2024

 

I've got a moment, since I am working online tonight and I thought I would post a pic of me, all gray. Just gray. Laughing. It's so appropriate for January 2024, a month where I have suffered from the flu and endured, ice, snow, and brutal cold weather. I wrote on Twitter/X that January is always a year to me, and it is. I seem to fade into a gray ghost in January, but by the middle of February I am buying tulips and looking at seeds and planning a garden. I just have to get through this month and the first half of February, and my countdown to spring begins. Little writing is going on now. Just organizing files and a little revision. I opted to read a few new books and try to relax. Today was the first day of January that I really had a decent meal, I had a filet, some air fry okra, baked potatoes done in herbs and paprika and even a glass of tea. I've been drinking only water all month. I've also been living on can soup and baked potatoes, and scrambled eggs. Tomorrow I am having some sausage pinwheels for breakfast. At the end of next week, I'll go back to creating new words and moving on with the work in progress. I've been working hard since November 1 when I began NaNo. This is my NaNo project. A new version of the older book that went nowhere. I am energized. I like it. It's got the right hero now, it's got a better conflict, it's more compelling in story and voice. It's rich in folklore. It's terribly romantic at times. It's got kicker conflict. I just love it. Laughing. I am almost compelled to write it, something I haven't experienced in a few years since John's death. I miss John. Seven years now. It seems like yesterday at times, some days it seems long ago, almost foggy. It's insane at times. I think a loss like this is like a hole. It's there and most days you just walk around it, and some days you kind of fall into the hole and sink. Most days now, I walk around it. I feel okay. I sort of feel safe in myself if that is a thing. I feel moored to something again. Me. I don't care for selfies anymore. I don't really care about social media. I have this nice life going. Art. Writing. A garden to plan, books to read. A cat who annoys me. My blog is for bits and pieces. I don't even talk about writing that much. I write instead. I try to be kind to others. I made a pen pal list so I would be more than a name and photo on social media to some of my friends. I would be a real person writing snail mail and sending post cards and all that old stuff that people ignore nowadays. I have plans. I play vinyl music and dance. I like to cook. I want to exercise and be able to do cartwheels again. I have these little ambitions. They make me smile. Smiling is important. Laughing is important. Living the best me I can is extremely important. Giving back is nice. Being kind is nice. I can do all this. I can make a difference. Gray and all.

The Middle of January 2024

“Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.” — Neil Gaiman

Symbol and Metaphor

There is no language and no knowledge without symbol and metaphor. Two consequences arise from this: one is that we require imagination both to make and to interpret symbols, and the other is that symbols themselves beckon us through language to that which is beyond language. In other words, symbols are energized between the two poles (as Coleridge would say) of immanence and transcendence. 

                          — Malcolm Guite

 Malcolm Guite

Neil Gaiman on Making Mistakes

“I hope that in this year to come you make mistakes because if you are making mistakes then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before and, more importantly, you're doing something. So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art or love or work or family or life. Whatever it is you're scared of doing, do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

— Neil Gaiman

"With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous."

                  —  C. S. Lewis

More and more I appreciate Tolkien and all those writers who inspired him

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

'I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.' — W B Yeats

The Silver Apples of the Moon by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh

Not a canary in a cage.

‘I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.’

— Mary Oliver

The King of Owls by Louise Erdrich

They say I am excitable! How could

I not scream? The Swiss monk’s tonsure

spun till it blurred yet his eyes were still.

I snapped my gaiter, hard, to stuff back

my mirth. Lords, he then began to speak.

Indus catarum, he said, presenting the game of cards

in which the state of the world is excellent described

and figured. He decked his mouth

as they do, a solemn stitch, and left cards

in my hands. I cast them down.

What need have I for amusement?

My brain’s a park. Yet your company

plucked them from the ground and began to play.

Lords, I wither. The monk spoke right,

the mealy wretch. The sorry patterns show

the deceiving constructions of your minds.

I have made the Deuce of Ravens my sword

falling through your pillows and rising,

the wing blades still running

with the jugular blood. Your bodies lurch

through the steps of an unpleasant dance.

No lutes play. I have silenced the lutes!

I keep watch in the clipped, convulsed garden.

I must have silence, to hear the messenger’s footfall

in my brain. For I am the King of Owls.

Where I float no shadow falls.

I have hungers, such terrible hungers, you cannot know.

Lords, I sharpen my talons on your bones.

Detail from Simone Martini's Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus

Detail from Simone Martini's Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus

—

"He shall be called the son of the Great God, and by his name shall he be hailed as the Son of God, and they shall call him Son of the Most High."

— Dead Sea scrolls manuscript Q4Q246

Translated from the Aramaic. It has been suggested that Luke's version was taken from this Qumran text. The Feast of the Annunciation is in March, but I find myself looking at images in December as Christmas approaches. The center of 3 panels painted, the saints being positioned on outside panels. This painting was worked on in 1333, a beautiful example of Christian art done in the early medieval period. The angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she was to be the mother of the Son of the Most High. Simone Martini did this work, I believe for the Pope in Avignon, and it was later moved a few times. It's one of my favorites of the full Annunciation works from that period. My focus in study has always been Greco-Roman to the death of Joan of Arc, because this was when the world made a big change that is still in action today.

Life is precious

'There is a space between the setting of the sun and the fall of night that we all long for, twilight, dusk, that singular moment of ambiguity and mystery. We don't know what color it might be, what time of the day it really is, and we cannot call it night yet— all this, only for a moment and then it is gone.'

Twilight by Ed Org.

Kindness is needed now.

In a world where you can apparently be anything now, be kind to all.

Sad, but true.

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

— Eudora Welty

A cat or a god or a fairy....how are we to know?

"He is my household's guardian soul; He judges, he presides, inspires All matters in his royal realm; Might he be fairy? or a god?" — Charles Baudelaire

Why I am Silent Most of the Time.

It's time to consider most data, journalism, magazines, and politics to be exploitive. EVERYTHING that works to exploit for money or power, etc. rather than solve challenges and problems, rather than open discussions without shouting messages and preaching, for the common good of all people, is not productive, no matter which side of an issue it takes. We have come to a crisis point in history and social exchange where even good people are exploiting any issue, trivial or serious, as an expression of their momentary feelings or power plays in order to diminish one side or another, one view or another, and it's all an exercise of polarization. Fragmentation. Demoralizing and impotent. Because true change is problem solving and you can see it. It's not theory. While theory was once valid, it is now a serious handicap in polarization and diminishing "the other." Mistakes are always made in history, people. Mistakes are made now. Our brains are story telling processors, they are not always logical. Most days I cannot discern the lines between those seeking justice and those seeking revenge. Righteousness and sanctimonious posts, essays, and literature fill our lives in every single arena. We know a fascist when we see it. That's an easy one, because a fascist is working against democracy and often expresses his/her way as the only way. But everything else is kind of nuanced. When your way is the only way, pause.

I don't do culture wars or identity struggles anymore. This is probably the one and only time I will ever mention any of this. My timelines and blog, outside this one post, is free of any exploitation and sanctimonious messages. I am not silent in life just because I am silent here. I am committed to change and problem solving, but I do it in my community where it really happens in people's lives, through charities and hard work. I posted this because I have seen data used in magazines I once respected as exploitation. I have read interesting nonfiction full of the same, and I can hardly pick up a novel now that is not preaching at me. Book bans have come to mean more in the news than the fact that third graders are failing all across the country. They can't read well. They comprehend less. Discussions of mass killings catch the headlines when every single city is full of people facing death by gun violence from people in their own neighborhoods. We are a people living in fear and off fear. Gloom and Doom. Well, despite all this messiness, there is a whole lot of good in the world, a lot of beauty, and a reason to hope.

I don't live in the past, though I know it has a weight on me, that's evolution and geography, and yes, history. But I also don't live under the weight of futures that do not exist, and may never exist. I don't live in despair, and neither did my parents who existed during the Great Depression and World War II, who had none of the privileges I do. I don't barter in misery or seek validation here. It's entertainment and where I do find information or check out friends. I am an ordinary person, really, flawed, yes, a list of life's mistakes a mile long. I don't have a perfect life or a perfect face. I'm kind of plain and chose never to dye my hair. I am odd, too. Too blunt. Catholic in my thinking though I am highly flexible. I do value logic and a sense of humor. I value mercy and forgiveness as much as I value truth. Knowledge and data is not wisdom. Facts can be manipulated. Culture and trends pass. Morality even changes. And I am finished preaching.

Books I have Reread at least 5 times in the last 7 years. Amazing

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

Persuasion by Jane Austen.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Our Mutural Friend by Charles Dickens

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

The Quick by Lauren Owen,

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Rook by Sharon Cameron

Great Expectation by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier

Moby Dick by Melville

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Short Stories by Faulkner

Short Stories by Hemingway

Possession by A. S. Byatt

Book 1 and 2 Paradys by Tanith Lee.

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer.

Wonder Tales Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Thorn Jack series by Katherine Harbour

Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip

Swordpoint by Ellen Kushner

and anything by romance writers Loretta Chase, Lisa Kleypas, and Laura Kinsale.

Happy Birthday Colin Lyric.

 Colin at the Memphis Zoo.

dave mikey nance reading nick land's critique of the left and mark fish ...

Creating means making mistakes.

 

Creating is messy. You should see my writing desk on a regular working day. Messy. Messy. Messy. On Friday afternoons, I stop and clean it up. All my little messes. To makes messes in the creative process is to make mistakes. To be wrong. To fail. I have been making mistakes in art and writing my entire life. Some of those mistakes are in print. Laughing. As I got older and more experienced, I began to think of creating anything as "big mistake-making adventures" which will involve a lot of destruction along the way. That's why rewriting and starting over and just working regularly are so important. You are going to write so many words that you will never use or paint or draw so many things you just don't like. Some creative acts are even traumatizing. Laughing. When I was young, I used to sort of deny my mistakes or try to rationalize them or work to cover them up. Now I just relish them. Fear of making mistakes, of being wrong, of failing, IS ABSOLUTELY the "creative mind killer." My best advice is not to ignore mistakes, defend them, fear them, or leave them uncorrected in infinity. Make them. Learn from them. Use them. But creating means making mistakes.

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