Sigard the dragon slayer

He was expert in sword-play, in throwing a spear or hurling a javelin, in shield-work, in archery and in riding, and many and varied were the arts of chivalry he had acquired in his youth. He was a wise man, having foreknowledge of future events. He could understand the language of birds. 

     from a description of Sigurd the dragon-slayer

    The Saga of the Volsungs, ed. and trans. R. G. Finch 

Writing quote from Jeff VanderMeer

I also devote a lot of time to learning technique. When I’m writing a novel, even one like this, if I’m reading another novel, I might plug in a technique I just saw used by somebody else in an unusual way. And then take it out again. Just to see how it works.

      — Jeff VanderMeer

Lady of the Lilacs painting by Arthur Hughes

Lady of the Lilacs, by Arthur Hughes

(painted for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll

Favorite Quotes

"Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning." 

              — C. S. Lewis

Ariel in the Cloven Pine

 

Ariel in the Cloven Pine Paul Vincent Woodroffe, 1905

Fairies in trees are part of my own personal mythology. Like dryads, it pushes them into a botanical existence. In trees, they thrive, sleep, rest, refill their magic.

Camus Quote

"The true horror of existence is not the fear of death, but the fear of life. It is the fear of waking up each day to face the same struggles, the same disappointments, the same pain. It is the fear that nothing will ever change, that you are trapped in a cycle of suffering that you cannot escape. And in that fear, there is a desperation, a longing for something, anything, to break the monotony, to bring meaning to the endless repetition of days."

— Albert Camus, The Fall

Yearning.....

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh...

            — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Writing quote by Sylvia Plath

 "Write to create a mood, an incident. If this is done with color  and and feeling, it becomes a story."

              — Sylvia Path, journal 1959

Quotes

“She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox's tongue. She tastes like hope.”

                              — Laini Taylor

The Embrace by Wilhelm List

The Embrace by Wilhelm List

But what about The Fly?

There is a flower that Bees prefer—

And Butterflies—desire—

Emily Dickinson.

Illustration for The Conference of Birds by Attar of Nishapur

 

Habiballah of Sava for The Conference of Birds 

by Attar of Nishapur aka Farid ad-Din Attar.

Desire

“Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness.... It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.” — D. H Lawrence

Barber's Adagio: Students and supporters play to protest closure of musi...

Romantic Love

 

🎨 Richard Borrmeister

If there is one thing I have learned in life, is that love is grand. Desire. Love is pretty much everything. All kinds of love. Romantic love is beautiful, even if it doesn't last. Remember, nothing last. All things end. I often live on the memories of the romantic loves that I have experienced, all of them, but mostly my marriage. I want to say that 'we fall in love many times in our lives if we are lucky.'

Love is a bit of a mystery to many people, but it possesses certain ingredients. 

It takes meeting someone, noticing them, feeling an interest, and then it takes two, both people expressing that same interest and attraction. Desire again. Sometimes curiosity helps. Love does not thrive properly if proximity does not feed it, and for that matter, some good experiences too. Desire leads to touching. Intimacy is critical.

Somewhere along the way, if love is thriving right and if attraction wins over ego, a firm commitment happens. Each person wants the other person's happiness. Desire grows. Love manifest itself in a visible form. This is best if the two people are independent and emotionally mature. 

But what makes Love and Passion last? Years and years and years of desire. That's compatibility. If two people are not compatible in most issues, love can die. This is why I tell people, if you value a good conversation with your lover, that's a big plus for the relationship. Good communication feeds love, because life is not just about falling in love. There is a reality of pain and stress and suffering outside the realm of love and desire. Also, people change over time. They may discover new loves and desires which alter a relationship. Some relationships survive. Some do not. But nothing negates what people once felt for one another when they first fell in love. While love fades with disappointments and absence, love is really stronger than one can understand.

I'll end this little post on love by adding that one of the gifts that modern people possess is the ability to experience what we now call Romantic Love. It was not always so. As cultures have evolved over time, fairness and love and passions have developed into an ideal Romantic Love, even for many very ordinary couples. But it not so for all people in this world. Some cultures have not evolved enough. For some of these people, love and desire leads to unhappiness and even tragedy.

If you can love, do so. Be happy in the doing of it. 

What I am Reading Next

 Reading this for the pleasure of language and a wildly new take on a situation. Longlisted for the Booker.

3.6 rating leaning up as it was sad, and not as good as Maugham. Smiling. Beautiful language. It did not move me emotionally though. Reading books is so subjective and even shadowed by moods. I could pick this book up and reread it next year and feel completely different. That's why books are forever. That every read is a new experience.

TRUTH

"Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them." 

  

                         — Angela Carter

Beowulf, Basilisks, Dragons and Serpents

 Not much time for writing here as I have offline writing to do, but these are some of the books I am reading for research. I wanted to post them while I did my brief social media this morning. I slept in and now I need to catch up. Laughing. I have four editions of Beowulf, but I really like Swinton's version as it has side by side translation and I needed that. I wanted to read Tolkien's version just because it's Tolkien and the other work is on monsters and dragons and basilisks and serpents of the Classical and Early medieval eras. 

Junip - Line of Fire

Howl fan art

It's strange what a novel can do sometimes, or where it might lead. For example, lots of fan art. This one is from Howl's Moving Castle. I am a big fan of Howl's Moving Castle and of Howl and Sophie. I also like bird people, which is a very old fantasy of mine.

          art by Dani López

Re-enchantment

“The essential ingredient in a temenos is the perimeter that marks out the space, whether by a wall, a fence, a hedge of flowers and bushes, or some rocks that only imply the full perimeter. Having crossed the border, we find ourselves in a special place where certain things happen, and other things do not.” 

 — Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life

SYML - "Wildfire" [Official Music Video]

Of Monsters And Men - Wolves Without Teeth (Official Lyric Video)

Open my chest and colour my spine
I'm giving you all
I'm giving you all
Swallow my breath
And take what is mine
I'm giving you all
I'm giving you all

I'll be the blood
If you'll be the bones
I'm giving you all
I'm giving you all
So lift up my body
And lose all control
I'm giving you all
I'm giving you all

You hover like a hummingbird
Haunt me in my sleep
You'll sailing from another world
Sinking in my sea, oh
You're feeding on my energy
I'm letting go of it
She wants it

And I run from wolves, ooh
Breathing heavily
At my feet
And I run from wolves, ooh
Tearing into me
Without teeth

I can see through you
We are the same
It's perfectly strange
You run in my veins
How can I keep you
Inside my lungs
I breathe what is yours
You breathe what is mine

You hover like a hummingbird
Haunt me in my sleep
You'll sailing from another world
Sinking in my sea, oh
You're feeding on my energy
I'm letting go of it
He wants it

And I run from wolves, ooh
Breathing heavily
At my feet
And I run from wolves, ooh
Tearing into me
Without teeth

And you can follow
You can follow me
You can follow
You can follow me

You hover like a hummingbird
Haunt me in my sleep
You're sailing from another world
Sinking in my sea, oh
"You're feeding on my energy
I'm letting go of it" she once said

And I run from wolves, ooh
Breathing heavily
At my feet
And I run from wolves, ooh
Tearing into me
Without teeth

And you can follow
You can follow me and
You can follow
You can follow me and
And you can follow
You can follow me
You can follow
You can follow me

Juvenilia

(Something I wrote as a teenager, a very young teenager, around thirteen or fourteen years old.)


Poe In Allegory

Amid the cool dark of endless space
A single crimsom flame does race.
Behind it across an ocean of blue
A haunting shape does pursue.
This shape gains speed with the light of day.
In the cool of night it loses its way.
While it moves across the sky,
The shape falters and asks itself why
It pursues a thing it will never possess,
And why it does not pause forever to rest;
Yet, always in the light of day
The shadow moves faster along its way!

Alas! Night is a time for stars and dreams.
Life is not what it is or what it seems.
There is no shadow, only the glow of the moon,
And the warmth that it brings never too soon.

                                     Copyright © 2024  Madly Jane

Kissing

"...Praise the deep lustrous kiss that lasts minutes, blossoms into what feels like days, fields of tulips glossy with dew, low purple clouds piling in beneath the distant arch of a bridge.... Let the tongue, in its wisdom, release its stores, let the mouth,tired of talking, relax into its shapes of give and receive, its plush swelling, its slick round reveling, its primal reminiscence that knows only the one robust world."

Kissing Again Dorianne Laux

A reminder

I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And, if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. Nobody ever said it was easy. What they said is: "Life is short, art is long." 

Ursula K. Le Guin

Iona by John Duncan

 

Iona by John Duncan. Symbolism and one of the pieces of art that always inspires me. Especially Duncan's use of color and expression. In a certain story I've read, Iona is the protagonist in a myth about a young girl who fell in love with a god. When I heard her story I thought I'd like to fall in love with a god. Of course the more I read and understood, this was a perilous path to choose. What would it be like to be human in presence of the divine. Any divine. Despite Iona's tragic circumstances, this was a topic that I love. It haunts me. 

Backstory: Around the age of 10, I started writing little notes about another girl who has had various names over the years. A young girl, ordinary in all ways but very clever who falls in love with a god, who finds her annoying most of the time. This was my fantasy. My dream.  Part of my paracosm. While my friends wanted to be Cinderella or Snow White or some heroine of a TV show, I wanted to struggle with a god and make a life. Some of this might have been my early, much too early, understanding and knowledge of death and how it shadowed my early life.

I was only seven years old when I realized that all  gods, whatever, were probably the fantasized needs of human beings. I was crushed at the time to know this. By age eight I had relaxed into this philosophy, but it wasn't like I could have a conversation about it with my friends or my parents, although I tried to explain it to my mother several times. I did explain it to my third grade teacher, which led to some unintentional consequences for me and yes, a new understanding of myself. I was never the same. This teacher influenced me greatly and was a wonderful mentor in early life. I always thought of her when I thought of gods and mortals. I still think of her.

Love is forbidden between gods and mortals. This theme is told over and over in literature. Why? That is one of the things I wanted to know, too.

Fall Notebooks

 

Writing is lots of hard work. Reading and Studying is too. I bought these and 3 dozen Traveler's notebooks for organization. Everyone knows I love flowers.

Wildflower Explosion.

 

 Images © Lucia Leyfield 

This is something I want to do. Nature journaling and doing watercolors of my flowers from my garden. I started one a few years back but got distracted by life. This time I have planned better. I have already purchased lots of watercolors, etc. But I just love how Lucia Leyfield designed her pages. She has a website, and is on IG if anyone is interested. I first saw this image on Twitter. No one knew who the artist was and then they made a search. I had too, but I did not see all of Leyfield's page due to time and circumstances, so I missed this entry on her workshop. One can buy it to learn and paint along.

Roman History Notes

 Written by Titus Ursus, Primus pilus of Legiō IX Hispana, in the third year of Hadrian's reign (*120 AD). 

"This will probably be the last papyrus and my last note. Our legion was ambushed in the wild realm called Caledonian Forest and was almost completely annihilated. Half of my first cohort is all that was left of the IX legiō. We were pushed into the marsh and we will probably die here, fighting bravely to the end in the name of Rome and the Emperor. We were attacked by a demonic pack of the barbaric Picts. They looked more like wild beasts than humans. Some of them were dressed in animal furs, painted with strange runic signs... others seemed to be two-legged wild beasts. They tore us apart as if we were made of paper! I saw our legatus and my brothers in arms being eaten alive, I will never forget their screams. The barbarians attacked us unnoticed, quickly and with wild fury, then disappeared in the fog. Mainly at night. Our shields, swords and armor were no use here. The enemy we face seems to be the ancient wrath of some dark gods we have awakened. We should never invade these lands. I hear demonic howls, they're coming! They're coming!" ⠀

Beautiful writing is...

“Beautiful writing is more than pretty prose. It creates resonance in readers’ minds with parallels, reversals, and symbols. It conjures a story world that is unique, highly detailed, and brought alive by the characters that dwell there. It offers moments of breath-catching surprise, heart-gripping insight, revelation, and self-understanding. It engages the reader’s mind with an urgent point, which we might call theme.”
           ― Donald Maass

I am alive . Good night.

 

Good night. 

I am still alive.

So grateful

That I can even smile.

I am here. 

What do I love?

“The mind I love must have wild places.”
              ― Katherine Mansfield

YUNGBLUD - I Was Made For Lovin’ You (from The Fall Guy)

Added to the writing soundtrack. I love this cover of Kisses' song. So good.

Cleaning up and making a routine

One can't really understand the stress I have been under due to illness and also predicament. For example, I had a medication adjustment by my personal physician which finally put me in the ER two days before my June 1 birthday. Then I was gardening on June 11th and some insect bit me and I got severe hives, angiodema, and a rash, which after two weeks put me in an Urgent Care clinic so I could get steroids. I stopped up my bathtub drain with repeated oatmeal baths. Laughing. Before that was over, a young girl I knew (22), (TRAGIC) who was indigent, committed suicide, and weeks later after being on life support, donating her organs, and being put in the county morgue, her family didn't have the money to bury her so I paid to have her cremated to keep her out of a pauper's grave. That was May and June and part of July. What a nightmare.

On top of that my writing coach and I decided I needed to change the setting of my story and create a more complex fantasy feel while keeping the found family dynamics. This means major rewriting. REWRITING. After yesterday, with all the political nightmares, I decided I needed a break from everything. 

So I am reading some genre fantasies, so I can immerse myself in a wonderful and complex worlds and maybe learn something from the experience while being entertained. I am going to break from social media while I read with exception to posting comments on the book. I just can't take it anymore. I need to clean up all my writing and work rooms, three of them and then develop a routine. One can't write what I need to without a routine.

And my son made me some sausage pinwheels because he knows I am unhappy. Food helps.  

This entire year has been strange and full of challenges.

"It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff..." — Mark Twain (Elizabeth Donaldson 2002-2024)

Elizabeth, in my opinion, died on June 23, but was put on life support in order to be a donor.

WIP Day 2-4 Revision Notes

 

   

EDIT September 1, 2026. NONE OF THIS I KEPT. NONE. All is in a cardboard box. I did not even keep the setting or names. Laughing. Process is never known to reader. The draft I started at NANO is what I have continued working on. But anything before November 1 2024. Also due to retina issue, I did not work in 2025 but maybe a day here and there. I started back work in summer of 2026. NOW.

I've had some busy days working out the reverse outline and making notes and deciding what is to be done on the WIP. I will never do another NaNo project in my life. Laughing. It's messy and ridiculous and while it gave me a great idea, well, we know what they say about ideas. They are a dime a dozen. It's not a book. It doesn't look like a book because I have torn it to pieces. Think of it as a cake that is just a wish and all the ingredients are sitting on the kitchen counter but the bowl is empty and the oven is still cold. I had to stop, take a deep breath and make a list of how to approach it all because there is so much good material and so much bad material and yes, as I wrote earlier in the year, before illness overtook me, I am really rewriting the book. 

That's okay. I have done that many times. It's been long established that writing is rewriting. That's not an issue for me at all right now. The issue is what to put in the bowl. What kind of cake am I making. With a little help from a friend, I managed to organize how to approach this kitchen counter covered with ingredients and decide what to throw away and what to keep and if I wanted to reimagine the story in a few other ways. I did.

A reverse outline is a masterful way to look at your story when you know it's too long, has too many characters, and maybe even too much plot. I was taught this method, with a few special details by my first literary agent. She's long gone now, and if she were alive, I might have called her and cried a little. When Alice went. through the Looking Glass, the world was reversed. Nothing made any sense and she encountered lots of nonsense, including that wonderful poem, Jabberwocky. But Carroll was very logical and mathematical and in this sequel to Alice in Wonderland, he approached some clever ideas. It's my favorite of the two books, the one I reread over and over.

So I am baking a cake. Only I have to get everything proper together or I will end up with nonsense, once again.

How I came to realize what to do with the book, you know, what kind of cake it is, well I made lists of books I loved, books I have reread over and over, and all the things I loved about those books. Then I made lists of my gifts and weaknesses as a writer and followed that with lists of the things I felt were really wrong with the book and had been since Day One of NaNo. I got very cold and logical. I put away my feelings at times, because this time next year I want to be completely finished with this project. Since this is my revision draft, I am guessing it will take me six months to put all the right ingredients together and another six months to polish and edit it. If I am lucky....I've been so ill this year, I just hate to make predictions on what life will bring me.

But this is the plan.

One thing big changed. This is now a Historical Fantasy. I have completely changed the setting. This was the boldest thing I have ever done when revising a draft. I feel good about this for many reasons. 

Second big change. I am writing a full outline and doing character sheets, something I always did when working previously but not done on this NaNo draft.

And the one before....

And the one before....

And that is why I do not have a finished book. NEVER AGAIN will I be in this mess. Unlike Alice, I know exactly where I am going this time around.

Art work by John Tenniel from Through the Looking Glass.

RIGHT NOW I HAVE TO FIGURE OUT THE DETAILS, THE WAY FORWARD, AND THE MECHANICS OF IT. HOW TO DO IT.

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.