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.