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 alone 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)

I am thinking of my mother and bees.

I bought books on The Merovingians. Although I've read about them enough to know the basics, I really needed to own the books since The Merovingian mindset is included in my current WIP. When I chose this period, I did not realize it was the least researched period in France, but then that might be why my mother suggested it. Laughing. It's difficult to believe that Mother was alive when I came up with this thorny project and that it would be years and years before I actually began the work. Another decade. Mother was an amateur Medievalist, the kind who could recite lists of Kings and Queens, their notable bio without so much as lifting a book. This is what she read all her life, it was her first love. If she had been online and computer savvy, her passwords would have been either a long list of initials for obscure medieval Popes or maybe some event in the life of the Black Prince. This morning I thought of my mother and bees, and I cried. There is no mother to talk about these things. No mother to offer sage advice. No mother who had a better memory at 80 than I do now. This project is reckless I know. I may never finish it. I may finish it and know that it is a disaster. It is the most "alone" work I have ever done.

Age and Reality

“Over a period of twenty-two years “you’re bound” only to get older, barring nasty surprises. This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career—something to work at, work on, “make an effort” for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s “relationships”—is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents.”

— Joan Didion, "Letter from ‘Manhattan’"

Work Updates

 

It's very easy to see the influence of The Goblin Market on Bee Fly Crow as it's a story of girls who face terrible temptations and must decide on how to live their lives. When I began the novel, playing with drafts and ideas, while coming up with a solid story, I did not realize the influence, because I had looked to other sources, and low and behold, after reading through the proposal last week, I saw old influences. Perhaps that is what I write about, girls and boys facing challenges. The theme itself is about power. The premise (what the story proves, like a thesis statement) is what love can do for one's life. There is a deep realism to it, psychologically. I have paid a lot of attention to the psychology.  Two things I want to address are: I began my new writing schedule and I changed to present tense for the entire book. It was divided. I do have some interesting structures in the narrative that I have planned with intent and care. Day 1 of the new schedule was a mess as I lost line 24 on my single page format, and I had to find it and reestablish it. Some of this was very silly but also due to the fact that I cut and paste a lot in the writing process. Why? Well, since I know the plot, I often write loose drafts out of order and later copy them in to revise and smooth out with the working draft. Somehow codes for lines and so forth were carried over. I did not realize, at first, that I had to highlight an entire chapter I was working on and then redo the paragraph format with no extra space. Three hours of time to discover something that would have taken a more computer savvy person thirty minutes. Oh, well. Today's work went well. I am changing past tense to present tense. Some places need complete rewrites. Some do not. I never thought in a million years that I would be writing present tense. If my team does not like it after the book is finished, I'll change it. I don't find it that complicated. But for now, I have made a decision. If one does not ever decide, the work suffers. 

Desire is the Opposite of Death

 

Time for the new writing schedule to be put in place. I've been thinking about immortals and mortals all day and what that really means in terms of my writing and my life. My ambitions. My desires. I have been thinking about possibilities and what I can do and cannot. And how to proceed.  The best way to go about my business of making art, of creating, of finishing my WIP and painting some wildflowers this coming winter. It's almost here, winter, the end of the year and the beginning of a new year. I can't go on as I have been going on. I have to take a new path. It is hard to make new habits, to change direction, to give up things in order to do the work I need to do. But I am sure to fail if I do not make these changes. And I wanted to write this here so I could come back and see the commitments myself, because I have to hold myself accountable. So here I go, making change. Nothing more to say.

Kitchen tree aka the kid;s tree

 We all have plenty of stars this year.

The ole Parlor 2024

 Finally finished decorating for Xmas. Here is my parlor. lol

A place to take tea.

 Christmas Season 2024. I am so very grateful for my life, those I love, and the journey I am on right now.

Run With the Wolves

“The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.”

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Self-Determination

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”

            ― Jean-Paul Sartre