Line edits are exhausting.

 Dear Reader,

This religious text I'm working on has reached the first major editing milestone: the first round of line edits. It is just arduous to sit and go through this thing line by line. It reminded me that I have to slow down when I am typing or I make lots of typos. I'm making progress at it. I know that what I'm working on is going to be considered heretical by the orthodox sects. At the same time, it's going to make some goddamn sense when you read it. No more faux archaic language cluttering the page. No more sentences that are a full paragraph long series of comma splices. No more sentence fragments just hanging around in irrational space.

Someone in the past claimed that the bad writing was actually poetry. I'm sorry, but, no. The writing was actually that bad. So, I'm giving it a full makeover so that you can actually read it. The places where it isn't supposed to be prose are going to be sectioned out and visual distinguished from the rest of the passage. I'm just frustrated that this thing is consistently so messy despite there being at least four different versions. The original hand copied one I can't get to the digital archives for it because the site went down. You'd figure someone along the way would have read it over with a critical eye and say "Hey, we can't really read this that well. We should fix it." I don't know, maybe I was destined to be that person.

It makes me feel like I should go back to editing book V because I know that I have complete sentences to work with there nine times out of ten. *headdesk*

Long week.

 Dear Reader

It's been a long week. If you happen to see my sanity, put it into a nice little box with some fluff to keep it cozy. I have been working on this transcription/revision/synthesis project and I'm at about the final third of it. I keep having to fix grammar and language to make things flow smoothly. I thought editing my own work was an ordeal. Taking three separate versions of one text and mashing them together into one version with a few minor tweaks is proving harder than I expected.

I think, however, when I get this thing finished it will do a lot of good. I'm taking a religious text that has been heavily femme and moving it to gender neutral. I occasionally have spasms of anxiety that I am doing something WRONG!!elventy1! but then they pass as I realize that my efforts are actually making the text easier to read. Correlating the points that align across all three existent versions of this book is proving surprisingly easy. I truly believe that once I get this to the finish line, it will make the holy texts of Filianism and Déanism (one of the religions I practice, my spiritual life it weird.) more accessible and easier to understand. I am also going to have the audacity to put a section with commentary on changes made and why. Because there are some changes that I know the orthodox practitioners are going to disagree with because they want the texts to remain the same. My goal here is clarity of text, ease of readability, and opening the text to a wider audience (which from what my research has shown me was one of the things the founders of the religion wanted to do before their group fell apart due to politics).

Now, if I had the spoons for it, I would sit down and do the same thing for other religious texts that are much meatier (i.e. the Christian bible). Because I think that holy books shouldn't alienate readers and that they should be open to all believers, regardless of gender, which should be reflected in gender representation in the text itself. I try to do a decent job of equal gender representation in my writing. I feel it's important. That's part of why I took up this project to begin with. I want, in the end, a book that if my boys felt like reading and learning from didn't leave them feeling like they were less because they weren't female. I know the founders of the faith were working to uplift women during an era that female figures in religion were uncommon in England and most of "the west". (I have thoughts upon that expression, but I'll save them for another day.) The founding of this religion shows up during the civil rights era and attempts to address the inequality women faced in that era in England.

The original texts and the excellently researched published texts from Rev. Sarah Morrigan and from the Eastminster society for Filianic Studies (publishers of the New Celestial Union Version and the Eastminster Critical Edition of the Clear Recital, respectively) show that the founders were deeply thoughtful in their theology and philosophy. There is a branch of Filianism and Déanism that swings really hard into femme dominant territory, which I think is an aberration and deliberate misinterpretation of what the founders had in mind that arose during the 1980s, not long after the original cultus of worship had fractured and fallen apart due to political issues within their organization. At the same time, without that more extreme branch, Filianism and Déanism would quite possibly have become lost to the sands of time. It's all convoluted in places and yet very sensible in others. But, that's what you get with any religion.

But, this is what I have been working on this week while I try to pick up the threads of where I left off with everything else. My life's beginning to get a bit more organized with the school routine settled. I'm even beginning to get back into my journal writing. It is my hope that next week, I will be blogging on here daily. Even if it is minor ranting about writer's block or my frustrations with this big project that I'm working on right now.

Not sure what to write today.

 Dear Reader,

I'm not really sure what to write today. Typically, I'd be discussing exotic plants and fantastical animals from my little world but the inspiration for that just isn't present. Right now, the kids are drumming away on some random thing in their room. By some minor miracle, they're not fighting at the moment. I'm still stalled in the fiction department. Honestly, I'm stalled in my journal writing even. I've debated breaking out my prompt box and writing stuff based off of prompts but I kinda hate doing that.

Life's been strange of late. The smoke from the fires in California land Oregon have reached the East Coast. It's made the sky look the wrong color and there's the faint scent of fire and death on the air. Death by fire smells like burnt to blackened, charred, ash meat. When I was a kid, we drove past a house where people died in a fire and that smell was there. I never forgot it. Smelling it on the wind now, however faintly, is disturbing and makes me feel like its a bad omen for the remainder of the year.

Looking at the pictures of the forest fires, all I can think is that is what Muspelheim looks like. Nothing but towering flame and choking smoke. It's deeply disturbing. I pray for rain to come and help put out the fires. There's a different kind of fire going on through out the country too. Protests regarding police brutality seem to be everywhere. Some folks I know have said that these are happening because people are bored and looking for some excitement after the confinement that has come with Covid-19. It's a raging fire of fury against injustice. It's not bored people looking for entertainment. It is as deadly serious as the forest fires. I keep saying that the Black Lives Matter movement is a human rights movement. There are folks who are not happy with me taking that position. It doesn't change the fact that it is.

There's a lot of egregious human rights abuses happening in my country. I never thought I'd live to see the day that state sanctioned violence happened openly in the streets. There are protestors being kidnapped from the protests by unmarked police officers into unmarked vans. It's happened in broad daylight. The Attorney General Barr is going so far as to say that he has the power to authorize this bastardy. We're not living in Nazi Germany, but the parallels that I see are deeply disturbing. I'm frustrated because my health is impared enough that I can't go protest. I can't do much aside from write angry blog posts and do my best to raise my children to know better than to act like how so many adults are right now.

It sucks the light out of things. It's enough to inspire depression by itself. To have my seasonal affective disorder and my bipolar II acting up at the same time is just making things harder. I fear for the future.

Craft of Writing: Pandemic Exhaustion Edition.

 Dear Reader,

Currently, my boys are in the background debating if you can destroy a black hole with the largest thermonuclear weapon known to humanity and speculating what will happen to the galaxy when the world will be swallowed by the sun. They are just distracting me from what I want to write with their discussions. It's been that way for months. Not because they're incredibly loud but because they're very enthusiastic about it and keep throwing out questions that catch my ear and make me go "Wait, what?" Latest question, "What do you think would happen if Jupiter replaced our moon?"

Almost all of my creative energy since March has been sucked into fielding those questions, trying to come up activities to keep the kids from getting bored, and doing my best to keep them engaged with their distance learning. Now that school has been in session for a week, you'd think that I'd have recovered some of my mojo and was ready to get back into the saddle. The problem is I'm tired. I've been on high alert since March and doing everything in my power to keep the kids distracted enough from the fact that we can't go to the park to play while at the same time trying to decide if I have to sterilize everything that comes from the store.

My anxiety has been a roller coaster. As such, my focus has been garbage. I'm tired. I'm so very tired of the anxious thought that any person I come into contact with outside of the house could be a carrier of Covid-19. It's kept me functionally housebound and miserable for these last months. I'm exhausted from trying to stay on top of the kids academic work and provide the various academic supports they need (before I had kids, I worked in special education providing support for kids like the boys). The rapid switching from one child's needs to the other child's needs makes my head spin. I try to find some solace that they are at school now (with all the safety precautions and protocols being followed) but I worry that something's going to go wrong and we're going to go back to distance learning again in the near future.

My writing time during the day is getting eaten up by chores that I'm attempting to catch up on that I had fallen way behind on when the kids were home 24/7. You don't want to see the laundry situation. It's all clean thanks to Beloved's hard work, but ... well, let me put it this way, if the pile had a bit more structure to it and clothes were a little less floppy it would easily come up to my shoulder. It's exhausting to do. My exercise routine that I was beginning to get into back in March got destroyed when the governor shut down schools and the park closed. I was starting to do walks over there while the kids were at school, but that couldn't happen and I couldn't bring the kids to the park with out them being allowed to play on the equipment (which was roped off).

I've been trying to get back into blogging but I am depressed and feeling like everything I post is pointless. I have my books for my research project here. I've read through them and just can't bring myself to start working on the notation for the project. I look at the draft of book 5 of the Umbrel Chronicles and my brain goes blank. I look at the running documents for the serial stories that I have going on here and my brain goes blank. I just want to cry sometimes because I just can't seem to tap into my creativity right now.

Unless it's in yarn. I've been making my anxiety washcloths again. I have a pile that's several inches high and I'm almost done with the cone of yarn that Beloved bought me about two weeks ago. I was working on a monstrous sized version of the wingspan shawl. Initially, I planned on doing it in the full spectrum of colors. I started out with a hook two sizes larger than was called for in the pattern. This has had unintended consequences. The exponential growth of the pattern has me at the point where I'm working on the color green (I started with red that was half a ball of yarn, orange was 1 ball, yellow was 2...) and there's no way I'm going to go beyond green. Green is 4 1lb balls of yarn. This thing is long enough to cover my couch and I'm not even finished with this section. Blue would be 8. Purple would be 16. I can't do it. I've learned my lesson, do the project in the recommended hook size or it will take over your home. To say the least, the weather got too hot for me to work on the wingspan project and I had to set it aside for about two months.

So, I started an embroidery project. I've been stalled on that because I feel guilty working on it when I have piles of laundry to put away and other household chores to work on. That feeling of guilt has been stopping me from writing too. I'm kinda flailing and doing about as well as a fish out of water. And, ontop of all this, I had to put down my fancy crowntail betta fish because he caught some kind of parasite. I'm a bit emotionally raw from that. And from some familial troubles dealing with my side of the family. I'm still sorting those emotions out and struggling to figure out what manner of productive thing I can do with them.

To say that I'm not doing well is a bit of an understatement. I'm going to do my best to get back into my posting on a daily basis. I can't promise immediate success. My schedule is a mess. My brain is not exactly in the best state becasue I'm depressed and the seasonal affective disorder is starting to kick my butt. But I will try. And I'll post pictures of the monstrosity when I get the green triangle done and of the embroidery project as I get more of it filled in. The embroidery project is a quote from Dune. It's the only good thing to have come out of that series of books. Frank Hubert was a mysogynistic prick. He may have had talent as a writer but he was about as kind to women in his works as H.P. Lovecraft was to people of color.  This quote came into my life during a particularly rough period when I was a kid. On the tapestry I am embroidering, I dropped part of the quote, but it has enough of it to get the point across. Here's the Dune  Litany Against Fear:

I will not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
It is the little death that brings oblivion.
I shall face my fear and allow it to pass over and through me.
And when I turn my inner eye along the path it has gone,
Only I shall remain.

How is it the middle of September already?

 Dear Reader,

I have no idea how it is the middle of September. I could have sworn that it was still August last week. I'm operating on the edge of burnout right now. As I review book five of the Umbrel Chronicle series, I am just staring at the pages in exhaustion. Times like now, it'd be real handy to have an editor I could tap for a few hours to trouble shoot this stuff. 

My youngest child has decided that he's going to be an author like me. Over the summer, I taught him about outlines and how they work to make writing your story easier. He's still on the fence about the idea but he put together a pretty good story for his brother's birthday. We were going to use Lulu.com to self-publish it as a picture book but he kept getting distracted from making the pictures for the book. I'm saving the story, however. He has his own file box full of story ideas and notebooks that he's filling up with pictures and snippets of stories.

It's like watching a younger version of myself at work. This is going to be interesting as he gets going in English class at school. Either he is going to do very well and make great strides because of his enthusiasim, or he's going to get frustrated because the assignment limitations keep him from writing what he wants. Beloved (my husband) was the second kind of student. Even as I type this, he is in his room writing when he should be putting toys away.

The real trick here is going to be helping him with his handwriting and correcting his grammar. He gets excited and his handwriting degrades to an illegible scrawl. I have absolutely no idea where he gets that from. *wink* I really hope we don't have to do flashcards. I hated flashcards as a kid. They felt pointless and stupid. I learned more from working with the language than I did from just memorizing how to spell words and meanings. That's what dictionaries are for, am I right?

The kids are back in school with all safety protocols in place and social distancing. So far, they've reported that they have no homework. I'm a little suspicious but this is the first week of school. I have spent my mornings just stumbling around with my cup of coffee and trying to make headway into research I am doing for a religious text that I'm working on. This business of getting up at 5:45am IS NOT my friend. But, the kids bounce out the door and have made it to the bus on time every day this week with all of their supplies. I have even remembered to pack lunches for every body. So, maybe there's hope for me after all.