First attempt highlights: AW: Reading Notes - Spiritual Electricity and the Basic Tools.

 This really is all that I wrote regarding my notes on this book. Then 2019 turned into chaos which continue into today.

AW: Reading Notes 1

I will be revisiting the two chapters discussed in this post in the coming weeks.

Morning Pages 2024: No. 3

I have come to the conclusion that my prompt box is pretty lame. It has questions in there that don't apply to me. It has prompts on topics that I can't really talk about. I mean, 'what's your favorite television show?' doesn't work when you don't watch television. The closest I get to that is listening to NPR's news podcast on Spotify. Which now has advertisements, much to my annoyance. The rest of the time I am listening to neoclassical, electronica, medieval folk, medieval, and renaissance music. I suppose it is time to hunt down more prompts for the box. The last time I added any was in 2016.

2016 was a bad year for me. I was hospitalized for a major depressive episode. Almost ten years later, bit and pieces of what happened during that year come to mind at random times. Otherwise it is a gaping hole in my memory. I was talking with my Auntie A. about that year and she told me that before the depressive episode hit, I had a major trauma memory nail me between the eyes. I was saddened but it made sense.

Morning Pages 2024: No. 2

Every time I try to do this digitally, it's truly difficult to write these pages every morning. The household is chaos and then I am exhausted and I take a nap. It's just not right but here we are. Looking at my keyboard, some industrious and tiny spider spun a web between the J and the U keys last night. That was weird. But weird things happen  here. As a devotee of the Norse god of mischief, I get my very own weirdness magnet strapped to my butt. I get exasperated with the Marvel franchise distorting the relationships between the deities of the Norse pantheon. There's enough drama and wtf in the old stories, you don't need to change the relationships. You can just write new stories keeping the deities and spirits in the same relationships. 

Indeed, by exploring these relationships, one may find that the new stories discourage extremist parties from absorbing cultural symbols as part of their identity. Among the heathen subculture, there are a large number of people who are getting angry with things like the runes being appropriated. There's a subtle fight going on between heathens and neo-Nazis (and their supporters) over the runes. The general reaction to the failed self-coup on Jan. 6 was horror, embarrassment, and fury at the sight of the Q-Shaman's enormous Mjollnir inked onto his side. The same was for the tiki-torch march in Charleston (if I recall it rightly) where there were people in the white-supremacist crowd carrying badly made 'viking shields' with runes on them.

If you are looking for the people who'd be willing to throw down with these people, that would be the heathens. The community is actively rooting out, shunning, and passing around lists of who in the community fall along theses lines. Change is happening in a slow fashion right now but it's beginning to speed up as more heathens get on board with this idea of drop kicking the fascists out. 

Morning Pages 2024: No. 1

 So, I have decided to do the Morning Pages exercise as a timed writing thing. I have a sand timer that takes ten minutes to do its thing. I like it. It helps me stay organized and focused. I also enjoy the look of it because the sand is pink. I admit, my two favorite colors are pink and black. Most shades of pink, I like. But it is that bright, neon pink that I love. I don't really know what about it I love so much. It could be that it's a shade of pink that isn't found in nature. It could be that it is a color I associate with happiness and joy. It could be a lot of things, and I guess that is ok.

I forgot my eyeglasses in the other room. I'm squinting at the screen right now and debating enlarging the font so it is easier to read. I tell you, Friend, getting older just isn't much fun now. Birthdays turn into regular days of the week. Health starts going down hill. And, if you're lucky, you may be losing your hair like me. Sounds odd, but I am losing my hair. I've gone salt and pepper grey, with streaks of white. I have a buzzcut to hide where my hair is thinning and falling out. It's not fun, at all.

Sorry that I am a week late. Life caught up with me.

 Dear Reader,

My schedule has been a mess since I was sick a few months back. I'm trying to fix it but I'm having problems sleeping which just makes things worse. Sleep deprivation is not your friend. Books are still in a holding pattern because this week has been full of appointments for various family members and I'm cleaning up a disaster. You know how they say if Mom gets sick, the whole house will go to pot. For a long time, I just thought it was an expression. Then I had pneumonia for two months and it happened.

I do have one thing to report, I'm making slow progress on all this knitting and crochet I am doing to make presents for people. If I'm lucky, I will have things finished by the holidays. I feel a bit guilty that I knit so slowly, my son's sweater has been on the needles for two and a half years. Fortunately, I have the back third partly done. Now I just have to knit 24/7 to finish it. It's a WWI pattern from the Red Cross that I found on the Smithsonian's website. I thought 'oh, this looks easy enough.' and then my son saw it and declared that was exactly what he wanted me to make for him. Looks are deceiving and it is clear that my son has inherited his father's patience of death on this front.

I would post more, but I have knitting to do and coffee to drink so I can stay awake. Tomorrow, I will do my best to come up with something more directly related to this blog and not so boringly domestic.

Up coming recovery period.

 Dear Reader,

I am taking the next three days off from blogging all over creation. Sunday's Craft of Writing Post will be back to back with Monday's Flora & Fauna post. I just need some time to recover from this migraine and head cold. I'll see all y'all on Monday. ♥

Word count? What is that you speak of?

 Dear Reader,

Here we are at the final day of NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo. Many people are at or real close to the finish line. Others are slogging along, possibly cursing their decision to participate in these challenges. Word count is the big gauge of success and source of stress during this month. Posting across six blogs, I have absolutely no idea what my word count is. It took some stress off my shoulders, but six blogs ... that was a lot of work. It has cemented in my mind that some of these blogs are going to be updated on a weekly basis.  Because updating all of them in one day eats my entire morning of writing time.

The serial stories are stalled right now. The science fiction book is stalled because my notes in pencil are become illegible due to fading. At least I found them. The series of modern fantasy is on hold as I am awaiting contact back from the person who requested the work to be done. We had a gentleman's contract initially based on a virtual handshake. I have four books written and a fifth started. It is time to take that gentleman's contract and put it on paper to make clear what is expected of everyone involved. I'm having difficulty contracting him, because he's in grad school right now and busy as heck.

My fantasy series is on hold because I'm correcting errors in one book and trying to make things work according to my plot map in the other book. Hopefully books six and seven of the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar will be out by late spring. In case you are curious, the story arc plotted for the whole series takes place over thirty books. I have snippets and bits of ideas for the other books, but I have to finish what I have on the block first.