Blue sky. No wind. A perfect day in a perfect place.
The problem with perfect days and perfect places is that they can never last. Eventually the wind and the clouds return. The rain sheets down. The river floods. Developers destroy, using a method that they call creating, yet is anything but.
Still. Today is perfect. Tomorrow will also be perfect. Perhaps here, perhaps somewhere else. That’s okay, I’m told. It’s progress, they say.
Maybe, maybe not.
Writing Updates:
I’m still publishing weekly on Medium. This week’s oeuvre is:
True Community Isn’t Pay-to-Play Go read it. I’ll wait right here for ya.
I’ve set short fiction aside, for now. The Ragman wants out. Actually, Blue and Indigo want out. And Skookum. And a few other characters that have been poking me in the brain box when I least expect.
They want out so badly, in fact, that they took up the nearly 9,000 words I wrote last week. Skookum especially. He is an old fragment of a character I wrote a few paragraphs about, for a completely unrelated project, about six years ago. I was dusting off some old files (i.e.- actually trying to clean up the ol’ hard drive for once), and stumbled across those forgotten paragraphs.
He was ready and waiting for me. He leapt out of the screen, grabbed my hand, and said, “I have something you must see.” I followed. I saw. I wrote it down. Then, in the last sentence, he sent out a call.
The Ragman heard. I didn’t realize it when I first met Skookum all those years ago, but he is part of the Ragman’s universe.
How exciting!
Reading Updates:
For me, reading goes through phases. I usually bob along finishing two or so books a week. Usually a fiction read and a non-fiction read. But, every once in a while things go haywire and I find myself reading LOTS of books at once.
We just entered a once in a while period.
I finished A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny. Exactly what I expect of an Agent Gamache mystery, no more, no less. Although, I will admit I am having a hard time suspending disbelief, the more of these books I read. How many murders can happen in such a small town that mainly affect the same six people over and over and over again?
I also finished The Way Home by Mark Boyle. I can never recommend this book enough. This is probably my 12th time reading it. I seem to cycle through it again every few months. I am not sure why I find it so appealing, it just feels right.
I am reading:
Poor Richard’s Women by Nancy Rubin Stuart. A very engaging read! We had a power outage for a few hours last night, and I easily read over half the book before the battery in my booklight gave out. Highly recommending it so far.
Free: Adventures At the Margins of Society by Katherine Hibbert. You can read it for free on archive.org.
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. More to come after I finish it!
Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Communities by Nelson and Timmerman.
Survive & Thrive
I haven’t changed much in the previous seven days. I still hate the fact that our lives are controlled by (fake) silver coins, colorful pieces of paper, and digital pips in a bank’s database. But, I’m also a realist. So I recently got a job.
You heard me right. An actual job with regular paychecks. Don’t worry. I’m a bookseller now, working part time in a book store. A real, brick and mortar bookstore that sells real, paper books that are, to the best of our knowledge, written by real, actual human beings.
This doesn’t mean that I am giving up on the Mowse project idea, nor am I going to stop writing or publishing. It just means that even with my highfalutin ideals of a moneyless, egalitarian, eco-utopian world, I still need to eat and sleep in this world. And being able to eat and sleep is necessary to the effectiveness of the work I try to do to unravel systems of greed, stolen privileges, and eco-human destruction.
Try not to be too disappointed in me, please.
If it helps, I also started a batch of rhubarb wine, baked all our own bread, hung out with a rough sleeper (and did what I could to make their day a little less rough), published a piece on those highfalutin ideals, took care of the property I am lucky enough to call home for now, looked after a neighbor, spent lots of time with my family and friends, stood up to a bully, used public transportation, cut back on our energy dependency a small amount, harvested nettles for tea, and took as little part in the monetary greed economy as possible.
So, I’m trying!
Jenny Wren 