Tag Archives: reading

Tuesday Update – Digging In

My image. Mine, mine, mine! Okay…I’ll share it. Enjoy!

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!

Tuesday Update – Another Trip Around the Sun

I’ve made another full revolution around the sun! Last Friday, I celebrated my birthday by simply turning another year older. There were also some meals with loved ones, gifts, a bit of beer, and perhaps a few more fun things. These, obviously, were unimportant compared to the arrival of an AARP envelope welcoming me into “being damned old enough to belong to the American Association of Retired Persons.”

HAH! Joke’s on them, I’m a writer and an American citizen, so I will never be able to retire!

Oh. Ugh….

Ah, well, onward and upward! At least the skies have been blue, and temperatures have left the arctic zone (for me, that means it is 60 F outside instead of 45 F). Shorts and beer garden weather, which is why it is my favorite time of year.

Writing Updates

I don’t want to say it was an unproductive week, although looking at my spreadsheet, it appears less productive than past weeks. I have a good reason for that, though.

I’ve mentioned before that I do a timed writing prompt every morning as a warm-up exercise. Well, over the course of several days, my prompt writing began to link together. Not a huge thing, this happens, and often, I get a full-length short story out of the prompt writing.

This was a bit different. I’ve put a novel idea, which I call Ragman,  on the back burner to cook a bit until summer break, when I expect to have time to give it the attention it deserves. 

Apparently, Ragman is not very patient, though. Three mornings in a row, Ragman kept creeping into my morning warmup with new characters and directions. Things I hadn’t even had on my radar. Does this mean I need to start focusing on Ragman now, while still in the thick of the university season?

Perhaps. Perhaps…

That is not to say I was completely not hitting my goals! I finished revising “Dendrolatry” and have sent it out into the world. Two submissions this week, but planning a few more over the coming weeks as submission windows open at a few places.

I received a rejection for “From Little Mice.” It was a nice rejection, not rude at all, from the journal Hearth Stories. I also received a rejection from Jeopardy for the flash story “Myths of Each Other.” Also, a nice rejection, but I also know the editor personally, so perhaps they felt they had to be nice. I jest! Plus, I have two more stories submitted to that publication (with different editors, though), so they may still accept something.

Published this week is “Is It Capitalism, or the New Feudalism?” over on Medium. (Free read friend link below, share it wide and far!) It’s an exploration of how we can create room for creating and creative thought in the system where we currently find ourselves. 

Reading Notes

I finished Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers and have moved on to the second book, Prayer for the Crown Shy. I went into these books knowing I would love them. I love every single thing that Chambers writes, from now until forever. I love how she plays with the idea of gender and speciesism and nonbinary/nondualistic love. 

What I didn’t expect was how much I was going to specifically love these two books. They are library books, soon they will be my books because I placed them on order at my local independent bookstore (you know I am not ordering them from some online retailer). I see myself carrying these books in my bag, just so I can read a passage or chapter whenever I am sad, confused, or need some inspiration. 

These books are that good. Go read them.

I also finished Laura Goode’s Pitch Craft. Another excellent book, for different reasons, obviously. Goode does an excellent job breaking down the state of the writing and publishing world as it is right now. Most of the craft books I find on the publishing industry are woefully out of date or have put all of the eggs into the self-publishing basket. Pitch Craft is both up to date and it is an engaging read. I rarely read books like this cover to cover, but I did this one. It’s another one that I am adding to my reference) bookshelf. 

The sun is still shining. If you are familiar with the PNW in April, you are also aware that this may change at any moment, and it will once again be cold and rainy. Thus, I am going to find a beer garden to sit in so I can soak up the sun, people-watch, and get back to the business of writing.

As always, go forth in hope, Friends!