reading – Jenny Wren

Tuesday Update – When Blackberries Attack

30 June

June gloom has come late to this corner of the world. The heat and sunshine gave way to clouds, a bit of rain, and temperatures in the low 60s (Fahrenheit, of course). This was conductive to property maintenance — I have done battle with more blackberries than I care to mention, and I carry the scars now as trophies.

Strawberries, a few raspberries, and of course, herbs, have been coming in. I helped friends harvest cherries, and was rewarded with more cherries than I could hope for! Most have been either eaten or canned. I do love opening a jar of cherries to snack on in the depths of winter! Some were set aside to become jam. That is a next weekend job.

Herbs and strawberries were either immediately enjoyed or dehydrated for later.

It is Monday as I write this, and I am exhausted. Combination of hard labor at home and too many hours at work are catching up to me. But we must persevere, as this is the nature of life.

I have read some excellent books this week. The Divine Gardener’s Handbook by Eli Snow was an especially pleasant read. Very punk, very hopecore, very queer. All the things I like in a modern novel. I had an advanced reader copy, the book won’t be officially out until August. When it does hit the shelves, I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy!

As for nonfiction, I am working my way through Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economies. I expect it will take me a couple of weeks to get through at my current summer pace, as I have little time for the more concentrated reading necessary for such a work. Thus far, I have found it thought provoking and engaging, which is what I like best in quality nonfiction.

Finally, my own writing continues apace. I have made quite a few plot discoveries in the Ragman. Pandora, especially, surprised me by becoming more than just a sentence in a paragraph that developed some of the lore of this world. Before I mainly had fully developed characters strutting around the room, but only the idea of a story. Now I have both the story and the characters, so it is time to lock them in a room together to see how it all plays out. How exciting!

Over on Medium you can read Convenience Is a Trap, where I try to lay out why we need to do hard things and accept that kindness can actually be cruelty.

Enjoy the week, friends. Do something radical, revolutionary, and remarkable!

Yours in hope,

Tuesday Update – In the Thick of It

We discovered a dawn redwood seedling in a cage full of weeds. Gonna have to clean that up so the little one can thrive!

I do wish I had more news from the writing front to share this week, but I do not. Okay, a bit of a lie. I reworked about 6,000 words of Ragman into a better form. I was hitting a wall. Not so much a wall, but a stumbling block. The issue? I had three strong characters all vying for the limelight – Ragman, Blue, and Indigo (yes, there is a reason why two characters are named after colors that lie close together on the spectrum, although one character is a mostly human woman and the other is a dog, well, a Grim to be exact). Holy run-on parenthetical, Batman!

Anyway, I worked out the head butting that was occurring with these three so that they can share the stage in a mostly sensible manner, so I hope to start moving forward with the story itself this week. I hope to give a more concrete update next week!

My reading has been all over the place. I am almost finished with TJ Klune’s “In the Lives of Puppets.” Barring something horrible happening in the last couple of chapters, which I am not concerned about because I adore Klune’s work, this will be a whole-hearted recommendation for anyone looking for a bit of queer fantasy lit. I typically describe Klune’s work as pre-hopecore. Why? Because he catches that fleeting bit of time when the dystopia is dying and hope is just about to be sown anew. Klune’s work leaves me heartbroken but hopeful, which is quite powerful since the real world we live in also leaves me heartbroken but overflowing with hope each and every day.

I’ve also been plowing through various bits of non-fiction. I finished my re-read of Mark Boyle’s Moneyless Manifesto, I will finish Live Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies tonight or tomorrow, and I will begin Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics tonight or tomorrow. The first two are recommends, for sure, and the last one likely will be as well. At least for those of my readers that are sick and tired of what the industrial revolution has resulted in, economically speaking.

Seriously – we industrialized just so we can make squishy toys and Pokemon cards? Really? This is why I read hopecore fantasy for relaxation, people!

Finally…FINALLY…we are doing so much work on the property. We dug out a sawmill from 18 wheelbarrow loads of partially composted sawdust. It had been overtaken by blackberries that had rooted in the sawdust (the sawmill sits atop asphalt, so the blackberries couldn’t root any deeper thankfully). We have hauled so much scrap to the brush pile that we may need to build a new one. We also discovered an entire sequoia tree buried underneath blackberries at the foot of our lane. The tree is healthy, and will likely be more so now that it is exposed to the light.

We also found time to start a batch of cherry wine, to dehydrate 15 pounds of rhubarb, to celebrate Mozy’s birthday (my partner), to pass all of my university courses this quarter, tend to the garden, do general (non-clean-up) yard work, work at the bookstore, drink beer and play darts, practice violin, and somehow, miraculously, to sleep.

Summer is both my favorite season and my busiest, which is exactly how it should be!

Go forth in hope, friends!

Tuesday Update — Discombobulated

26 May

Remember the change I mentioned last week? It has discombobulated me a bit more than I thought it would. Side note — isn’t discombobulated a simply delicious word? I love it!

Anyway, here I am, a full week in and I made the mistake I always make, I thought I could do everything with a dash of even more. Usually this starts well enough, but ends in flames. I think, maybe, perhaps, I caught this before I exploded into a fiery ball of burn out and exhaustion. How did I do this? I’m taking a day, today in fact, to sit around and restructure my time and to freaking relax.

It’s raining, that pleasant and invigorating rain of early summer. Playing hooky today is also invigorating, as any sort of rebellion tends to be. Wish me luck!

Writing Updates:

No weekly Medium essay this time. This is part of my playing hooky and reassessment of my time usage. I fully expect to be back in fine fettle next week, so I shall deliver an essay then.

My other main writing work has been either for our friend the Ragman, or it has been personal exploratory work as I figure out the shape of my life for the next few months, at least. Not the sort of stuff I share publically, although it is the sort of stuff that future essays are often born of. Think of exploratory writing as the Orion Nebula — a nursery for the future words that will ignite into new stars.

Reading Updates:

I finished rereading Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing. I’m still working through my reread of Mark Boyle’s The Moneyless Manifesto.

In new reads, as in I haven’t read them before, I am chugging away at Sanderson’s Elantris — I adore this book, but it is slow going because it is a heavier epic fantasy with lots of moving parts, and my summer brain isn’t quite up to the work. So a chapter a day, most days, is my limit. Still, read Sanderson if you haven’t. He’s a nice break from the “romantasy” that has taken over and watered down my favorite genre.

Of course, three books isn’t enough, so I also started reading Ecotopia Emerging by Ernest Callenbach. I read his classic Ecotopia years ago, but wasn’t aware that there was a follow up. The suggested reads on openlibrary.org revealed it to me, and lo and behold, it was available to borrow for free!

Survive & Thrive:

Two words for you — rhubarb candy! We have so much rhubarb and it is mainly useful only when heavily sugared in a dessert. True, I like it sliced fine in a slaw, or stewed down as a base for a barbecue sauce or dressing, but its usage is fairly limited.

On a whim, I tossed some sliced rhubarb with some honey and chili powder, then dehydrated it in the electric dehydrator. Oh my! It’s a lovely tart treat with a flavor reminiscent of Mexican chamomile candies and a texture like a gummy bear! A delicious addition to certain rice and wild rice dishes, chicken salad, or any salad really. I even sprinkled some on top of a pesto pizza and it was divine. Anywhere that you would use dried cranberries, raisins, or a bit of tart fruit in a savory dish works well. I imagine it would do really well with pork dishes, too!

The rest has been standard — we transferred the rhubarb wine to a carboy to finish out over the next three weeks, then we shall bottle it. Our next decision is what to get into the fermenting bucket next! I gave all of our herbs a haircut and dried the excess for future use. The beans, peas, lettuce, mustard, and spinach germinated, but my cucumber and zucchini seeds may be too old so I will likely be picking up seedlings somewhere this week.

We had to put netting over the strawberry patch because the squirrels are eating all the leaves! Usually we don’t need to protect them until they start to produce berries. We also tended to a lot of chores. Like weeding around the trees, mainly to remove blackberry vines that tangle around the trunks. We also cleaned the moss and tree debris off our lane. I like how it looks, but that much debris is hard on the asphalt and it can become slick to drive on, so needs must.

There is also the usual weekly stuff I don’t really talk about — making all our meals at home, baking bread, tending the garden, foraging, fixing stuff that breaks, hunting down or making replacements for things that can’t be fixed (and preferably doing this without spending any money), drinking beer on the deck, chatting with neighbors and friends, playing darts, and practicing my fiddle. You know, the stuff of living.

As always, yours in hope,

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!