Better Than Dead

Currently reading:

(Subtitle: The life and mysterious death of Scottish churchman and scholar Robert Kirk and his influential treatise on fairy folklore.)

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I have two novels that are fighting it out for my attention, one about goddesses and one about Faery with a substantial appearance by the Rev. Robert Kirk of The Secret Commonwealth fame who has been after me for years to tell a version of his story. They have been team tagging me for months, first one then the other.

But both novels are wrapped in a cloud of ennui and exhaustion that is summer seasonal affective disorder, with a side of pandemic miasma. My health hasn’t been great the last few months, most especially the last two weeks, so that is adding to the funk. Nothing serious, I don’t think, but chronic. Which means that any progress I make on these two novels is sporadic at best.

I am so not alone in this. I know many creators who are facing similar struggles, but I do feel that I’ve slipped my mooring and am drifting in circles, becalmed in a Sargasso Sea.

I get occasional signs from the universe that it isn’t done with me yet, and the Sargasso, beneath its floating mat of seaweed, is a fertile region of biodiversity for many species. But I fear mine will  wonder if I have another novel in me? And if I do, is it only one? Will I be able to finish both of these projects? I don’t know the answer to that.

All I can do is to keep chipping away at the marble, hoping that the form within will eventually reveal itself and come to life: a real flesh and blood woman. Or man. I have no preferences. Only a forlorn hope. And two metaphors, neither of which I can choose between.

I would say to my pagan friends the same thing I would say to my friends of any religion: beware thinking your way is the One True Faith. There are many paths back to the Source, but judgement and rigidity are not amongst them.
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I’d start calling him President Cthulhu but that’s an insult to Cthulhu.
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You know, I’ve supported Nancy Pelosi all this time but mostly kept quiet because I didn’t want to fight with people, often people I liked and admired. I’m a little ashamed of that, but oh well. I knew, you see, that Pelosi is one of the canniest and most experienced politicians in Washington and I knew she was holding fire for a good reason. Last week that reason became eminently clear: she was waiting for a smoking gun. One that these cretins couldn’t wiggle out of, one that the general American public could readily understand. It may be argued that the Mueller report was a smoking gun, but even Mueller himself obfuscated and demurred so much that it wasn’t something that could be easily conveyed to the larger public. But everybody understands the kind of brutish and heavy-handed strong-arming Trump attempted with Ukraine. It was schoolyard bully stuff and illegal and immoral as hell. It’s enough to start changing minds–except for his rabid believers, of course. Trump said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and no one would hold him responsible. What he was too stupid or arrogant to realize was that when he did give Nancy Pelosi an easy-to-hold gun of her own, she would have no hesitation in pulling the trigger. Good work, Madame Speaker. I’m sorry I didn’t defend you.
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You know that overworked and ridiculous phrase in writing: “She (he) released a breath she didn’t know she was holding”? I’ve always loathed it in a work of fiction, but when the Ukraine news broke and with all the revelations that came out… I released a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
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I used this deck quite a lot at one point in my life. Can you tell?

Fortunately, the cards don’t look as disreputable as the box. And after literally decades of using this deck, I just discovered that I had two Knights of Swords. I’m not sure what that means. I would probably have never known if they both hadn’t come up in the same reading. Reversed. And yes, I guess the day of that reading had been about being, “indiscreet, extravagant, and foolish.” I’ve been through the entire deck now and there are no other duplications and no missing cards. But I guess I’d better pay attention to that Knight, hadn’t I?
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I was born in the last six hours of Virgo, just seven hours shy of the Autumn Equinox (West Coast time), so I have a hella amount of Libra in my chart. I was really feeling the effects of the new moon in Libra at the end of September. I tried to use that energy well. Balance and rectification. Throwing off the shackles of old bad habits that are holding me back.
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One of the best parts of living alone is that when I’m not feeling well I can sit around and groan and not worry about driving anyone crazy with my drama queen ways.
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I was watching one of those ghost shows on TV and the house owner was talking about how a ghost threw her cat across the kitchen. And there’s the cat sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor with its leg up cleaning its nether regions. He seemed very unconcerned in general. She took the ghost hunters into the bedroom to talk about what happened in there and here comes the cat to sprawl on the bed. “I ain’t afraid a no ghosts.” In fact, I kind of regard cats as a reverse ghost monitor. If they are there and not concerned they ain’t no ghost there.
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Every time I watch the science channel I wonder if the people who came up with the SciGo acronym realized how close it sounds to “psycho.”
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When the estimable Dr. Lucy Jones, eminent geologist, says that she fears climate change more than earthquakes one should really pay attention. I saw her state just that in a recent interview.
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I may have finished writing something that seemed very much like the denouement of my current novel. Only the coda left, and that’s already half written. But it’s been a couple of weeks now and I still haven’t finished it. I can’t help wondering if this resistance is a way of preventing myself from moving on. Or knowing that once I finish that coda, I’m done with this world for the foreseeable future. I can’t see writing any more Dos Lunas stories any time soon–and I’ve lived there on and off for so long (since 2000), I may be reluctant to let go.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that I like having mindless tasks to do, things that most people would never have the patience for. I suspect it’s a Virgo thing.
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Oh yeah, that probably explains a lot about the last few months. I forgot until just last week that I have summer SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Somehow I manage to forget that every freaking year.

1. Let me thread you a story… (1-17)
2. Portalville has been on summer vacation. Yep, that’s right, the whole danged town. We needed a break from our day-to-day reality.
3. So we hired us a whole mess of buses and drove them through the portal after which Portalville is named.
4. We came out in another plain of existence, somewhere folks could all agree about things and where no one felt better than anyone else.
5. Clearly, not any place on this earth.
6. Now, Portalville is a pretty friendly place under normal circumstances and we mostly get along with each other right nice.
7. But sometimes it all gets a bit much, especially when outside agitators come to town and demand we take sides in their outside arguments.
8. It gets wearying, and if you add into that the tendency of most folks in town towards summer seasonal affective disorder…
9. Well, like I said, time for a break. So, Mayor Begay ordered up those buses. We had the dire wolves manning the barricades on Route 40,
10. let the Rock tribe seal up the passes through the Imogen Mountains, and told Dennis the Toll Troll to shut down the Wynotte Bridge—
11. although the mayor told him he still wasn’t allowed to eat anyone who tried to cross. We sure hope he kept his word there.
12. With the town sealed off from the world and our minds at ease about invasion, we took to the portal and had us a fine time.
13. ‘Course, vacation always has to end sometime. The kids had to get back to school, the maintenance crews had to get back to work.
14. And running away from problems never does any good in the long run. Not while you’re a living, breathing human being.
15. Ain’t none of us dead yet, and while you’re drawing air into your lungs you need to be part of the world. Or you ain’t really living.
16. So yep, we’re back. We’re still breathing. For now, anyway. All I can truly say for sure is that we’re back for today.
17. But then, today is all you ever have, ain’t it?

This tale can also be found on Twitter @downportalville.

I ran across this passage in Women Who Run With the Wolves the other day:

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life; hold on, for the promise from the wild nature is this: after winter, spring always comes.

For me, it’s autumn.

I shake my feathers and the dust of the summer doldrums shifts away from them. Soon I’ll step into the cool, crisp waters of Fall and it will be washed away completely. I’ll slap my wings into the bath of autumn winds, dip my head, ruffle my feathers, and be off, on the wing again.

Summer has always been a trial for me. You know that Seasonal Affective Disorder thing? I always knew there was a summertime version of it, long before science tumbled to the fact. Every year, starting about late spring, I’d feel myself sinking. By full summer, I’d be slogging along through hot molasses. Then the seasons turned again and I’d be filled with incredible new energy that lasted through the winter and into early spring. I have always started new novels in the fall. That’s when they burgeoned inside me most naturally.

This year we had a mild summer, but the doldrums came anyway. It’s been a difficult year in other ways and I’ve been so exhausted I have hardly had time for that creative life. I thought many times of quitting altogether—but hey, anyone who’s known me long knows I’ve been down that path before. I spent most of the year doing revisions rather than creating new works. That weighed me down, too. But the spark always refuses to die, no matter how convinced I am that this time it will finally be extinguished. No matter how desperate I feel, how pushed into the earth I feel, that little light remains—and probably will until my bones are pushed into the earth.

I don’t yet know for sure that things will be okay, but I trust that little light. And I’m rising again. The wind may be crisp and cold, but once more it promises sure flight.