I dream of violets breaking through the earth,
presenting themselves with shy giggles,
and the ferns unfurling their fronds in stately parade,
Even the scruffy dandelions will come,
elbowing each other for room,
boldly declaring their rights under the sun.
For now, I must be satisfied with dreams
of introducing new lives in the garden —
rhubarb and greens and humble turnips all
slumbering in shells in cool, dry packages.
I’ve just gotten back to reading tarot cards, having gotten a new deck for Christmas. I’m not great with it — in fact, I still have to read the little guidebook to see what the cards are telling me, mostly because I’m not a visual person.
I don’t read tarot to predict my future or anyone else’s. None of this “slap, slap, slap, your dog’s gonna die” card reading. I read Tarot as a way of understanding what’s going on in someone’s psyche. I pick decks and methods that are suited for interrogating undercurrents and suggesting right action. The Good Tarot, my Christmas present, functions well in this way.
I don’t see my tarot-reading ability as having great favor from the spirits or anything dramatic like that. Tarot, to me, is a way of unlocking intuition and perhaps giving life-affirming instruction. Frankly, my readings are closer to positive psychology than woo-woo. Given that I teach positive psychology, that’s not surprising.
This morning I gave myself a very short reading. The way I do this is ask a question — the question was “what’s in store for me today?” I had already decided I would take some time putting more description in Voyageurs to make up for the material I cut by advice of my dev editor. So that was very much a part of “today”, but so was going to the weight clinic to try to find out why I haven’t lost this last 20 pounds. (I’ve lost 65 and have been on a plateau for a year).
I laid down one card — the two of fire. Its basic meaning — “creative planning for the future, mapping progress, trusting in the unknown. Spirit-led ambition.” (Baron-Reid, 2017). I laughed, because I sensed that one card told me everything I needed to know. But when I shuffled the cards again, two cards fell out — the aforementioned two of fire and The Fool, the card that symbolizes the beginning of a journey, a child’s enthusiasm.
The way those two cards go together tells more of a story: I am at the beginning of a journey, planning the journey with enthusiasm, trusting in the unknown rather than assuming that news will always be bad. It’s entirely possible I’m misinterpreting this and it’s about my class planning for the semester, although that’s less like a journey and more like a walk around the block. I suppose it could be about a journey I don’t know about yet. It doesn’t matter, because what matters is that I take that attitude to all my journeys.
Baron-Reid, C. (2017). The Good Tarot Guidebook. Hay House Publishing.
It’s New Year’s Day, and Trump is still president, damn it.
I don’t make resolutions, because they’re more wish than goal without the supports that will make it happen. However, it is my custom over New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day to do all the important things I want to incorporate in my life. In other words, I prefer my superstitious tradition to the superstitious tradition of making resolutions. Go figure.
Therefore, in the next two days, I need to:
I know that most of you in the United States are people I already know. My overseas readers, for the most part, seem to be regulars, but I don’t know you (or don’t think I know you). I am addressing all of you.
I need your thoughts and prayers.
Not in the sense of “I need to say something of comfort so I can go back to what I was doing,” as is too often the case when handling preventable tragedies in the US.
But I believe in thoughts and prayers if they occur in the sense of “I hope the best for this person.” I believe this has an effect — not necessarily to bring out a desired outcome, but to provide hope, clarity, courage, patience in the person who needs these things.
I need these things, because I’m struggling with writing. You might have noticed that I haven’t been able to write daily, and that’s because I don’t know if I’m going to continue writing. I have no idea if I’m ever going to be published, and I’m not sure it’s worth the time and money it takes to improve and make a story reading-ready.
But I don’t know if I’m not going to continue writing, either.
So, if you have a spare moment and the intent to help, send thoughts and prayers my way. You don’t even have to tell me you did. But I need to find clarity to move forward in whatever direction opens to me. .
I write this from Ottawa, Illinois, where I am visiting my father and sister and her family for Christmas.
Things I’m thinking about:
1) I wish I could drop Northwest Missouri State (my place of employment) onto Ottawa. This would unite a college town without a college (Ottawa) with a college without a college town (Maryville). I miss the river and the beautiful state parks and the invigorated atmosphere of a town that attracts people from Chicago and the suburbs,.
2) I still have to adjust to being 55. The hardest part is that it’s now unseemly for me to get crushes on younger men (maybe it was before, but I didn’t notice). I’ve gone from being flattering to being an embarassment. This is a major adjustment for me.
3) I can be with my family without talking much. This is a relief.
4) I’m editing Voyageurs, and the big problem is that I have to “fill in” with 34,000 words. I have NO IDEA how to do this. Think good thoughts.
Merry Christmas to all my readers — please keep in touch!
I haven’t written in a couple days, for which I’m sorry. I like interacting with all of you.
Update:
I’m still getting rejections, despite the improvements I’ve made to Prodigies. I’m also getting compliments despite that — I’ve been complimented for the quality of my writing, the scope of my story, and my character development. I don’t think the agents are saying this just to be nice. It’s just that the story doesn’t grab them. Or something.
I still entertain the belief that I can get an agent, and then get published. I sometimes entertain Walter Mitty-esque fantasies that I can make the New York Times bestseller list, and then I get another rejection and realize that I should settle for getting published by a smaller traditional publisher (AKA one that doesn’t expect me to do all the marketing, because I’m a writer, not a marketer.
My fantasies are out there, but at least they push me to work my hardest on my craft. Even if no agents want to take it on.
I’m done with finals! A few last-minute items will trickle in and I will have to grade those as they come in, but … I’m done.
This means editing time. I have the developmental edits on Voyageur and the pre-developmental edit on Reclaiming the Balance. I’m not writing anything new until I get most of my written works through developmental edit.
Unless, of course, I get INSPIRED.
It could happen. There’s a book (unabashed fantasy-romance again) I want to write about a librarian with the heart of a lion and a fae trying to escape the Queen of Faerie. Somewhat like the old Tam Lin ballad except with more (a lot more) escapades. Definite Heroine’s Journey here. I don’t know if she ends up keeping the guy, though.
We’ll see. After all, this is my break …
I dusted off a manuscript that I had written a couple years ago which is in line for developmental edit. The name of the novel is Reclaiming the Balance, and one of the main characters is Amarel, who is balanced on the point between young and old, wise and foolish, human and Archetype — and male and female.
In other words, Amarel was born genderqueer, complete with ambiguous genitalia.
When looking through the story, I realized that I had used the word “him” to refer to Amarel, which was first and foremost offensive, because the pronoun boxed him into a binary Amarel didn’t belong to. I misgendered Amarel.
So I introduced gender-neutral pronouns for Amarel — ze for he/she, hir for him/her and his/hers, hirself for himself/herself. I wrote a lot of substitutions, given that Amarel is one of the main characters.
The revised novel is a bit harder to read, because I am not used to gender-neutral pronouns. This might be a good thing or a bad thing for the reader — good in that the reader feels the discomfort of the people around Amarel; bad in that this might make it more difficult to read.
The gender-neutral pronouns also tend to add a feeling of isolation to Amarel’ s situation, which is accurate. Amarel is the only person referred to as hir and ze. We still treat the gender queer as “other”, as people who purposefully isolate themselves from society through their rejection of the binary gender construction of society.
If the story had been written in first person, Amarel may have seen everyone as ze/hir/hirself, which would make a pretty inescapable point to the reader. Alas, Reclaiming the Balance is a third-person novel, so it will only convey so much of the point.
