Author Archives: Autumn

Crusade

I have issues with poor punctuation and grammar, especially on signage. Most of the time I can grit my teeth against it and carry on. Incorrect use of quotation marks, however, is something that drives me over the edge.

Neil Gaiman posted a link to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks and made my day.

And just because, I’m including an Angry Flower comic that Lightspeedchick modified for me a few years ago. Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe is the original (which is also very funny because it is true); her modification for me is below.

Poetry Offering for Imbolc

I am somewhat late on the annual Imbolc post-a-poem-for-Brigid fest (but not really by my calculation, since the way I calculate things Imbolc began yesterday and carries through today, and indeed I celebrate it for about ten days), but here is my offering. It’s a wonderful poem that Pasley found and asked HRH to read at Tallis’ naming ceremony yesterday.


Advice from a Tree
By Ilan Shamir

Dear Friend,

Stand Tall and Proud
Sink your roots deeply into the Earth
Reflect the light of a greater source
Think long term
Go out on a limb
Remember your place among all living beings
Embrace with joy the changing seasons
For each yields its own abundance
The Energy and Birth of Spring
The Growth and Contentment of Summer
The Wisdom to let go of leaves in the Fall
The Rest and Quiet Renewal of Winter

Feel the wind and the sun
And delight in their presence
Look up at the moon that shines down upon you
And the mystery of the stars at night.
Seek nourishment from the good things in life
Simple pleasures
Earth, fresh air, light

Be content with your natural beauty
Drink plenty of water
Let your limbs sway and dance in the breezes
Be flexible
Remember your roots

Enjoy the view!

It was wonderful advice to give to an infant, and good for everyone to hear. (The ceremony was lovely; Tallis was the only one not crying. A success all round. More tomorrow.)

This poetry offering ties in to the ones being sponsored by Oak (who is carrying on the tradition begun by Reya), among others.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 25,049
New words today: 2,048

That’s more like it. Now I’m where I want to be: past 25K and a day’s yield of 2K. I’m happy.

Having three days in a row to work really helps keep me focused. Adding the extra day at the caregiver’s every second week when the boy spends Friday with his grandma was brilliant. On these Fridays, HRH takes the car to work and drops Sparky off en route. This helps me immensely, as all I have to do when I get up is make tea, have some toast, help get them out the door, and then sit down to work. I get to the computer around two hours earlier than I usually do on this day because I don’t have to head out to the caregiver’s and run whatever errands need to be run on the way home, and the workday is longer because I don’t have to stop writing at four-thirty, when I’m on a roll.

I’m feeling a lot better about the project. I can see that it will really start to coalesce over the next couple of weeks. I’ll feel even better once it’s vaguely recognizable as a book, instead of a collection of unconnected thoughts and uneven sections.

Yay me.

Reissue News!

I just received a message from my editor at Provenance Press. She told me that The Way of the Green Witch is selling steadily (hurrah!) and that they’re reissuing it with a new cover!

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am about this. Hearing that a book is selling steadily is always good news, but to hear that the cover is being redone made my week. I am less than fond of the Way of the Green Witch cover; I was disappointed with it when they showed me the final version and suggested several other possibilities, including some of the very different original cover they proposed for it, but without success. The new cover is being finalised right now, and as soon as I have a picture of it I’ll post it. I’m so excited!

My editor is also pushing for a reissue of Solitary Wicca for Life with a new cover. Updates as events warrant!

What I Read This January

Tarot Cafe vol. 1 by Sang-Sun Park
Violin Dreams by Arnold Steinhardt
Childe Morgan by Katherine Kurtz
Dark Moon Defender by Sharon Shinn
Virgin Earth by Philippa Gregory
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Earthly Joys by Philippa Gregory
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
The Druidry Handbook by John Michael Greer
Dust by Elizabeth Bear
Daughter of Venice by Donna Jo Napoli
Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature by Linda Lear
You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop by John Scalzi
The Cipher by Diana Pharaoh Francis

Notes for Posterity:

Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature by Linda Lear: I wax rhapsodic over this book! Lovely! Even the two chapters on mycology, which gave me more general knowledge and detail about fungus than I ever wanted to know! Potter is one of my heroes, so this three-inch-thick hardcover was such a joy to read. An excellent, well-balanced biography.

Dust by Elizabeth Bear: I enjoyed this so darn much. I’m mildly curious as to why I enjoyed it more than Bear’s Promethean Age books, for as a general rule I prefer reading stories with Elizabethan poets, faerie, and ceremonial magic in them to space opera/generation ship sagas. The characters were just so well-crafted, though, and I liked how a lot of the story was implied but not actually told, leaving the reader to be a really active participant in constructing the narrative. Also, it features really cool concepts of deity and of how lore gets encoded in day to day life over millennia within a closed system. And somehow, while Bear implies a lot, she still manages to convey a remarkably rich atmosphere. I’m in awe of how Bear can leap from genre to genre and write so well in all of them.

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor: Another book where I chose a bad place to stop, early on in the book. When I eventually picked it up and read past that point, it was excellent. I should buy the second one.

Violin Dreams by Arnold Steinhardt: I read this in a hour and a half, and was left feeling as if there was three-quarters of the book missing. Now, I understand that the book is deliberately impressionist in that it’s a narrative that traces the different instruments Steinhardt has owned and one particular piece of music he has a special relationship with, but there was just enough context given that I felt there were gaping autobiographical lacunae. There was a lot of time devoted to covering certain events, and others glossed over or left out and yet still referred to later.

Childe Morgan by Katherine Kurtz: Thanks to my fibro-fog I bought this thinking it was a stand-alone or first in a trilogy, then read it and realized that it was a second volume in a trilogy. And what is referred to as having happened in the first volume was vaguely recognizable, but I can’t find the book on my shelves, and now I don’t know if I actually read it at some point or if my brain is obligingly filling in the gaps with trowelfuls of imagination. (Checking my Past Read list, I see that I did in fact read it exactly two years ago, so why I can’t find the book is a mystery.)

Tarot Cafe by Sang-Sun Park: This was a ‘hey, whatever’ buy through a remainder shop, purchased because buying three books there was equivalent to buying one new, and I’d read a decent review of it somewhere. If I was into emo stories told with Bambi-eyed characters (all of them — every single one) I would have enjoyed it a lot more. As it was I was left wishing the whole thing was a lot grittier and less pretty. The concept is great — gifted Goth tarot reader reads the stories of her clients, who are all otherwordly in some way — but the prettiness is cloying. I’d like to see what Neil Gaiman would do with the concept.

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr: A solid YA retelling of the Winter/Summer kings/queens in faerie theme. Not derivative, thank goodness, and has some very well-drawn characters whose actions are believable. I’ll look for the second one when it’s released.