Category Archives: Words Words Words

New Clothes

So now that the owlies have moved, the I’ve-been-meaning-to-update-the-website-design-scheme project which had been lagging suddenly became much more pressing. So voila: the new Owldaughter design ought to be omnipresent. If you find a page in the old style, or a broken link, let me know via the contact buttons.

Spoiled

I’m currently craving fresh bread, balsamic vinegar, and that lovely Italian olive oil my mum hand-imported for me from Tuscany. Thank all the gods that HRH left me his keys today so that I can go out for the vinegar and the bread, otherwise there would be a very nasty Autumn waiting for him when he got home…

See what happens? I go home for twelve days, and my food standards have shot way the hey above what I normally eat. Ruined, I tell you — ruined. Although the ten sliced yellow and orange peppers from the farmers’ market (eighty cents each!) currently freezing on baking sheets in my freezer, along with the raspberries, will go a long way towards soothing my gastronomic snobbery in the coming days.

Fool’s Fate

I forgot to mention that I finished Fool’s Fate while I was gone. I can see what Ginger means when she says that she’s not quite fine with the end of Fitz’s story. I was impressed at the skill (no pun) with which story elements from three trilogies were wrapped up in general, however. It’s not a completely happy ending; there was loss, things weren’t too easy, and Robin Hobb deliberately didn’t take everything away from any of the protagonists, nor reward them completely. In the end, it just might have been the only way to end it, really.

In Which the Prodigal Returns, to Mixed Reception

We arrived home through six hours of storms and mind-numbing boredom at around seven last night. While I was gone, HRH stained the kitchen cabinets, moved some smaller pieces of furniture around, and raised the bed by about a foot to create box storage beneath it. No major crises occured in my absence, which is always a relief. Maggie punished my eleven-day absence by ignoring me until bedtime. Nixie wouldn’t leave me alone, and even talked to me with chirps and tiny meows. Cricket lay on the dining room table and sulked at the window, through which she wriggled to the Great Outdoors sometime over the week, so now having tasted freedom she is no longer satisfied with the small world known as Home, let alone the presence of her mother figure.

My day is scheduled already: I’ve caught up on e-mails, sent out a couple of queries, and now I’ll sit down with a pile of books and select new readings for the first level of students at CMS, as so much has gone out of print recently. Apparently reading selections from other teachers have been thin to non-existant, so I have a lot of work ahead of me. It was a lovely vacation, with lots of sleep and books and food, but now I’m back in the sweltering humidity and the dust kittens of home. Back to… whatever it is that I do when I’m not writing a book. Goodness. I just may have forgotten what that is.

Catch-Up

Okay — yesterday it was the killer migraine that hit me minutes after we arrived at my parents’ friends’ place for dinner (Dad drove me home, bless him), the day before was a day trip to Stratford, and today was here and there. Otherwise I’d’ve been posting the long reflective entries I’ve been composing in my head for the past seventy-two hours. Honest.
 
I was at the Royal Botanical Gardens for an hour on Tuesday morning, amusing myself in the greenhouse whilst my parents attended a meeting in Conference Room Two (which really ought to have been called TROT-2, but no one would understand the reference except a handful of people back home, so I withheld it). I took reams of notes to turn into a substantial post on herbs and the joys of being alone in huge glass buildings with over two hundred invisible anoles, which I still might do eventually, but I’m just too tired at the moment. (And don’t believe the website write-up; it was humid, not cool and dry.) Besides, I want to get back to Fool’s Fate, which is stunningly fabulous. I finished I, Elizabeth the night I had my migraine, after I’d taken two extra-strength Advil and slept for two hours (oops – there’s a max of three per day, so no wonder it knocked me out). Damned good. Pre-dates the film Elizabeth (you know, that Cate Blanchett one), and really foreshadows the film well in tone, speech, and scene. It was nice to finally hit a book which took more than two hours to read from start to finish.
 
Mum and I saw Guys and Dolls at Stratford, which came as a bit of a culture shock, since I’d been reading I, Elizabeth, and after having experienced so much Elizabethan theatre in the town over the years I always associate Shakespeare plays with a Stratford trip. (And that’s Stratford, ON for my American readers. I can’t quite envision Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK doing Frank Loesser musicals. And t!, the Noretta Motel finally as a new sign.) The show was enjoyable, in spite of Cynthia Dale doing a monotone performance of Sarah Brown. Sarah Brown should be earnest and perky. Cynthia Dale was lukewarm and lifeless. (Which she has apparently been in the past five years she’s been appearing at Stratford. Why do they keep casting her?)  Sheila McCarthy as Adelaide more than made up for the time Dale was onstage, though, and every other lead was phenomenal, paticularly Geordie Johnson as Nathan Detroit. (BTW, Tal, my mother and I have decided that sometime in your life, you have to play Nicely-Nicely Johnson. Just thought you’d like to know.) The choreography to the Gamblers’ Ballet was as impressive as the dancing itself. It’s rare to find a show where the men’s chorus has the knock-out dance numbers; in fact, it’s rare to find a show with practically no female chorus. This ballet had been choreographed so that while there were a dozen guys onstage, there were five different moves going on simultaneously — by two or three men in completely different places. It made for a dynamic overall presentation of the number, seeing that three men were dancing the same steps, but they were each dancing next to someone whose steps were totally different, and next to that second man there was yet someone else dancing something again different. For those of you who know the Festival Theatre, you know that the thrust stage is almost square, but still not huge; group numbers have to be really carefully sequenced. The choreography throughout the entire show was a triumph over space.
 
But every time I think of Cynthia Dale in the show, I think of a cold fish dressed as a Salvation Army sergeant. She would just stand and sing — no emotion, nothing. And in a larger-than-life show like Guys and Dolls, particularly when your co-star is very expressive, that just doesn’t cut it. I rather meanly evaluated her performance and almost said to my mother than I could have done better (and no lie, her singing is about my level of skill, and the gods know I can act better than she does), but I didn’t. If I believed in Purgatory, I’m sure I’d have shaved a few years off.
 
Time to go curl up and read again.

Witches Weekly

Witches Weekly for July 10, 2004 — Pagan Community

1. How did you choose the specific path you’re on? (Druid, Wiccan, Sumerian…)

Choose? Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been railroaded into it, and all the while Spirit was snickering up its sleeve.

The story’s been told before. Namely, I was doing research for a character whom I decided would be a modern witch, and rather than making it all up I chose to visit the local metaphysical shop and pick up a couple of introductory books. The rest, says the author/priestess/teacher, is history.

Come to think of it, I did the same sort of research on ferrets last November for my NaNo novel, but I didn’t become a ferret fan. Any more than I already am, that is. Ferrets are a nice idea, but too fast and nippy in person for my taste.

(For a more detailed answer to this question, visit the Owldaughter: Believe page.)

2. What do you feel you contribute to the pagan community?

Ahem. I’m a once-bitten type of girl, which means that I stuck my neck out in the Montreal pagan community about four or five years ago, and was disgusted with the hypocrisy which abounds. I was one of the four original founders of the Montreal Pagan Resource Centre, which is still going strong. It was the first pagan resource centre in Canada. I got tired of the community backbiting the people who were attempting to provide a common space and ground where everyone could meet, and resigned two years later. (Tangent: The amount of political crap that goes on in the Montreal pagan community never ceases to amaze me, however. It whines and moans about the lack of community, then snaps and backstabs any attempt at community support. I once told an interviewer that the Montreal pagan community eats its young. It’s a curious truth. End tangent.) For the past four years now I have taught a four-level program which studies a broad spectrum of comparative religion over the ages (N.B.: this is not a spiritual path; it’s a survey program which examines techniques and beliefs of various cultures). I also write articles and reviews for our local pagan journal, and I think my editing of the New Age imprint counts as well. For the first time I’ve realised that I’m a part of an international community as well as my local community, and I try to lead by example.

3. How long have you been an active member of the pagan community?
I never really hid what I was; after all, it’s a spiritual path, and frankly it’s nobody’s business. I became unmistakeably part of the Montreal community when I began to work in the city’s largest and oldest metaphysical shop. It’s hard to deny that you’re not part of the community when you’re immersed in it every day.