A good way to bolster the ego: read one’s CV.
Damn, I have done some impressive stuff. And when it’s all down in black and white, it looks more real than it feels in my memory.
ETA: This wasn’t done just for thrills, mind you; I’m revamping it and focusing it and doing all the required tweaking to make it what it needs to be for various markets. You know; more of that Stuff that one forgets can and should be classified as Work.
Thank you everyone who stopped by to see HRH on his birthday, or sent greetings and good wishes. He had a wonderful time with his friends, and is very excited about all his gift certificates and tickets and game cards and art supplies. Well done, troops.
By Friday night whatever had been eating through my spine during the day had ceased, and it was nice to be able to sit back by the fire at the pub and just listen to the conversations going on around me. I did actually have a book in my bag, but I didn’t need to use it.
Speaking of things in my bag, I have lost my sunglasses. This is very upsetting, because I hate sunglasses in general and I have owned this perfect pair for about four years. I had them when I walked from the car to the house after band on Saturday. Now, they are nowhere to be found. I mourn their absence. They may have fallen into the snow, in which case farewell till spring, assuming I’m lucky enough to find them when the piles and piles of snow finally melt, and they’re salvageable. (Look, a Canadian winter. I’d forgotten what those were like.) Lots of snow fell this weekend. HRH shovelled three times, and each time he moved the snow it was as if he hadn’t done so earlier. Today it is very clear outside (and thus the discovery of the loss of my sunglasses). The sun is rising significantly earlier and setting later, and the angle of it has visibly changed in the past week.
I am remarkably reticent about the things that are on my mind these days. I habitually use this journal as well as my other handwritten journals to work out and record how I feel about things, but these days it feels very much like more of the same thing I was feeling yesterday, and the day before that, and haven’t we had these general life problems before a few times too? And on top of that, I am experiencing computer aversion. The two main books on the go right now are frustrating in very different ways. I’ve reached a part of Swan Sister that isn’t very clearly defined in my brain, and while I usually see this as an opportunity to allow my brain to simply create without boundaries (and it is usually a success), this time it’s a major stumbling block. (Imagine, a stumbling block at 30K. You’d think I’d see them coming by this point.) The Poppy book, while now having a pulse again in my work-brain, is a problem because of the Revelation, because to implement it would require an even more drastic overhaul that I had originally expected. I would have to scrap eighty percent of the novel, and throw out most of what makes the plot currently advance. I read the first couple of chapters during Liam’s nap yesterday and it’s good as it is, just not what it needs to be in order to be a complete success. It’s an enjoyable read, but not a Story. I have to think about it a lot more, and this is ungood because what I want to be doing now is actually writing, not planning or rewriting. I may ignore both of them, pull the Pandora book out and start writing the final chapters of that instead. (Because today, ignoring the problems is much easier than trying to work through them and feeling as if I’ve made matters worse by the end of the precious work day. One must choose one’s battles.)
I’ve spent the morning handling correspondence, and doing banking. I’ve crossed half the things of today’s To-Do list. Since I don’t feel particularly interested in elaborating what’s on my mind, I will share Liam-news.
Liam has been singing Twinkle Twinkle an awful lot these days. He has also been requesting it on the cello. We are a little tired of fending him off from giving the cello full-body hugs at high velocity while it is being played, or using the body as a percussive instrument to accompany the bowed music. He informed me that the f-holes were moons the other day.
Yesterday he drew a picture, and by ‘drew’ I mean he scribbled with his markers on a sheet of construction paper on the floor with his Thomas the Tank Engine next to him. When he was done he looked at me and said, “Ati!”, which means Thomas in Liam-Speak. It took me a moment before I realised that he was referring to the set of scribbles. And when I turned it around, it did look remarkably like the engine once he’d pointed it out. I am mildly freaked out by this. I put it up on his door.
Toilet training also proceeds eerily well.
I made delicious homemade pizza Saturday night, and Liam ate an entire slice as well as stealing the pizza bones off my plate. Sunday we went over to HRH’s parents’ home for dinner, where we had excellent prime rib and lovely potatoes, with cauliflower and broccoli in a light cheese sauce. Liam gorged himself on it all like everyone else did, having seconds and thirds of everything. Then he sat on my lap, appropriated my coffee spoon and helped himself to my serving of impressive home-made black forest cake, and ate more of it than I did (I’m not a big fan of cherries in cake; I’ll eat them fresh but that’s pretty much it). He also helped himself to a few spoonfuls of decaf cappuccino.
And now, I will go reheat the final slice of pizza.
As I sat down in my desk chair after lunch, I noticed something. My chair was facing the window, because I had turned it to reach something before standing up. Sitting in it, I observed that facing east in the middle of the room instead of south staring at a wall felt good. Really good, in fact.
And then I remembered that when cabin fever struck at any time of year, I used to move furniture around. We haven’t done that in this apartment very much, mainly because the location of windows, closets, and heaters really limits furniture placement.
So I’ve just spent the last hour swinging the desk around to jut out from the wall, played with all the finicky wires and cables that connect me to that wall and the rest of the world, and I now have a different perspective. (As regards physical location, anyhow.) A change is as good as rest, as the aphorism says, and even though we all know that isn’t absolutely true it does help somewhat.
The office certainly won’t stay exactly like this. It needs better arrangement, for one, and careful proper rerouting of cables for another. HRH’s computer isn’t currently connected to the internet because this end of the ethernet cable doesn’t reach the router’s new position, but I think that can be fixed by feeding more cable up from the basement. I have less floor space overall, but as all I’ve been doing in here lately is sitting and working at the desk that’s not much of a loss. I may move it back later; I may make this floorplan more permanent. Who knows? But it feels good to sit here like this right now, and so I’m happier.
I’d like to thank a handful of friends who, over the past two days, have really been instrumental in the maintenance of my sanity, either by telling me I’m competent, telling me they love me, opening their homes to me to enable me to leave the house for an hour or so, and reminding me that they’re there if I need them.
Thanks, everyone. I deeply appreciate you.
A full moon last night, or more accurately this morning, at 12:45.
I love the images of Imbolc: White pillar candle in a silver bowl of snow. Berries in the offering bowl. Brid’s crosses, half-woven by candlelight.
Imbolc for me is about ten days of honoring. A few years ago I realised that the actual second of February doesn’t resonate with me as much as the days following it. Like other sabbats, the changing energy that the festival honours doesn’t happen all at once on a single day; energy is in constant motion, of course, and the sabbat is a day set aside to observe that ongoing change and to examine how one is responding to it. There are very few sabbats for which I can do this in a single day, however, and so the day of the sabbat often represents the beginning of ten or so days of introspection and reconnection.
We did our Imbolc ritual after Liam’s dinner. He watched me scoop freshly fallen snow up in the silver bowl and put it on the altar, then place the candle in the centre of it and put the bowl of berries next to it as an offering. We lit it and talked to him about how even though it was very very cold and snowy, the earth was already thinking about spring deep inside. “Candle,” he said, pointing to it, so we talked about the importance of light and warm hearths in the home too, and how Brid helps us make our home a loving one. Then he decided he wanted berries, so we went back into the kitchen and he ate most of what was left over. The last one he held in his hand and thought hard. “Do you want to give that to the Goddess?” I said. He nodded and ran into the living room to stand in front of the altar, reaching his hand up as high as it would go. I lifted him up, and he pointed to the goddess statue we have. “Lady!” he said, and put the berry in the curve of her arms. He’s a natural.
I have some very welcome meditation and honouring planned during this upcoming week. And I’ll be making my Brid’s crosses again, once I find appropriate material. I have to check to see if the corn husks I saved and dried will work properly. I think they will, once I soak them a bit to make them pliable.
And as my contribution to this year’s Imbolc poetry web, this poem about light returning:
A Winter Dawn
Above the marge of night a star still shines,
And on the frosty hills the sombre pines
Harbor an eerie wind that crooneth low
Over the glimmering wastes of virgin snow.Through the pale arch of orient the morn
Comes in a milk-white splendor newly-born,
A sword of crimson cuts in twain the gray
Banners of shadow hosts, and lo, the day!~ Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1899
(Editor’s note: For some reason this didn’t publish last Friday night, and as this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down since then I didn’t notice until now. Fixed.)
Dear God/dess/all aspects of the Divine:
Thank you for bringing Janice into my life. If you hadn’t, she wouldn’t be talking me down from a metaphorical ledge where I’m currently standing with an equally metaphorical semi-automatic, and there would be a lot of unhappy people dealing with fallout. Someone just broke one of my cardinal professional rules, you see, and I’m livid.
Patience. I must have patience. I have to, in order to maintain sanity until the person I must speak with about this Issue is back in the office next Monday.
So I just thought I’d say thanks.
Love,
Me.
(this pro writer thing isn’t just writing. There are page proofs, interviews, research, contracts, business nonsense, copy-edits. There is slush to read. There is Stuff. Stuff takes up a couple of hours a day. Every day. Some days it can take ALL DAY.)
and
continued creative output requires continuous creative input.
The Stuff can really mire you down. Particularly if, like me, you forget that it’s part and parcel of the whole career while you’re doing it, and think it doesn’t qualify as Real Work.
