Category Archives: Spirituality

When Typos Express What We’re Really Thinking About

Ah, subtext.

In essence, Brigid is a goddess of transformation, and smiting is perhaps the clearest example of this.

What, me, annoyed at something? Why do you ask? (Or perhaps that ought to be “still annoyed at something”, or “more of a similar something”.)

Smite is such a lovely word. Of Germanic origin, you know, giving us our Anglo-Saxon word “smith”, meaning “to hit”. Lots. Against something hard. Perhaps I will begin using this word more frequently. As in, “Move or I will smite you.” Or, “Stop telling me you know me better than I do, relative stranger, or there will be smiting.” Or perhaps, “Say one more thing about how I work — or worse, should work — and you will find yourself smitten.”

ESTC Update

Total word count, ESTC: 4,676
New words today: 1,976

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
4,676 / 50,000
(9.4%)

Wow; almost ten percent done. For some reason, that alarms me mildly. Today I wrote two rituals plus some stream of consciousness stuff on magical practice that will have to be prettified and expanded at a later date. (Not, alas, the aforementioned section on centering and grounding and basic energy use. I couldn’t face it; I just couldn’t. How do I say the same thing in a yet another way after doing it three times already?) As I mentioned the other day, rituals go fast and create a surprising amount of word count in a short period of time.

I remembered something that I’d forgotten around three o’clock. My window of maximum productivity is between two-thirty and six o’clock in the afternoon; it always has been, except for that odd little blip that had me doing prep work on the green witch book in the early morning for a short period of time. Now I don’t feel so bad about not being able to properly settle into writing until an hour or so into the afternoon. I’ll do research and reading in the morning then, and let what I could write about in the afternoon percolate in the back of my brain, and stop fretting about only getting a single-digit count of new words down before ye olde productive time kicks in.

It Haunts Me

For the fourth time running in writing a contracted book, I find myself having to include a discussion regarding basic energy use.

::headdesk::

Curse me for being responsible.

I unplugged my computer from the router earlier to better ignore the siren song of the Internet and email, because I was using it as an escape from writing. (Seven new words; I had a lousy seven words for over two hours.) Then I had to plug it in again to do research. There is no way to win.

Back into the fray. At least now I’m at 515 words, which is approximately a 75% increase in output today so far.

In Which It Is The Beginning Of The Week, And Was That The Weekend?

Wow — a busy busy weekend. There was lots of ritual and energy work. I facilitated the last level 4 class on Saturday afternoon, and the students handled two very challenging energy exercises with grace and aplomb. On Sunday we conducted an elevation ritual for one of our coveners, and that went spectacularly well too, both in general and on the part of the covener, of whose demonstrated work and skills we are so very very proud. The weekend was busy in an everyday sort of way too. On Friday night Liam’s godparents brought dinner over to our place and watched Liam while I went out to pick up HRH from work. When we returned they’d pulled the table out and set it beautifully, so all we had to do was sit down and eat once Liam was in bed. We had a lovely relaxing evening; it was a real treat. There was even birthday cake, the candles on which my goddaughter helped me to blow out. Saturday morning was band, of course, which was cut short when the power went out due to the nasty storm that swept through the city. Being an acoustic-based band, we simply propped open the door and went merrily back to playing songs on our setlist in the dark, but the lack of fans circulating the air drove us out after about ten minutes, alas. Sunday morning saw us picking up new plexiglass to fill in the rest of the kitchen window above the air conditioner (yes, we’ve moved it from the bedroom to the kitchen to facilitate the circulation of the cool air through the living area) and a new air conditioning unit for the Baronial residence.

Now we all need a day to recover from the weekend. And I sort of have one! Yes, today is Liam’s first full day over at his home daycare! We are both very excited. There are friendly cats, excellent toys, a cool caregiver, a hamster and rats to look at, and a turtle. What more could a chipper and social and inquisitive little boy want?

The morning visit with the daycare last Friday morning went tremendously well. The only problem we ran into was the early afternoon nap, where he was just too excited to settle down for milk or sleep, so we headed for home. He ended up falling asleep in the car five minutes before we reached the house, and I foolishly unpacked him thinking he’d fall asleep again after nursing. He didn’t, of course, so that was the total of the afternoon nap, and on top of only forty minutes of nap time earlier that morning, too. Today, however, he has his playpen in which to nap, plus his Magic Rabbit nap buddy and the crocheted afghan his great-gran made for him to help him think of being asleep in his own bed at home. He’ll eventually nap once he plays himself out, despite being in an exciting new environment. So he’s in two days a week for now, which gives me time to get my current work done.

When we were over playing there on Friday, Liam did something mildly freaky. There are baskets of toys on the lower shelf of the playroom, and I thought I’d teach him something new. “Where’s the tiger, Liam?” I said from a few feet away. “Where’s the tiger?” He turned to look at the baskets of toys, and I figured that after asking him again I’d reach over and pick up the little plastic tiger and show it to him. But before I could he reached over and grabbed the tiger toy, then turned back to face me with a “Yeah, this is the tiger, so?” look on his face. “That’s right, that’s the tiger,” I said, and when he looked down to turn it over and over in his hands and examine it, I freaked out quietly at Prospero’s Daughter, because he’s only ever seen a minute or so of a tiger on one of his videos that we’ve played for him maybe four or five times in his life, and it’s not one of the words we’ve been teaching him. Part of me thinks it must be the group mind thing, because I was visualising that little tiger toy and its position pretty hard while I was talking to him. Very cool.

Liam is now narrating our car rides, which is quite entertaining. “Car. Car. Car,” he says, pointing out the window at the other vehicles on the highway as they pass. Every once in a while he says, “Truck,” pointing at a cube van or a semi. And he flirts with people at stoplights, giving them huge grins and talking away to them. The awesome thing is that most people smile back, and chat or wave through the window. Some parents move their vehicles a little forward or back so that their child in the back seat can see and wave at Liam too. While the majority of the time these days I think the population in general sucks, sometimes people can be pretty cool.

So this is my first grown-up day of work with the boy in daycare. I have a proposed table of contents to polish and send off to another editor, a bit of correspondence to handle, some developmental work to do, and laundry to keep doing. I already stopped off on the way home to pick up some new tank tops (although no capris, alas, which were also on my list) and a few groceries.

I should add “eating” to my to-do list, because I haven’t had any appetite over the past three days. It’s just been too dreadfully hot and humid, and eating in weather like this makes me feel ill.

Whee!

‘Cause it’s much with the proposals, and even being asked if I want to write a fun book I didn’t dream up myself, which I could do in my sleep. (Almost. You know what I mean: I’m that familiar with the topic, and it’s practical information and lots of spells and such, not the deep philosophical metaphysical slippery spiritual stuff that always takes longer than I think it will.)

And honestly, I could do two at once, even if they both have early 2007 delivery dates, because they’re all so very different. (Just so long as they don’t have the SAME delivery date, because that would mean handling rewrites and copyedits for two different books at the same time, and please just kill me if that happens because even the barest hint of that thought makes me weak and wibbly and wanting to dig a hole in the corner of my office in which to hide. Gah. Back to the good thoughts.) It’s not like I don’t usually have three or more things on the go at the same time as a rule anyhow, simply to give my brain somewhere else to work when I hit a wall on one thing or another. And they’d all have saner deadlines than two months from now, because while doing one book on an unusual deadline like that is barely doable, but two at once? Impossible. (I am a goddess, yes, but there are limits to my goddessyness. My thoughts go veering back to that hole in the corner of my office.)

And if they’re all accepted, then we can simply schedule them over the next couple of years. Then I’d have multiple books coming out two years in a row, eight to ten months apart. (Hmm, is that a sense of deja vu? I think it is. Except not the insane deadlines or the to-the-rescue parts. And yay on that.)

While the proposal ideas got good response when casually discussed, they’re all being officially formally presented next week now that I’ve finished polishing them and have submitted the final drafts. I’m all bouncy and excited about it. I’m sure you couldn’t tell.

Oddly enough, the seasonal spellcrafting proposal is the idea I’m the least excited about out of the three I could be writing next. Or perhaps it’s not odd, because it’s the idea I’ve had the longest and I worked out all my bounciness about it two years ago, while everything else is shiny and new. And then there’s that series proposal that I did that isn’t really a potential assignment for me, but I’m excited about it anyhow, cause it’s my baby as well.

All right. I should stop bouncing here and do something else.

Concert News And More

This has been one of those days where you feel like it was a bad day but can’t really put your finger on why. There were things that kept it from being good, but nothing that made it bad, really. Liam was out of sorts too.

Breaking concert news: Yes, there are only eight days until the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra Canada Day concert! Go put another star on your calendar so you don’t forget! No, actually I’m just here to tell you that the time has been confirmed, and everything will begin at 20h00.

We have an encore prepared should everything go supremely well. I don’t know if we’ll be able to play it after two hours of intense music. I think, honestly, that after we pull off the kick-ass final piece on the program, our bows will fall from limp hands. Wednesday night’s rehearsal saw me aceing the stuff I’d been messing up till then, and messing up other stuff I could play before. After a night like that I never know if I should be impressed or find something blunt with which to bludgeon myself.

I got an email from a fellow Daughter of the Flame today telling me how much she’d enjoyed my books. I didn’t realise how much I needed to hear something like that. Every now and again I get an unsolicited email from a stranger sharing this with me, and it surprises me every single time.

Writing tomorrow. A date with an old friend who still hasn’t met Liam on Saturday. Band on Sunday this weekend. Two Solstice rituals, one on Sunday, the other on Monday. I wish I had more energy to look forward to it all, let alone work up the energy to do it.