Thursday Thirteen #59

Thirteen Things About My NaNoWriMo Novel

1. The title is Spring Fever

2. It started out as a simple romance, a love story, but then it got really complex.

3. Musing on spring, got me musing on seasons and from there to the cycle of life and death which fit nicely with my poet character, Holly Dawn Harper. She was already suffering from MS so it was likely she would be musing on these things too. So I gave the body of her work the theme of the four seasons. This would feature the seasonal cycles of sky, weather, flora and fauna along with various culture rites associated with seasons.

4. Holly's interest in seasons is one manifestation of the novel's exploration of time.

Concepts of time are expressed in a variety of ways by various cultures so I wanted to give each of my three POV characters a different ethnic heritage and to make things even more complex they each got mixed heritage so that there would be more concepts in the dynamic--the dynamic operating within each of their psyches and the dynamic operating within the relationships between them. Holly is part Amerindian and was raised on a reservation.

5. Holly is approaching forty and is married to Graham Palmer Simons who is a professor of ancient and medieval literature with a special focus on the poets and a personal passion for Dante's Divine Comedy.

6. Graham's heritage is Catholic and Jewish. His training as a academic also impacts his concept of time as knowledge of the historical milieu of a piece of literature is part of a complete comprehension of it. He is also multi-lingual, speaking several languages and reading several more and thus his interest in the etymology of words would also impact his concept of time.

7. Graham, as is reflected by the meaning of his name 'from a gray manor; stern', is the quintessential professor. A man of authority who rules himself by the same code he expects others to adhere to. He is in his early fifties and a bit hidebound.

8. Thus he is more than a bit distressed when Holly, who is also a professor, agrees to take on as advisee a grad student who wants to do her MFA thesis in mixed medium (poetry, song, dance, art etc.) organized around the Tarot as a storehouse of archetypes, metaphors and symbols that can communicate across cultures because they are grounded in the universal human psyche. He feels this is a frivolous waste of Holly's precious time and energy.

9. And so enters Maia Rhiannon Robins. (notice I changed her middle name since the last time I posted about her) Maia's heritage is Celtic mixed with something else which I've not settled on yet. To add to her image of frivolousness in Graham's eyes, she gives birth to an infant out of wedlock. But Maia can hold her own against Graham's scorn, deflecting his often caustic remarks with humor. She is not going to allow the friction between them to endanger her opportunity to work with her long-time hero, Holly. Maia's concept of time is influenced by her experience with music and dance as well as her passion for mythology and story.

10. Holly sees in the dynamic of Maia and Graham's relationship similarities to the beginning of her own relationship with Graham over sixteen years earlier and, suspecting that she has entered the end-stages of MS, chooses to encourage it, for she fears for Graham in the event of her death for he, like Dante, had lost his first love (a childhood sweetheart) while he was himself a grad student and had withdrawn into a decade long frozen wasteland of the spirit. Holly does not want this to happen to him again. So she offers Maia the job of helping her organize her papers and invites the young mother and infant to board with them. (Note: she has no intention, nor do I, of encouraging any infidelity)

11. The relationship between Holly and Maia is as important in the story as that between Maia and Graham and that between Graham and Holly. Holly and Maia quickly bond on a very deep level which soon has them sharing their most intimate hopes, dreams, desires, fears, regrets etc. Holly will share with Maia her thwarted desire to be a mother and confesses that early in their marriage she and Graham had frozen embryos in hopes that she would be able carry one to term during one of the intermittent remissions of the MS.

12. Maia, after careful thought and realizing it means that ethically Holly cannot remain her thesis adviser, offers to be a surrogate. Holly accepts but fearing Graham's refusal of the plan follows through without his knowledge. She wants this for him as much as for herself. She knows that his sense of duty will not allow him to neglect his child so, even if the relationship between Maia and Graham does not take the direction she envisions, the child would anchor him in life.

13. I've mapped out 22 chapters (major events) organized around the Tarot's Major Arcana. Each chapter takes on the themes reflected in the cards but not necessarily their titles. Nor do I follow their typical order. Each chapter is narrated through the POV of one of the three though not in strict alternation. (Holly's last chapter is the 14th at about the three-quarter mark in the story arc.) Each chapter also features a season except that the first and last chapters feature all four. Spring, of course, gets more billing than the other seasons.

Oh, and even though I set out to venture outside the boundary of my Fruit of the Spirit story world, I'm now teetering on the edge of bringing one and possibly two characters from FOS stories in as supporting actors because they have the profession needed and are already so well envisioned. The same goes for the college or university featured in two FOS stories. I'm still torn on that though as that risks allowing this story to get all tangled up in the FOS time line which became such an inhibiting factor during 70 Days of Sweat last summer. It is harder to generate word count when you keep getting side-tracked fiddling with a hundred some inter-related (by marriage and other relationships) characters and a sixty-odd year overarching story arc.


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Measured Progress

No new word count on Spring Fever my NaNo and 70 Days of Sweat project today. But there are other ways to measure progress besides word count.

I started my day with that shampoo I discussed in last night's post and followed up with that walk to the library. I've now got clean hair and a refreshed spirit. I'm physically exhausted and sore but that is more bearable than the mental fatigue I was fighting last night.

I made the trip especially to go after books for Ed. There was only one thing I was planning to pick up for myself and that was a DVD of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring, which research for my story had brought to my attention as possibly meriting a mention in the story if not more--like giving one of the characters a passionate interest in it. At the very least watching it should inform my several levels of consciousness on some of the themes of my story. Not to mention fill in another one of those culture gaps created by thirty-five years of eschewing all things 'worldly'.

I found mention of the ballet in one of my sources and immediately went to Wikipedia to learn more. The more I read about it, the more I wanted to see it or at least listen to the score. So I went to the library catalog online to check on its availability.

We can't request items from other branches until next week and Phoenix is currently in very small quarters while its new building is under construction and over half of its collection is in storage. So I wasn't expecting to find something I could get my hands on much before Thanksgiving. And as I scanned the list of materials related to Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring popped up a lot and as I expected. none were at Phoenix. Most were CD, but once it was a video cassette of the performance. I was pleased to see that because though I prefer DVD that I can play at will on my laptop, this was important enough to be willing to use my in-laws TV and VCR in the middle of the night. But then, near the end of the last page there it was, the DVD. I clicked on the link to see which branch it was at, expecting it to be the community college library. But, like a miracle, there was the word Phoenix followed by the word in. That, of course, ended all deliberations on whether or not I would make the effort to get to the library today.

That was the first thing I looked for when I walked in the door. It helps that the DVD shelf is right inside the door. At first I didn't find it because the title showing on the spine read, Keeping Score: revolutions in music: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But Stravinsky was in smaller font and the rest was covered by the Dewey sticker. On my second pass over the shelf I was reading the Dewey stickers because I had written down the number at 3AM. I didn't even need to get out my notes.

After that, I must have been feeling exuberant or something because I started pulling novels off the shelf for Ed with abandon. Partly that was due to them being short mysteries and I wanted to be sure he had enough to last a full week. I resisted most of the ones that tempted me. After all I'm still reading The Historian! And haven't touched any of the five I checked out last week. But I succumbed to two slenderish trade backs. Not much weight and quick reads. Both of them were on the theme of women dealing with issues of womanhood inside fairly patriarchal cultures. I was afraid I wouldn't remember their titles and was too lazy to return to the other room for my notebook to jot them down while there.

Then on a whim, I decided to glance at the medical section (Dewey 600s) on the chance they might have a book about dealing with MS because I've given that to one of my characters. There wasn't one specifically about MS but there was one on how to manage your life while living with chronic conditions. A glance through it showed that, although MS wasn't one of the conditions focused on, there was plenty of info that could help give me insight into my character's daily life. And even ideas for conflict and resolution or just events that move the plot.

That book had been on the bottom shelf, and as I stood up my eyes passed over the title on the spine of a trade back book that was laying horizontal atop the row it belonged in because there wasn't any room on the shelf for it. Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest. The same character I've given MS, I've also given an ethnic Amerindian heritage! Here was another portal for getting into her head. I hadn't decided which tribe to assign her to yet. But whether or not it becomes a Pacific Northwest tribe, her interest in her own heritage combined with her academic bent (she is a poet and a professor) would make it likely she would know these stories. Under it was a book collecting legends of the world and it had a some Amerindian stories. It was also the fattest book I had picked up all day so I deliberated some. But flipping through it and seeing all the stories from around the world and across time, I realized that many of them would be familiar to the poet's husband, a professor of medieval literature, or the grad student who is the poet's advisee and has a passion for mythology.

I tell you, it was the weirdest feeling to have these items (the ballet DVD and four books) fall into my hands when I least expected them. I have read a lot about synchronicity but have seldom consciously noted it when it was happening to me.

Yet another benefit of getting away from the laptop and the confines of this room, was a clearing of my head which allowed the ideas to start flowing again. It had felt like my characters had abandoned me yesterday. But today they were walking beside me and conversing with one another. I was so engrossed at one point that I stepped off a curb and was halfway into a crosswalk before I realized I had not checked for approaching traffic. It was a side street with no light and a stop sign for vehicles but I've often had to contend with cars that stop inside the crosswalk or others, turning off the main street into the crosswalk while I am in it. It is not wise for me to get that engrossed in a daydream when I'm walking city streets. It is a life-long habit of mine and very difficult to break. Someone/something was watching over me today.

My TT tomorrow is going to be 13 things about Spring Fever, my NaNo novel. I was hoping to get both this post and the TT posted before I slept but I'm wiped out and dare not risk inviting that headache back in again.

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Wilting

I've had three slow days in a row with my NaNo novel. I'm behind the pace by 3377 words, assuming the need to average 1666.6666 words per day. I'm a tad discouraged but not panicked yet since I've frequently surged ahead by over 3500 words in a single day on a story. But that kind of thing isn't the norm and I can't count on it. When it does happen, it usually follows a day or two of backing off to dream the scene(s), watching my characters move in their environment and interact with it and with each other. I can't afford very many such breaks in grinding out the words though. Especially with there being no guarantee that the surge of words will follow the fallow day.

It doesn't help that I'm fighting another headache either. This isn't quite of the migraine category yet but still... It might be eye-strain. I've taken the step of increasing the font size to 20pt to see if that might help. Of course, I won't be able to judge that until after I've rested my eyes and started fresh.

If some of these headaches of late are eye-strain related, I may be getting relief soon. I've finally got an appointment with an eye doctor. A week from Friday though, so it's not going to help me get through NaNo. Even the best scenario means that I'd be breaking in a new prescription during the last ten to fifteen days. There is always eyestrain involved in that too. And to make matters iffier I have to go with bifocals as our insurance only allows for one pair in two years so I can't have separate reading glasses.

I did not have a happy experience with bi-focals last time I tried them. They were fine for reading or for sewing while watching TV or for not having to choose between seeing your dinner plate or the face of your conversationalist across the table. But for walking about--not so fine. My tunnel vision seems to be encroaching faster from below than from the sides so I have to look down to see anything below the level of my nose. Looking down with bifocals while stepping off a curb was nearly as disorienting as stepping off a carnival ride. I use that analogy because I had bifocals when we moved to Sunnyvale, CA in 1999 and the following spring we bought season tickets to PGA (Paramount Great America) amusement park. It was a natural comparison.

One of my frustrations today is that my word count remains so low in spite of the fact that I have spent the majority of my waking hours focused on Spring Fever. Once again I've put every other thing in my life to the side to become submerged in the story world. I don't know whether to just accept this as the way I work most productively or to think of it as something that needs to change. I know such a working style would not be compatible if I had other pressing responsibilities: a day job, kids, a household of my own to run. But since I don't have any of those, maybe I should just go with it. On the other hand, I am starting to miss certain things. Like reading novels, watching movies, clean hair, and sleep.

And getting out of this room! It's been a week since I've been any further than the dinner table or the bathroom. I was considering passing on the weekly trip to the library this week because I've barely touched most of the books I brought home last week. One of them has become essential reference for my story world but the rest are just sitting there taunting me. I still haven't finished The Historian, the novel we own so bringing home more novels makes little sense. But Ed is down to three out of the seven I brought home for him and thus might not make it to next Monday without more. So now I'm thinking that I should try to go tomorrow, the last day the Phoenix branch is open this week. And if I wake up headache free I think I will wash my hair and head for the library.

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Monday Poetry Train #24

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Thanking Evan
by Joy Renee

We thank you Evan
For your visit.
Though you came and went
In the space of a smile,
In that little while
Blossomed the flower
Of eternity.

We thank you Evan
For you exist
Now in hearts enlarged
To hold the ocean of love
Which over the years
Of absorbing our tears
Will return our joy.

For Eric M twin of Evan M b. 7/27/95 d. 10/31/95

#############

In mid October of 1995 Ed and I began babysitting three month old twin boys. On the morning of Halloween we were expecting the arrival of the babies and instead received a phone call from the mother. Evan had died of crib death.

Because Eric was Evan's twin, doctor's recommended he be attached to a monitor for a year and any caregivers would need to be trained in how to use the monitor. The family decided to keep care of Eric inside the family.

So, in a sense, we lost both babies. Ten days is plenty of time for me to bond with an infant.
The day before, Evan had gazed into my eyes and smiled, holding the gaze and the smile for what seemed like an eternity. Memory of that moment sustained me through the grief process and was the seed for this poem.

It is hard to believe Eric is twelve years old now. As far as I know anyway. His family were friends of friends of my mother and I haven't heard anything further since my mother's friend showed me a photo of Eric at age three.

___________

Sorry I'm so late getting this posted this week. It has been hard to drag my attention off my NaNo novel.

Plus it is getting harder to select a poem. I've got three left now! I'm going to have to start writing poetry again or start reposting poems or switching to fiction outtakes....

Maybe I'll be inspired once I get inside the heads of my three POV characters: two poets and a Professor specializing in medieval poetry. Which leads to an interesting question: when a character in a novel writes poetry which is included in the text of the novel, who is the author?
__________________

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Sunday Serenity #30

Can you tell I just love these singing cats. Some of them are silly and some are energizing. This one is serene and had me anticipating posting it today the first time I saw it while Ed was putting together his TT this week.

Watch a snow white cat amid pale almond blossoms emit the velvet voice of Marcus James Christian singing the song, Almond Blossoms Fall, from the album Harmonious Haiku>

Join us in a moment of serenity

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I've Got the Fever

I'm on fire for my story. My NaNo story, Spring Fever, is off to a raging start this year. I'm closing in on 5000 words. I'm not claiming their quality words. but they are words.

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Friday Snippets 17

Sorry I'm so late posting Friday Snippets this week. I was hoping I'd have something from my NaNo project ready. I should have known better. It is too soon. In order to generate word count I am allowing myself to be very messy with it.

So instead I'm sharing a scene from my NaNo project of two years ago, Brooding Instinct, another novel from my Fruits of the Spirit story world. Most of that one is still messy too but there were a few scenes I have worked over. This one still needed some work after I chose it for today's snippet. I chose it anyway because it has a character in common with the snippet from last week. Curtis isn't actually in either this scene or last week's snippet from Tale of a Wail, we view him only through the thoughts of the protagonists.

Brooding Instinct

Vivian listens to the silence of the house. She waits at least thirty minutes past the last sound she heard from her parent's room. The night-time restlessness of both of her parents have increased since Valerie's last miscarriage. Her father spends more time in his study before heading to bed and her mother has taken to coming in to check on her, content to watch her sleep if Vivian does not let on she is awake. This has made it difficult lately for her to leave her bed let alone slip out the window into the yard and make her way to the apple tree. Thus the rendezvous with Curtis have become fewer and farther between.

She slides one foot onto the floor and pauses to listen. Nothing but the tick of the clock on her headboard. She sets the other foot beside the first and stands, holding her breath for the sound of the creaking floorboard if she miscalculated. Thank God she doesn't have to cross the middle of the room where most of the old floorboards are loose in the dry heat of summer and speak their irritation with one another in a language of ticks and squeaks. It is just one step from the side of the bed to the window sill of this old window with the sash that is left raised to catch stray night breezes. Each season has its own challenges but summer is the most conducive to getting out of the house and back in again without announcing her movements to her parents on the other side of the wall.

She has already prepared for her departure by unhooking the bottom of the screen so that it will push out on its hinges. She will have to remember to keep one hand on it as she lowers her self to the ground so that it won't snap shut with a sound like a knock on the door. She slides one knee onto the low sill and leans her head under the sash. It would be so much easier with Curtis' help but also so much harder to explain if they were caught. This way she can claim she only wants to go sit in the swing to catch the breeze. That is something she and Valerie used to do in the summer when they shared the room. And even after Valerie left home three years ago, Vivian continued to do it and occasionally her mother would spot her and come to join her.

It wasn't until Curtis moved into the converted Sunday-school room the summer she was thirteen that her parents started acting like she mustn't be sitting out in the yard alone at night. Vivian couldn't pretend not to understand why. She had been wearing her heart on her sleeve for Curtis since she was small enough to ride on his shoulders. But what the family considered cute when she was five to his fifteen was no longer thought cute after he turned eighteen. Let alone now that he was twenty-five. He promised that as soon as she turned eighteen they would move to Idaho where it was still legal for first cousins to marry.

Vivian slid her other leg over the sill and lowered herself to the ground by one arm as she held the screen open with the other. As soon as both of her feet were solid on the grass below, she let go of the sill and then carefully released the wooden frame of the screen. She stood absolutely still for long seconds, breathing in and out through her open mouth the better to hear every possible sound. Her parent's window just yards to her left was also open. Though she thought she heard their electric fan whirring, which would mask some sound. But why take chances?

After a couple minutes of hearing nothing but crickets and frogs, she ventured one step backwards. And then, pivoting on that foot, she fairly scampered across the yard to the apple tree. Sometimes she would sit quietly in the swing for several minutes. Just to be sure her escape from the house had not been detected. For being spotted quietly sitting in the swing was not likely to bring her parent's wrath. Only her Mama's offering of an iced juice or herbal tea along with her solicitous companionship until Vivian voluntarily returned to her room.

But this night, it was already past one in the morning and she was impatient, fearful that Curtis would give up on her and return to his room, leaving her to ache for the touch of his hand on hers, for the sound of his voice as he spoke her name when only she could hear. So, instead of sitting in the swing she stepped into its seat and in one fluid motion she grabbed the branch on which its ropes hung with both hands and swung herself up into the foliage.

Standing on the branch supporting the swing she was just able to reach the underside of the tree house floor where there was a trapdoor. She pushed this up eagerly anticipating his greeting. But there was only silence and black darkness. Disappointment was like a sudden dousing with cold water. Tears sprang to her eyes and she had to take several juddering breaths to keep from crying. She couldn't bear to turn back, retrace her steps in the same careful silence to the same sigh-soaked sheets and dream-withering walls. She could at least rest for a bit first.

Before lifting herself up she reached into the branches and plucked an apple. She tucked it inside the front of the sports bra she wore under her knee-length night shirt then reached for a second one, tucking it into the other side. For the third one she had to reach so far to the side she needed to release the grip her other hand had on the solid trunk-connected branch and shift all of her weight onto the foot farthest from the trunk. She held her precarious balance by swaying gently as the toes of a single foot gripped the bark under them. When she grabbed the apple and tugged sharply its sudden release caused her to wobble so severely she thought for a moment she was going to topple off her perch and plunge into the dark beneath her feet where the twigs and branches which were now her concealment and comfort would whip and lash her mercilessly as she fell. But it was only a moment. Not even a second lapsed before she had steadied herself again with one hand on the trunk and that third apple safely in the other.

But now she must do something with it for she needed both hands to proceed up into the tree house and she wanted to go on up even if Curtis was not there. He might still show up and even if he didn't she longed to lay on the floor and look up through the branches at the stars and dream of the day when she and Curtis could declare their love for each other and forever after belong to each other in the open light of day before the eyes of parents, Assembly and God.

The tree house in the wee hours was the only safe place to think about this longed for future as it was the only place it was safe to meet each other's eyes, to let their gazes linger on one another, to touch finger tip to spine. to trace the graceful arch of the other's bare foot with one naked toe. Vivian shivered as a cool breeze passed through the branches. She opened her mouth and gripped the apple gently with her teeth without breaking the skin. It was early in the season yet and she nearly drooled in anticipation of its sharp, green-apple tartness as she launched herself up into the womb of darkness above her head.

##################

Just a note to clarify something. I have no idea whether Idaho is a state that still allows first cousins to marry. Vivian believes it because Curtis has said it.

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Thursday Thirteen #57

If you like these funny animated cat singing and dancing videos, go check out Ed,s TT this week.

Thirteen Weird Things My Cat, Merlin, Thinks are Yummy

1. Peanut butter
2. Jelly
3. Fruity yogurt
4. Apple cider vinegar
5. Salt and Vinegar potato chips
6. Rose petals
7. Alysium
8. Ice cream

9. Ice cubes
10. Watermelon
11. Mayonnaise
12. Applesauce
13. Cheddar cheese
Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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I've Got NaNo Fever

The typewriter in the NaNo icon reminds me so much of my first typewriter, a little portable Underwood that was at least ten years older than I was when I received it for my thirteenth birthday. On November 13th 1970.

In just two hours and a few minutes I get to start writing the story that I've spent the last nineteen days dreaming and jotting notes for. I'm raring to go.

This year my story is a love story. I was going to try to do a straight romance genre story but I seem to be incapable of creating characters and plots that don't take me into philosophical musings. So I've listed my novel as literary fiction at NaNo again this year. The icon above links to my profile at the sight.

My novel is titled Spring Fever. It is the story of Graham Palmer Simons a Professor of Medieval poetry with a special interest in Dante's Divine Comedy; his wife Holly Dawn Harper also a professor but a poet in her own right whose work explores the concepts of time, seasons, and change; a grad student Maia Fleur Robins who's thesis is on the symbols of transformation embedded in the Tarot. Maia's thesis adviser is Holly but she must take classes from Graham. She and Graham get off to a rocky start when she arrives late to her first class with him. Their encounters after that simmer with intense emotions; not just the resentment but because of an instant mutual attraction that neither can afford to be conscious of. But Holly notices and gives it her blessing, though she says nothing to either of them. She sets out to matchmake them, seeing in Maia Graham's potential salvation in the event of her impending death. Holly knows she is fast approaching the end stage of the MS she has battled for fifteen years and she knows that Graham is in denial about it and fears for his sanity after she is gone. For the loss of his first love in a tragic accident had sent him into a tailspin from which he barely escaped with life and mind intact. Meanwhile Maia has recently been badly betrayed by a professor from her undergraduate years and has no wish to think about another relationship let alone with another professor twenty years her senior.

I don't know yet but I suspect that I am going to be alternating POV among these three.

I once posted the original storyseed for this story here, the beginnings of a scene I wrote years ago. It is a story that has been simmering in my imagination for nearly ten years. But in honor of the NaNo requirement that no scenes be written ahead of November 1, I was disqualifying this story. But I was desperate and decided that instead of disqualifying the story entire, I would just forbid myself to look at that storyseed again until at least several days into NaNo. Not even to remind myself of character's names and descriptions. I haven't looked at in in over a year. I found the link to it in my archives by its title.

I've thirty minutes left before I can

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Oh, Joy! The Books Are Back

The Phoenix branch of our library system opened at ten Monday morning. I was sitting on the brick-enclosed flowerbed by the front door when the librarian arrived to unlock the door at two minutes til ten. I had not slept. I had tried, but it was no go. The day before a big event has always been one of my insomnia triggers.

I was sooooo tired last night. My muscles and joints are still trying to decide if they reeealy want to know each other that well.

My haul included 7 novels for Ed; 5 novels and 5 NF for me; and 4 DVD. Sound like a lot? Ha! Then you don't know me well. Take a look at my profile pic. That was me bringing back the last of the books on the last day the libraries were open last April 6th. About a month before that, I'd had to bring back three or four times that many in the week before they put a 30 item limit on each card. At the heighth of last winter/spring I topped 130 items on my card alone.

That wasn't typical though. 60-80 items on my card is more typical. I kinda went a bit crazy after news of the impending library closure. I had dozens of projects ongoing. I tried to bring as many as possible to adequate stopping places. I panicked. Instead of doing a dozen things well in the last four months, I did six dozen in slip-shod fashion. I stopped taking notes. I tried to become a sponge for the words but no matter which thing I was working on, anxiety about several of the others kept my mind distracted.

I'm hoping I've learned some lessons that will stick over the last seven months. I probably wouldn't have committed to 70 Days of Sweat if I'd still been a slave to library book due dates. I probably wouldn't have committed to posting daily to Joystory either. I do not want to loose the momentum of giving quality time to my writing. I want to bring the ratio of fiction to NF reading back towards half and half. Fiction, my first love, had slipped to less than 10% of my reading over the last decade.

I also learned during the Read-a-Thon October 20th that my reading speed has slipped to between 20 and 30 pages per hour. That is a large drop from the 50 page per hour rate I was at 7 years ago. I'm hoping that removal of a cataract in my right eye and new prescription glasses will allow me to bring that back up but until then, an adjustment of expectations is in order.

Somehow, I got confused today and spent most of the day thinking it was the last day of October and that NaNoWriMo kicked off at midnight. It wasn't until just before dinner this evening that I figured it out. This afternoon I had finally gone to the NaNo site and reactivated my account and updated my profile. I'd been putting it off because part of the task was to grab icon gifs off their site for display in my sidebar. It had been so long since I'd altered my sidebar, I'd forgotten how to do it. I also needed to change the image at the top of the sidebar, shaming Southern Oregon for the library closures. The one showing a jumbled pile of books with a red circle and slash over them.

There were several other things I changed on my sidebar. I spent the evening after dinner plugging away at it, learning how to add URL links to images that refer to their site instead of to blogger's photo id. Also, in reverse, to add an image to a link in a link list. I made a number of changes but there are still more to do. For one, I need to totally revamp my link lists. This evening I eliminated at least half of the links in 'Blogs I Haunt' because I hadn't visited for months or I knew the link was invalid. I need to add in the ones that have become regular haunts over the last year.

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Monday Poetry Train #23

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This is another poem that disturbs me as much as By the Blood does. Early versions were written in the weeks following the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I considered using pictures from the event for this post but the chaos and terror of that day is not the point I wish to emphasize. The first versions of this poem were dark and full of despair. Over the years I have added and subtracted and rearranged words and lines, tweaked punctuation and repeatedly decided to destroy all copies and versions. I'm still not entirely comfortable with it. And yet. There is just something.

I think it keeps drawing me back because it is so strongly associated in time and symbol to the event of my definitive break with the fundamentalist sect I was raised in. For five and a half months preceding that April 19th, my dreams had been full of ruined buildings, bombed landscapes, contorted bodies of children as my world unbuilt itself. Throughout the news coverage in the weeks following, I was never quite sure if I was dreaming or awake.

Even the early versions of this though attempted to focus on the aspect of community--its vulnerability and resilience, its faith and its heart. In loosing my community, I was at first bereft and adrift. But apparently by the time I began composing this, I'd already begun to see the possibility of belonging somewhere again. Since then I've learned that it is not only possible, it is necessary.

Heartland
by Joy Renee

Oh, oh, oh, Oklahoma!
Our nation’s heart.
Land of the free.
Domain of love.
It harbors our hope and in no
Sense from the rest is set apart.

They can resist its innate charm?

“Honey no sweeter
Than revenge.”
Answers fear
To injustice hinged.

Anger, home-grown and adamant
Timid reason and appeasement
To resist til vengeance
Jabs disturb plain faith.

“A beneficial call to arms
Stirs our bitter rage uncoiled.”

Heartland love:
Its innocence
Partook in harmony.
Then dangers intimidate.
And judgment foiled, liberties are
Leased by terrors some name just.

“Deuces are wild,
Jokers suffice
Our grapes of wrath
Your peace un-spun.”

Yet we must again partake
In that song of hope and faith;
Reclaim our trust; reach out with love;
Establish anew our reliance
On community, on harmony;
Proclaim with humble defiance:
“It’s not just dues but sour grapes
That kills the heart for its mistakes!”

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Sunday Serenity #29

I was really resisting putting up my Sunday Serenity today. And I knew that just meant I needed it that much more than those times when it is easy. Here I return to the roots of this exercise for me. My first Sunday Serenity was put up as an effort to stop associating Sunday primarily with the death of my beloved cat, Gremlyn, who had died on a Sunday a few weeks earlier. My Gremlyn was a very vocal kitty and we held long conversations that went something like:

G: Meow?
J: What?
G: Meeeeeow
J: You don't say!
G: Murrreow purrrrlinow
J: That's some story girl.
G: Yearrowl Grrrrrrnow
J: Tell me more
G: Rawwwerrowl meeearowl
J: Nobody will believe it
G: Yurrrrlum mawl

Gremlyn alway had to have the last word. But if I stopped responding before she wanted to stop, she would reach for my mouth or chin to remind me it was my turn and if that didn't work, she would nip my nose to elicit an "Ow!" and get the conversation going again.

I miss her so much sometimes. Especially when I've been sick like this past week. She was such a comfort, curling up and purring under my chin, grooming my face, purrling into my ear.

Her markings were similar to the kitty in this video who's saying "You say what?" She was an Abyssinian/Siamese/Tabby mix with the Tabby stripes on face, tail and limbs; the Siamese personality and vocal traits; the Abyssinian salt, pepper, paprika marking on her back and small size. As an adult she was often mistaken for a six month old kitten.

Join us in a moment of serenity. (laughter counts)

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Serve Me Some Cheese With This

I'm not much in the mood to put up my Sunday Serenity just now. Which probably means it is more important that I put my mind to it.

I've been fighting headaches all week. None have been as bad as the one that woke me Sunday after only six hours of sleep following the Read-a-Thon but they have been bad enough to disrupt my days.

These headaches are often triggered by food sensitivities. Some of the items Ed bought for our Read-a-Thon last weekend were probably suspect. Then there was the extra caffeine I had that day too. But the reason I'm still having problems is that at least four out of the last six evening meals have contained suspect items. My system has not been able to regain equilibrium. I am not the cook, shopper or menu planner here, so I feel I've really no place complaining about what is put on the table. But this leaves me feeling rather helpless sometimes.

These headaches also further impair my vision. Besides having less than 10 degrees of vision left in each eye because of the RP, my right eye has a cataract which needs to be taken care of. I had the cataract removed on my left eye in the late nineties. I'd been blaming all my vision loss on the RP and was greatly surprised to have the central vision in my left eye returned to me.

It is also past time to get my new prescription glasses. The last time I had my prescription renewed was in 2000 when we were in Sunnyvale CA. At that time I was told that the cataract on my right eye was 'ripe' and should probably be removed. Knowing this, I have put off going after new eye glasses until I could get the cataract surgery first. Because I'd need a new prescription afterwards and we are only allowed one pair in two years. Which also means I will have to have bifocals instead of a separate pair for reading.

Meanwhile, two years ago, I damaged the lenses of both my walk-around glasses and my reading glasses. I had a habit of putting one pair on top of my head while wearing the other pair. This had caused no problem for years. Then my sister gave me the rest of her hair gel because she had developed an allergy to it. Apparently it contained something that ate away at the plastic lenses. It left some splotches of undamaged lens but trying to aim the right part of each retina at the right part of each lens is a challenge all its own.

Adding to that challenge is the missing ear piece on my reading glasses. On the hot days this summer during the Sweating for Sven challenge, real sweat became a huge issue. I had trouble keeping the glasses on my face. The contortions I put my poor neck to! Sometimes I just gave up and took them off and that turned out to be a sorta blessing because not being able to see more than a blur forming under the cursor made me less tempted to backspace, to stop and fix spelling or second guess what I was typing.

Because of the headaches and sensitive eyes even when the pain was gone, I've done little reading all week. I've done even less writing--other than emails and IM. I'm going to have to report a second week of zero word count to 70 Days of Sweat tomorrow too. I'm starting to panic but good at the fast approaching start of NaNo.

I've even feeling as much dread as excited anticipation about the opening of the library Monday. I haven't made the walk in seven months. I can count the times I've been out of this yard in that same seven months on one hand. I realized it is liable to be crowded on the first day and thus hold all my sensory overload and social anxiety triggers. Which is making me think of waiting until Wednesday to go...

Times like these I'm wondering just who I think I'm kidding.

OK. I'm done whining now. Feel free to serve me some cheese. (as long as it's not aged Cheddar or spelled with a z i.e. processed food product with additives) :)

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Friday Snippets 16

I won a short story contest online with this one a year or so ago. But I really see it as the prologue to a novel. One that belongs in the Fruit of the Spirit story world.

A Tale of a Wail
by Joy Renee

Her mother would tell the tale for decades of how Abigail Ames sucked in her first breath and released it in a vibrato wail, with no impetus but surprise and how it took her seven years to break her daughter of the embarrassing habit of howling in the face of the tiniest disappointment. And her mother had broken her well. So well that she didn’t cry when at age eight, she watched her brother’s dog Griswald break the neck of her kitten Calypso while her brother, Darcy, stood by laughing. So well that she didn’t cry out at age ten when Darcy and his buddy Curtis strung a rope over a high tree branch and put a noose around her neck and slowly tightened it until crying out would have been impossible anyway as simply drawing breath burned like fire. When they lifted her into the tangle of leaves and branches and then let go of the rope so that she fell, breaking her right arm and spraining her left ankle, still she was silent.

Her self-enforced silence began the night of her seventh birthday when her mortified mother removed her from the dinner party after she let loose an endless open-mouthed howl when eleven year old Darcy blew out her candles for her and told her that meant he had just stolen her wish. Her wish had been to someday sing the part of Annie in the Broadway musical. It didn’t strike her that the transference of such a wish to her brother was a ludicrous concept. All she had registered was the irrevocable loss of hope. She was inconsolable. So her mother took her to her room and lectured her on the protocols of social engagements and the expediency of stiff upper lips for young ladies. Especially for a daughter of the Apostle of the Airwaves, Amos Ames, author of Daring To Profess.

"If you simply must cry, then go somewhere no one can hear you. And if that is impossible, then at least get off alone and put your hand over your mouth like this." She placed Abigail’s own hand over her mouth and pressed. "There, see? You can cry as hard as you want and no one can hear. Pretty soon you will learn to do it without even using your hand. Once you learn to do it without screwing up your face into that unsightly mess, you can scream and cry and carry on in a crowd without even disturbing your make-up."

Abigail took the lecture to heart. She never again cried out loud. But nor did she ever again sing out loud. Not, at least, until she was nearly out of her teens and too old to play Annie. Darcy had stolen her wish after all. The first of many precious things he stole from her. And now he was about to take from her the last precious thing because he refused to take her years of silence in lieu of an oath of eternal silence.

"Swear on what, Darcy?" she asked. "On my purity? On my honor? You took those from me long ago. And what point is there to swearing an oath to a man without honor? It would be nothing but babble in his ears. Easy enough to disregard on a whim."

Nor would an oath suffice. Darcy had not gone to the trouble of tracing her after ten years just to hear her mouth a ritual phrase. She doubted he, on his own, had the means to track her to this remote mountain cabin in Southern Oregon. But he had managed to get a message to her through the one childhood friend whom she hadn’t the heart to cut loose of. Nor would Darcy have gone to that trouble on his own. It had to be on behalf of, and with the resources of, Curtis Christopher, currently campaigning for United Sates Senator in Idaho. Darcy had been Curtis’ campaign manager for every election he ran in since his run for Class President his senior year of college. Abigail had been privy to the inner-circle of that one, though still in high-school herself. She knew that Curtis kept himself willfully ignorant of the tactics Darcy used to make things go his way. She knew that their ambitions had been, from the beginning, to go all the way to the White House. With stakes that high, there was only one guarantee of silence that would satisfy Darcy.

Darcy’s mistake was in thinking that she had spent the last decade cowering in this redoubt, nurturing terror and shame, with nothing more than a salacious tale to tell that could be spun as sibling rivalry, if she ever dared to voice it, an embarrassment that could be averted by a single stroke. He could not suspect that the timid, biddable Abigail had been preparing to sing on a stage dwarfing any stage her seven-year-old imagination could have conjured, for if he had he would not have attempted to back her into the corner that abutted that stage on one side and the abyss on the other.

For, far from nurturing terror or shame, she had been cultivating a network and a name recognized for integrity and intrepid truth scrounging. Trudy Ann Daring, Investigative Journalist and founder of TruthDaring.com, had created the stage on which she would sing. And her tale was far more than an uncorroborated he said/she said family scandal. She had proof--documented facts and the living, breathing truth, that last precious thing--Truth Ann Daring, not yet ten, sleeping that peaceful sleep of innocence--just this little bit longer--in the loft over Abigail’s head.

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Thursday Thirteen #56

Thirteen Books, DVD or Authors On My High-Priority List Now That the Libraries Are Open Again

1. Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation.
I had only made it fifty or so pages into this before the libraries closed in April. I had to wait in queue twice for my turn.

2. Anything by Ken Wilber

3. Marcus J. Borg's The Heart of Christianity.
Because someone just recommended it to me.

4. The last five or more titles published by Joyce Carol Oates.
A recent visit to the bookstore alerted me that I've missed at least that many. How did that happen?

5. Same thing for Stephen R. Donaldson's novels.
I've been thinking for some years that I would like to re-read his two Thomas Covenant Chronicles since I read them the first time over a decade before my exit from fundamentalism and I've been curious to see what new things I might see in the story after my explorations in religion and philosophy. I discovered at that same book store visit that he has just published a second volume in a third trilogy set in the same world. How did I miss that? Now I need to decide if I want to re-read the first six books first....

6. Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
I read the first five and then decided to stop and wait for him to complete the series and then start from book one again. He issued the final volume last year and I was planning to get started after NaNo last year but after news of the impending library closures the first week of December, I decided to wait.

7. Anything by Neil Gaiman.
I had just discovered him last spring. Brought home a couple of his novels for Ed who read them and agreed that they were my kind of story.

8. Anything by Holly Lisle.
Ed has been reading her for years and trying to get me to try one. Since I've been participating in her Friday Snippets since early June, I have regretted I never read one of her novels. I just read her Plot Clinic which I won in a 70 Days of Sweat drawing and am hoping our library system will have her World Building and Language Building and Character clinics too.

9. Shakespeare plays on DVD

10. Shakespeare from A-Z
This book compiles info about Shakespeare, the plays and his time in an encyclopedia format. It includes synopsis of each play, entries for every character and info about the production of the plays through time and famous actors who played Shakespearean roles.

11. Dracula
Both the novel by Bram Stoker and the movies made based on it are of interest to me because of my current reading of Elizabeth Kostava's The Historian.

12. Anything by Dorris Lessing, this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.
I discovered Lessing in the eighties and once had my own well thumbed and underlined copy of her The Golden Notebook. But like several other of my favorite novelists, I lost track of her latest during the nineties after the weight of my reading shifted to the non-fiction because of my quest.

While I'm at it I want to return to last year's Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Another one I'd just discovered last winter. I had waited in queue for months for my turn with several of his novels and never got the chance to read them.

13. The movie, House of Sand and Fog, on DVD.
I read the novel in 2000. I had been in queue for my turn with the movie for months and my turn was next the week the library closed. I'll have to get in queue again as they did not preserve the requests records.

####

Of course, I'm not going to find many of these in the tiny Phoenix branch. I will have to put my requests in. But I have to go in to the library to do so as they aren't adding back the option of requesting materials online until mid November.

The Medford and Ashland branches opened yesterday but they both entail bus rides. I'm waiting for Phoenix to open next Monday morning. I'm planning to be waiting on the doorstep.



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When Discipline Becomes Abuse

I woke from a dream this morning that has haunted me all day.

In the dream, I had taken a job as a live-in babysitter or nanny. It seems there was more than one child but I only saw one. It was a toddler about 18 months. A boy. The child's mother and I were visiting affably as he played nearby. Then the mother left the room and the boy became a little manic. Not destructive or aggressive but silly and playful and he made a mess with the objects of his play, using them in ways they were not intended.

When the mother returned, I pointed this out to her, barely able to contain my amusement and my sense of wonder at the creativity of such young child; a baby really. But the mother was not amused. She grabbed up something long and flexible which I understood was a belt and she took the toddler by his arm and began swinging that belt across his bare legs.

I was shocked and dismayed. I had to leave the room. When I came back, I told the mother this wasn't going to work and she needed to take me home. Except that I'd forgotten this was home since I was a live-in child care provider. But before I remembered that, I had packed my things in her car (which looked very much like the Mustang I drove while still living in my parents home) But we got in the car anyway. She in the driver's seat after handing a bundle wrapped in a quilt.

We drove around for a bit but I was unable to give her directions to my 'home' so she pulled over and made me get out and tossed my belongings out with me and drove off, calling back to me, "It's all yours."

It was then I realized that I was still holding the quilt-wrapped bundle and knew that inside was the broken, bloody body of that baby which had not stirred the entire time I'd been holding him.

Some of you may of read one of the few posts in which I talk about how my break with the fundamentalist sect I was raised in was triggered by witnessing a baby being disciplined. I must admit here that recent events had caused me to reflect on that once again. So that might have had something to do with the conjuring of those images at this time and the emotional power they held. But based on a repeated pattern over decades, I've found that the appearance of infants and small children in my dreams nearly always reflects a current creative project or creativity itself.

It is not hard to see this as a warning from my psyche that I'm once again sweating the small stuff with the 70 Days of Sweat and upcoming NaNoWriMo challenges. Just like last July and the last three attempts at NaNo, I've put too much emphasis on rules and expectations and measurements of success that tend to beat the silly, the playful and the messiness out of the process and of course this kills both the creativity and the joy.

Umm pun unintended but probably relevant anyway.

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Erratic Static

That's been my mental state ever since waking up Sunday afternoon about six hours after signing off the Read-a-Thon with my last update. I woke with a headache that was probably a migraine. Though if it was, I got off easy on the pain side. Not so easy on the mental and emotional side-effects. It was probably triggered by something I ate or drank Saturday and exacerbated by sleep deprivation.

Although the pain and nausea lifted by wee hours of Monday morning about twelve hours after it began, the other symptoms have not. I continue to be plagued by tangled thoughts, mischievous memories, muck bathed emotions and extra vision impairment. Spending much time looking at the laptop screen makes me motion sick.

Thus I'm not getting anything productive done. And that includes writing. So the wrath of Sven looms like a storm cloud threatening to drench me in 70,000 drops of sweat. And NaNoWriMo is only one week off now... See me crawling under the blankets and whimpering? Next thing I'll be sticking my thumb in my mouth.

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Monday Poetry Train #22

Happy Toes II by Kim Garraway
print for sale at art.com

Legacy of Laughter
by Joy Renee

Sarah--
One of laughter, one of love.
Your upwelling, out-flowing,
Inundating exuberance
Revealed the essence
Of life to us:
To live is to love,
To love is to live.

Your ebullient soul--
A dancing rainbow
--barely restrained
By body or mind,
Shimmered in your eyes, in your smile,
In the play of your hands
On their every find.
“I’m alive! I’m alive!”
They seemed to say.
“And I will love you
With all that I am.”

Then, with a SLAM
A door shut and you were gone,
Leaving behind but
Echoes of your laughter,
Memories of your love,
As you rushed to the arms
Of that One who Loved us all Alive.

This our comfort and our hope:
Knowing that there your soul dances
In unfettered Joy.
And that soon--Even so Lord!--
Soon we shall see you face to face
And join with you in His embrace.

In memoriam: Sarah Lynn M. 1973-1989

###############

Sarah was the adopted daughter of my cousin. She was a special needs child. I was fifteen when she was born. She was the first baby I bonded with. I couldn't have loved her more if she had been my own. She died suddenly at age sixteen.

Her death is coupled in my mind with the beginning of the end of my unquestioning acceptance of the doctrines I'd been raised with. Not due directly to her death but because the doctrinal disputes that had been simmering for decades among our twenty or so assemblies had begun to boil over. I did not know it consciously until 1992 but my quest had begun by 1987 because I had started to ask questions that could not be answered from inside the approved system of reasoning.

Since then I've learned that religion is not the only system of thought that can get doctrinaire and dogmatic.

Whenever I am tempted to despair by the incorrigible mean-spiritedness of so many of the debates among and between religions, nations, ideologies, and the sciences, I remember Sarah and what she taught me about the meaning of life.

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Sunday Serenity #28

Maybe I Should Get Some Sleep
art print for sale at art.com

Yep, that was me at the close of the Read-a-Thon this morning. Got some sleep. Want some more. But just found out we're expecting company.

I doubt I'll be posting my poetry train poem before tomorrow now.

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This Is My Brain On Books

This is where I will blog about anything Read-a-Thon connected for the duration. With my most recent updates, musings, etc. added to the top below this intro, it is a bit like a blog within a blog. The pic at top is linked to sponsor Dewey's blog where you can find more participants.

6:00 AM--So I guess this is the wrap-up. I made 66 pages into The Nature of Jade. The descriptions of panic attacks are almost too good. I began to feel on the edge of one and had to remind myself I was just reading about one and that I haven't had a full-blown one for years.

Out of the last 24 hours I've read 20. I subtracted one hour each for:
-reading nest building and rearranging
-visiting readers and checking out mini-challenges
--writing updates
--misc

I was afraid I might be too jazzed to sleep. But I that's not going to be the problem. It's Merlin who is jazzed up now. Here's hoping that once I shut the laptop lid and turn off my reading lamp and snuggle down with my cuddle blanket he loves to knead, that he'll figure out that it is now a normal morning--we're going sleepy-bye as the birds start to sing.

3:30 AM--L-squared is reading Dracula.~~Alison seems to be jaunting about with cheer shaker this half hour as well.

OK for the duration I'm going to pick up a YA loaned to me by my niece. The Nature of Jade by Deb Caletti. She has been very anxious for me to read this. After reading the inside cover I can see why:

I am not my illness. "Girl with Anxiety," "Trauma of the Week"--no. I hate stuff like that. Everyone, everyone has their issue. But the one thing my illness did make me realize is how necessary it is to ignore the dangers of living in order to live. And how much trouble you can get into if you can't.

My niece and I both have issues with anxiety that interferes with our daily living. She will be pleased to learn I've set aside The Historian in order to read this.

3:00 AM--I'm off to pass around some cheer to the remaining readers for the next half hour or so.

2:30 AM--See Don Quixote/Swing his sword/ Bravo! Don Bravo!

That was my contribution to this (21st) hours mini-challenge to write a haiku or limerick about a character we read about today.

Does that tell you which Spanish novel I spent the last hour with? I should have known better than to go looking for a modern best selling author to find a free on-line text. At least it didn't take more than five minutes on the search page to figure it out. I soon found this.

I 'read' to the end of chapter four. By 'read' I mean that I not only passed my eyes over the words, I sounded them out in my head as close as possible to the cadence of the Mexican-American speech I hear frequently here in Southern Oregon. I did not read for meaning but when meaning caught me by surprise I was quite pleased. I recognized with confidence about one in ten words and could guess at about that many again. 20% of the words are not quite enough to make out the story. Though my imagination was eager to play with the words: road, mule, dame, sad, house, sword, valor, brave, (bravado?) mercy, mayor, reason, imagination, magnificence, miracle, water. I could easily make my own story out of those words but since I'm somewhat familiar with Cervantes' story, I could also guess at some of what was going on here.

The most important thing I learned from this exercise is that Cervantes had an ear for his language. I felt the whole time like I was reading poetry. The lines were rife with alliteration. I could almost hear them being sung. It sounded like opera.

For awhile I completely forgot to hear Ed's snores.

And Merlin must have said "Forget it." after his several attempts to supplant the laptop were rebuffed. He seems to have found his spot down by Ed's feet. What is it with cats and dirty socks?

1:30 AM--OK I think I may be getting that second wind which comes so often right about this hour. Sometimes the wee morning hours are my most creative and especially when I've been awake for more than twenty hours. I think I am going to try something off the wall. I'm going to go find a novel in Spanish and spend an hour 'reading' it for the mini-challenge put up by Sarah. I'm thinking this playful, dreamy mood would actually be more helpful than a more rational 'solve the puzzle' state of mind.

So here goes. I'm going to take my 30 year old high-school Spanish and my talent for pattern recognition and my sleep-deprived, story-stuffed brain over to Google Books and look for a Gabriele Garcia Marquez or an Isabelle Allende or Umberto Eco (wait, did he write in Spanish or Italian? I guess I'll find out.)

Meanwhile, Ed is snoring (there's more sharing for you) and Merlin is talking in his sleep.

11:30 PM--I started reading Women Who Run With the Wolves over my coffee two hours ago and forgot to stop back by to note that choice. Ah, well. I'm forgetting more and more intentions as the hours wear on. I'm starting to feel as though I've got one foot treading a dreamscape. And I don't mean that to sound like a complaint. In fact, I often cultivate this state intentionally when I'm after a high-octane creative state. This is a good place from which to write poems. Not so good for reading anything that needs focus, concentration, memory. But it is a good place in which to create a compost of words, images, symbols, names taken from thither and yon and jammed in odd juxtaposition, cheek by jowl, in a jumble that can stew in the juices of memory and dream until that moment when something new tumbles out struts its jaunty stuff into a poem or story or a new numinous dream.

Ed dropped out at 10:30 and that entailed a third reconfiguring of my reading nest in the bed. This caused me to ruminate on how sharing is one of the ingredients of an enduring marriage and of all the things we shared to make this event work for both of us: we shared the light to read by, we shared the space on a standard size mattress, we shared the air we breathed, we shared ideas, we shared the laptop to make updates and read our reader's comments, we shared giggles and we shared a spoon.

All of this reminded me of the mini-challenge posted in hour 1: to post something about Joshua Henken's novel, Matrimony and then drop him a line to be in line for a chance to win a signed copy!. Based on Dewey's review, I feel pretty sure the couple in this novel do a whole lot of sharing, including pain and hardship, disappointments and tears, but also of dreams and desire and hope and joy. It is a character-driven story that muses about character-driven stories. Sounds like my kind of story.

oooops! speaking of forgetting. i forgot to click publish when i finished this update. or did i forget to finish it? i don't know. i don't remember.

i forgot to put fresh water down for Merlin too. But he is good at reminding. A claw tap on the wrist while lifting a water bottle is a better reminder than a string tied around it.

and as u can see i'm 'forgetting' many keystrokes. my hands are as weary as my eyes but just as jazzed on coffee as my brain. a lot of sizzle but little control, like a downed electrical wire in a storm.

8:30 PM--I was determined to reach a total of 100 pages for the day in The Historian before I took another break. I just reached page 350 for a total of 104. It took me much longer than I expected. I may have slid to 10 pph in that last hour! It is only partly the small print. It is at least as much due to the delectable sentences Kostova composes. They have the staid cadences of an academic treatise while being jam-packed with those all-important nouns and verbs that move a story's plot forward.

Oh, but she dishes that plot out in eye-dropper size doses while stirring in exquisite details of local culture and landscape and history. The various narrators are all historians by training and passion and their diction reflects that in its precision and attention to detail. And yet, the story of these historians turned vampire hunters is as bone-chilling as any Stephen King has concocted.

I desperately want to continue. But I know that if I do, I will never make it til dawn. Besides, how can I do such a fine story justice if I'm starting to see the word 'napkin' as 'napalm'? I caught myself on that one. What have I not caught?

So I think I will be moving on to other things for the duration. I may return to Joseph Campbell's Mask of God series. I may pick up Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes for a chapter or two because the featuring of Hungarian culture and history in The Historian reminded me that Pinkola Estes had drawn from that well with her re-tellings of stories of the wild woman archetype.

I also have the thought of looking for a free e-book of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. I've never read it and it is almost a breathing presence in Kostova's story.

And at some point before I quit, I want to make an attempt at the mini-challenge sponsored by Sarah at There's Something About Translation to spend an hour trying to read a story in a language other than my mother tongue.

I will let you know what I've decided to do next after I've taken a short break to get something to eat and make a cup of coffee.

Merlin waits patiently for me to decide too. He wants this spot between my knees where the laptop is now perched on a box. He would probably vote for another Read-a-Thon real soon if he knew he had it to thank for his hours of usurping the laptop's place today.

4:30 PM--I was forced to take a break from The Historian by the arrival home from work of my husband Ed, of Ed's Thread, bearing bags of finger foods and energy drinks for feasting as we read. He's going to join in now for as long as he is able. But seeing as he just completed a sixth full work day in a row, we'll forgive him if he can't hang in til dawn.

While Ed was getting his Read-a-Thon post up, I demolished the nest I'd created on the bed for myself right after he crawled out this morning. I put back on there shelves the couple dozen books and reordered blankets and pillows to accommodate two. (But what about me? cries Merlin.) OK three. Happy Mr. Wizard?

I'm going to return to The Historian for awhile. At least long enough to find a better stopping place than the middle of a conversation in a Budapest restaurant. After that I will see. As much as I am loving this story--one of the best I've ever read--the small print is hard on my eyes. As the night wears on, I may switch to a YA out of the selection of fifteen or so my niece has loaned me.

2:00 PM--OK I spent longer over at Dewey's and checking out the mini-challenges and visiting etc than I intended. It is kind of addictive. I going to return to The Historian for awhile. What better novel could I have chosen for today than one featuring libraries and ancient manuscript collections all across Europe and America? It is a story inside a story inside a story wrapped in a weave of history and legend and myth.

As for Merlin? He's more impressed with the bookmark. His favorite game is to steal it out of the book while I'm not looking. Which is quite easy to do what with my RP aka tunnel vision.

12 Noon--As I munch on salt and vinegar potato chips and drink a Sobe's energy drink, I'm going to take a break from reading for awhile to go check in on doings at Dewey's and then drop by a few readers to pass along some of the cheer left here for me.

"Merlin! Get outta the chip bag!"

9:00 AM--I've reached page 280 of The Historian after two and a half hours. Not even the average of 25 pages per hour I was managing earlier this week. I probably should have started off the morning with something in a larger print. But I wanted to read fiction and I don't like to have multiple novels going at once. (Though I have on occasion. When a library book due date loomed say. And I set The Historian aside for three days last weekend in order to read again The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton during my nieces visit so we could discuss it.)

About 8:30 I set aside The Historian and began browsing in Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God, a set of four books published between 1959 and 1968 tracing the roots of myths from prehistoric to modern culture. From the cover blurbs:

Vol. I Primitive Mythology: The primitive roots of the mythology of the world are examined in the light of the most recent discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology.

Vol. II Oriental Mythology: An exploration of Eastern mythology as it developed into the distinctive religions of Egypt, India, China, and Japan.

Vol. III Occidental Mythology: A systematic and fascinating comparison of the themes that underlie the are, worship, and literature of the Western world.

Vol. IV Creative Mythology: The whole inner story of modern culture, spanning our entire philosophical, spiritual, and artistic history since the Dark Ages, and treating modern man's unique position as the creator of his own mythology.

I was introduced to Campbell's works in the early nineties as I began my quest to find my place in the larger world outside the fundamentalist sect I was raised in. I cannot now imagine that journey without Campbell's aid. I've since come to hold in awe and reverence all the sacred stories of all the traditions for the evidence they hold of how deep and strong the roots of story grow as people struggle to explain their world and themselves to themselves. I've come to see human being's need for story as equal in power and necessity to that of hunger and thirst.

I'm going to continue browsing Campbell for at least another hour. It took me an hour to type this update because I couldn't stop browsing.

I'm not going to keep track of pages for this. With my vision constraints I'm not in the running for prizes for most pages read anyway. For me, today is all about guilt-free reading.

I was going to make a trek to the kitchen for a snack and another cup of coffee but Merlin has made his own nest in a blanket next to my right hip and is happily snoring. I think I will let him be for now.


6:30 AM--I begin on page 246 of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which, if it fulfills all the expectations laid down in the first third, is one of the best novels I've encountered in years.

That is, I will begin if Merlin will settle down and stop turning off the light!! He's chasing wrinkles on the bed and jumping up to grab the light fixture chain. That's the thanks I get for bringing him a cup of milk when I went after my coffee. I guess I got him all riled while building my little nest on the bed with a couple dozen books within reach among the infinitely mutable mountain of blankets and pillows.

OK. Here's my book, where's that coffee? Merlin, no....

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