Better Than Dead

Random quote of the day:

“As a Catholic, I believe in God and in evolution; once there were dinosaurs and now there aren’t; six million years ago there were no humans and now there are, so obviously something changed. God has more imagination than anybody.”

—Diana Gabaldon, interview, Outlander Cast Blog, April 13, 2017

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I ran across an old reading meme and decided to do it again. Because life is short and why not waste time? (Although I don’t believe reading or talking about reading is ever wasting time.)

Question: Do you have a regular place you read? What books are currently waiting there?          

Nan by Elizabeth Kingston
A novella set in the world of her medieval romance trilogy which I devoured in a month. Well-written and with incredibly dimensional and nuanced characters, these are books I will hold on to: The King’s Man; Fair, Bright, and Terrible; and Desire Lines. (I hope there will be more!)

The 37^th Parallel by Ben Mezrich
A Hellier inspired purchase. So, you know, paranormal non-fiction.

Fairies: A Guide to Celtic Fair Folk by Morgan Daimler
Research reading for the current WIP, concise and easy to read.

Tarot for Writers by Corinne Kenner
Using tarot for world-building, character, and writing prompts. I haven’t gotten very far into it and I’m not sure it will be completely useful for the way I write but whatever.

The Archetype of Initiation by Robert L. Moore
A Jungian approach and quite fascinating. Also inspired by Hellier.

The Underworld Initiation by R.J. Stewart
Because one cannot have too many books on initiation, right? More of a mythological/psychic approach.

I’m actively reading all of these except the last, cycling them in and out. I think reading both books on initiation simultaneously might get confusing, so I’m saving Stewart’s book.

Random quote of the day:

“To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation—is there a worse trade we make in life?”

—Robert Brault, Round Up the Usual Suspects

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

—John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.”

—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.”

—Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“The law is not about humanity.”

—Phil Rickman, The Heresy of Dr. Dee

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I’ve been doing some clean-up work on my blog, trying to eliminate duplications and other messes that happened long ago when I transferred it from LJ to Dreamwidth. It’s never been a high-priority thing, but something I dip into when I’m in the mood to do something fairly mindless (and kidding myself it’s productive). (Or as a time waster instead of writing, but we won’t talk about that.)

I ran across an old post from June of 2011 which was just at the beginning of my caregiving for my mother when she was on peritoneal dialysis and still able to do most things for herself. That changed in September of that year when she had her stroke—but that’s not the point of this post. Apparently, in June I had just finished my last read through/clean up of my second completed novel, Blood Geek. I think maybe I had the idea of self-publishing. That idea was overtaken by my mother’s illness and never came about. It’s just as well, I suppose. It was a decent effort, but not my best work.

But that’s not the point of this post, either. In the above-referenced post I was talking about the strange parallel of writing a novel (almost twenty years prior at that point) about a woman whose early life had been constrained by caring for her sick mother. She was just about to break free and live life for herself. In 2011 I was rather amazed by the “haunting echo, now that I am helping to care for my own mother, that keeps bouncing through the chambers of my heart. It’s a little disturbing. I knew more than I thought I knew back then.” But in June of 2011 I had no idea, really, of what was to come, how consuming caregiving would be, how it would leave no room for anything but working and caring, how it squeezed out all time for anything like creativity.

But again, that’s not the point of this post. This is, this paragraph I came across:

And now I am in a different phase of my life. I have no vision for what comes next. I can’t see that far beyond the day-to-day. I do know that when I get back to writing something new again, I don’t want it to echo that day-to-day in the slightest. Which is not to say I might not use some of these characters again—in fact, I fully intend to. But they will be engaged in some other enterprise, something that blows the doors open to other worlds with no fences.

What blows the doors off my mind on this day, in 2020, is that I am writing new things again, and the new novel I’m writing does involve some of the same characters—in a whole new enterprise, a whole new process of growth and transformation. (And I am going through that transformation with them.) I haven’t really thought about these characters much in the last nine years, although one of them, Carmina, kept popping up now and then to insist she had a story I really needed to tell. I poked at her story over the years, but beyond the first two chapters, nothing gelled. I didn’t start last year thinking she will be the one. I started last year just trying to write something, anything. And then I wrote a completely different novel in a completely different universe. Also one I’d used before, but nothing to do with these characters.

Yet here I am. Happy and more than a little surprised that this fall Carmina’s story finally took off.

And that’s why I say that no story I have ever committed to paper or electrons (or, hell, even the ones that knock around in my head that I haven’t bothered to do that with) is every truly dead—until I am. Or until my brain blows out. Even my first completed novel, which if I have anything to say about it will never see the light of day, has produced nuggets that I have mined and used in later books. Like the clerk in the dead parrot sketch of Monty Python fame keeps insisting, these stories are not dead. Even if I’m not aware of them on a conscious level, they’re still in there. Resting.

Random quote of the day:

“Death is the ultimate mystery, which, alas, love isn’t, so it’s more enticing as subject matter.”

—Luisa Valenzuela, The Paris Review, Issue 160, Winter 2001

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“To be feared is to fear: no one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind himself.”

—Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistles

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.