Author Page! And Other Stuff...

I officially made and official Author Page over on Facebook. I'm not sure this was the right thing to do, since I don't have any books out (besides the poetry anthology, Poetry Pact 2011, which you can buy here, if you like poetry. It's modest, but has come great poets (not me) involved, and poems that range from complex to Byron and Frost-type (me) and is a fun read) out but since so many submissions ask about Author pages and how many followers one has, and so on and so forth, I thought I ought to have an official page. At the very least, I can try to start accruing followers and such. If you're feeling kindly, please go here, and follow me.

The 'other stuff' is mostly just musing about how difficult it is to keep writing sometimes. Not difficult as in, you've got writer's block, or anything like that, but difficult as in, you've got so many stories in your head that want to be written, but you don't know which one should be the next one. There are so many options here, and I find myself flickering back and forth between several. Currently, it's between A Life Once Borrowed, which is a contemporary (with magical elements, though just how much magical elements is still unclear) inspired by the Scottish ballad, The Daemon Lover, and a completely new WIP, tentatively titled The Weight of a Shadow, which is much more fantasy. I'm also continuing to plug along with the Castalia memoir, and the super secret project.

Also, it's always interesting to find out that you were walking around with an injury you didn't know you had. Since I'm now off the blood thinners, I've finally gone to PT for what we thought was rhomboid pain, which has been causing me an increasing number of severe headaches. After initial treatment of the rhomboid and neck issue my PT guy traced the origin of the trouble back to a lump that I've had for about seven years, since a tragically clumsy 'almost' fall in the shower. Turns out that lump, is not one, but two torn muscles, which have subsequently scared and developed adhesions to the structures around them. Nice. On the upside, at least we discovered this now, as opposed to five or ten years from now, at which point, there might not be a way to fix things. And my shoulder is healing. I'll have PT for another couple of weeks but already the torn area is beginning to resolve and the lump is less than half the size it was.

And, because life is always better with old lady cats, here's a random photo of Face, who often sits with me while I'm writing. A fitting copilot when I'm working on the Castalia memoir. 17 years young, she is. And still death to any mouse she sees, as well as random feet.

For the Betterment of Oneself.

A friend of mine shared the file below on Facebook tonight, and I thought I'd take a brief moment to pass it on. Not all of these apply to me, but enough of them do, that I'm going to print it out and carry it around with me so that when I need a moment, I can take it and reflect on it. Selflessness is a wonderful, WONDERFUL thing, but sometimes, it's vital that you take care of yourself first, and worry about everything around you second. So, here it is!

She had a skittish soul, that girl with the faraway eyes...

The title is part of the first line of one of my WIPs. Specifically, the memoir I'm muddling through about Castalia, where I worked for thirteen years, and would still be, were that an option. I have so much to say about that period in my life, and yet each sentence is wrought of blood, extricated from my mind like a pale splinter of bone being pulled free from flesh and muscle, each spell spent working on it an exhausting and painful bout of self-inflicted wounds.

I'm in a maelstrom of life right now. Not because bad things are happening, but because many things are happening, but happening around me, while I'm secluded from them, even though I want to be a part of them so very badly. I am trapped inside a glass ball, tossed from wave to wave, caught by the storming winds, and pulled by the currents, yet completely unable to influence my own movements in any manner.

I know, so Eeyore, so emo, such a downer. I don't mean to be, and I'm not depressed.

More, I simply feel disconnected. Friends have books coming out (!) some have second books coming out (!!!) others have gotten agents (!) In the non-writing world cousins have had babies (*squee*) best friends have had babies (*more squeeing*) people have gotten married, other people have died. Everyone is doing things, going places. Meanwhile, I float in my sea-tossed glass, still writing, still fixated on that one goal of attaining an agent or a publishing deal. I don't begrudge the ships of friends, the schooners, and galleons, the sleek yachts or catamarans of other's lives setting off on different courses, but the distance between us has never yawned wider. They ride currents of wind and air, choosing their route with rudders and sails, while I bob at the mercy of the elements, unable to even cobble a ship together, never mind a process of steering it.

My cage is only made of glass. If I struck it, it would shatter. But that would leave me exposed to the sea without any means of staying afloat, so for now, I keep my hands fisted at my sides, hold all my weapons, the chafing frustrations, and irascible truths, that could fracture the insubstantial globe close against me, where they scrape and cut away at my calloused insides, but cannot damage the fragile cage. And I wait, scribbling stories across my own skin, putting them where I can never forget their sound, where they might safely wait until they can finally be recited within the sheltering glow of the campfires of others' minds. Those stories are all that matters, all that will be left once the body they're written on has dried an turned to dust, their passages impermeable to decay.

Should my glass some day finally be thrown onto the rocks of a seaside town, or hauled up in the belly of a fisherman's net, at least there will be stories inside it, if nothing else. Indelible traces of the bones and skin that made them so long before. Stories that will be heard and told and retold and reformed and passed from one mouth to another ear, to be regurgitated yet again in yet a new body. Immortality, by its truest definition, gained by accident through the act of creation.

So, here I bob and sink, and rise and fall, contained, and railing against the sphere around me while at the same time I resist doing anything to escape my cage. For now, I wait. And write. Always, I write.