Category Archives: Writing

Art and Culture, Poetry, Writing

To Hell and Back

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Beltane                                                              Emergence

Dancers. Kinesthetic wonders. The James Sewell ballet troupe are lithe, strong, fluid. Many of the things they did with their bodies revealed possibilities I had not kenned. Several a male dancer with take a female dancer on his back, then they would move, him bent over slightly, her resting on his back with no holds on either part, just weight and angle keeping her in place. Or, deadlifts of a prone woman on the floor to hip height. The Inferno was 70  minutes long and the number of calories expended by the troupe would keep me thin for a couple of months, maybe longer.

Then there was the audacity of it. The level of creative challenge in taking a solid, 800 year old literary masterpiece and interpreting it in an essentially silent, physical medium is immense. This was a brave work. The score and the dancers took on us on a journey through the Inferno, going lower and lower, down the New York Subway into the infernal regions. The Sewell inferno is set, loosely, in New York City.

This story of damnation and mid-life crisis is timeless and the Sewell Ballet has done it well. Worth seeing.

 

Humanities, Latin, Letters, Writing

Home

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Spring                                                                                New (Emergent) Moon

Since listening to the TED talk I posted below, I’ve been trying to decide what my home is. Certainly writing is a contender. Two or three times a day I sit down the computer and pound out a post for this website. I’ve written novels and short stories over the last twenty years plus all those sermons over the last forty. When I need to clarify fuzzy thinking, I head to the keyboard, trusting the One Who Types as less addled than the One Who Only Thinks.

The other contender is scholarship. I’m hesitant about this one, since it seems the realm of the academic and I left the academy long ago. Still, I translate Latin, take the MOOC courses and follow up, stay in touch with the literature in several fields: hermeneutics, biblical scholarship, ecologial thought, climate change, certain sub-disciplines of philosophy like aesthetics, pragmatism and metaphysics, neuro-science and classical literature. And, perhaps more telling, I approach life with the mind of a scholar, critical and analytic, wanting to be confident of my data, my sources, always pushing toward synergy, toward new ways of thinking.

These are not, of course, exclusive.  The writing requires research and research requires writing. Perhaps my home is the liminal zone between writing and scholarship.

Feelings, Writing

I Found, I Found An Altar

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Spring (so they say)                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

My lands!  My great-aunt Nell used this phrase a lot.  Seems to fit the weather today.

Entered my revised version of I Found an Altar into Scrivener.  I’ll compile it and start a round of submissions for The Ifrit and Altar.  These will go to magazines, both print and electronic. I’ll start with prozines because they pay the best and acceptance at them counts more than that at the lower paying and no compensation mags.

Really does feel like I’ve begun a different phase of my life now, one in which the writer is more professional, more functional than dysfunctional.  In spite of my melancholy over the last week or so I feel better about life in general.  A paradox, I know.  Melancholy these days feels like a chemical matter, perhaps triggered by some event (the rejections?) or emotion (why did I wait so long to get to this place?), but out of proportion to them.  So, I can have this underlying sad, heavy, bittersweet tonality or mood while feeling simultaneously strong.

 

Weather +Climate, Writing

Short Story Collection

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Spring (?)                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

Two more rejections have come in on this decidedly unspringlike day.  I can’t tell how much we have now, but when I went out at 7 pm to retrieve the trash container I walked in snow that came over the top of my Sorels.  In one day the advance of the sun has been pushed back, nullified by white, a covering more mid-winter than Easter.

Right now I’m going through a curious process of trying to collect all the short stories I’ve written in one spot though it has proved difficult.  I’ve had several computers over the years and transferring files from one to the next has not always been seamless.  All my novels and parts of novels are in one file, but until today the computer files I have of short stories were all over the place.  The computer files now have a home.

However.  In going through my paper files I’ve found many stories no longer extant as computer files.  That’s ok, because I can just reenter them, but it makes centralizing my cache of stories a bit more complicated.  I’m not sure I’ve located all the paper stories yet since I have three file cabinets plus bankers boxes, but over the next few weeks I’ll get all I can find in one physical location.

This is important to me because I’m editing and revising them in preparation for sending them out to magazines.  I want to have a reasonable idea of what my trunk looks like.

I edited one today, “I Found An Altar, Black With The Ash of Sacrifice,” that I like a lot, but it’s one of the paper only stories so I’m entering it now into Scrivener.  This process will take some time.

Art and Culture, Myth and Story, Writing

The Ifrit

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Spring                                                                       Bee Hiving Moon

Entering the edits and revising the Ifrit took longer than I expected.  Sigh.  When touching a work, I can’t resist fiddling with it.  Still, I finished before noon.  Then, I began to search my sources for short story markets.  I found several, but following their submission requirements will require some time, so I only submitted to one, a contest for emerging writers that had April 15th at 5 pm EST as its deadline.  Since that was only an hour and a half from when I found it, I decided to prioritize that one.

This is in service of building writer’s credentials, as well as selling/getting work out there, too, of course. I admit I’ve not done this stuff as well as I could have (hardly), but I pushed myself over the hump before I left for Tucson and I find myself with increased vigor around it.  Submissions still send a shiver of fear down my spine (Will I survive constant rejection?  Answer: of course, but tell that to my spine.), so I wouldn’t call it easy or routine, but I’m trying to get there.

Gives the old guy something to shoot for.

(Angels bow down for newly created Adam, whereas Iblis (Satan, dark, right) refuses. Islamic Persian miniature from before the 19th century.)  Ifrits are djinn that serve Iblis.

Writing

Conundrums

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Spring                                                          Bee Hiving Moon

Got my first semi-encouraging rejection today.  Missing doesn’t fit their needs, but they encouraged me to send future work to them.  Could be the gentle let down, but it sounded non-formulaic and sincere.

I’m in a bit of a stuck place right now in regard to the Unmaking trilogy of which Missing is the first book.  Since it takes a year + to write, then some more to revise and edit each novel, committing to finishing the trilogy could take up to three or four years.  I’m not getting any younger and I don’t want to spend that much time on something without a commercial future.

I have other projects that have a energy, three actually.  One of them in particular has a big book feel to me, but I’m not ready to start it.  It needs more research and language skills more advanced than those I have now.

So, I’ll let the submission/rejection cycle play out over a few more agents and if necessary consider electronic publishing, then decide about picking up Loki’s Children.  It is about a third written with material from Missing I cut out during revision.

Garden, Writing

Queries and Cool Season Crops

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Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

Got Missing queries sent off to 7 agents who represent young adult novels.  I’ll pick up the other three next week and establish a new list of fantasy submissions.  Feels good to have it sent off, routine.  Book buying by publishers, agent’s choices for what they represent, even what the public chooses to read are all highly subjective decisions.  That’s why multiple submissions over a period of time represents the only way of making sure you’ve give a work a fair shot.

The cold season crops will go in the ground this afternoon after the nap.  The weekend and next week looks either cold or wet, so today is the best shot.  Beets and carrots, that’s our cool weather crops, but I’ll plant a lot of each.  We love both beets and carrots.  I spent some time this morning checking planting and nitrogen requirements.  I still have to lay down nitrogen since I left that out of the broadcast last fall.

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Travel, Writing

What Is My Life Reaching For?

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Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

On the last afternoon of the Intensive Journal Workshop we had an exercise focused on what our life is reaching for.  In the first morning we had defined the current period of our life: in my case the time after Kate’s retirement.  By the last afternoon we had worked ourselves into the next period of our lives.  Since we were newly in this next period, this exercise asked us to feel, below the conscious level, where our lives wanted to go.

Here is my sense of what my life is reaching for in this next period:

1. a bountiful, sustainable nutrient dense harvest of fruit and vegetables.

2. a way to use the Great Wheel website to advance the Great Work through literature, science and political activism.

3. a third phase (third lifetime) writing portfolio with short story writing credits as a floor for selling novels.

4. a schedule for translating and commenting on at least several books of the Metamorphoses

5. still more of a stable, wonderful marriage, regular visits and communication with kids and grandkids and friends.

6. more mutual travel opportunities with Kate.

As I work in the inner movement of my life, I can feel a quieting, a confidence that who I am and what I do is enough-no matter the outcomes.  This feeling has grown stronger since Kate retired and continues to strengthen with time.

In my third lifetime I will be calm, steady, productive.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase, Travel, Writing

Mr. Ellis Regrets

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Spring                                           Hare Moon

Just the last few things left in the room.  This “room” by the way has a kitchen and a small living room.  It’s a very comfortable way to live away from home.  I might try Residence Inns again sometime.  Not too expensive either, especially if you stack it up against a mid-priced hotel.

Been googling and looking at the EZY READ atlas Tom got me.  I don’t know why they say large print.  Doesn’t look large to me.  Chaco Canyon may, to my regret, be a road too far.  Gallup is 6 hours from here, not 4 as I figured for some reason.  That meant I could have gotten there by 9 pm MST with just 4 hours driving.  6 hours after a full workshop day is probably too much.

Haven’t decided what to do yet, but I can make Denver by Friday afternoon to surprise the birthday girl in two reasonably easy days if I skip Chaco Canyon.  I’ll still want to catch something, though I’m not sure what.  Not sure what route I’ll take either.  That will have an impact on what I can see, of course.

Anyhow as of this afternoon the trip turns north, back to the land of ice and snow.

Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Latin, MOOCS, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Now

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Spring                                             Hare Moon

The first of three workshops has finished.  This one, life context, positions you in the current period of your life.  It’s been, as always, a moving and insight producing time.  These workshops move below the surface and defy easy summary, but I have had one clear outcome from this one.  I’m in a golden moment.

I’m healthy, loved and loving.  Kate and I are in a great place and the kids are living their adult lives, not without challenges, but they’re facing those.  The dogs are love in a furry form.

The garden and the bees give Kate and me a joint work that is nourishing, enriching and sustainable. We’re doing it in a way that will make our land more healthy rather than less.

The creative projects I’ve got underway:  Ovid, Unmaking trilogy, reimagining faith, taking MOOCs, working with the Sierra Club, and my ongoing immersion in the world of art have juice.  Still.

I have the good fortune to have good friends in the Woollies and among the docent corps (former and current).  Deepening, intensifying, celebrating, enjoying.  That’s what’s called for right now.