Kate

Winter                                             Full Cold Moon

Kate goes back to work on Monday, February 1st.  Right now I believe she’ll do ok.  Her hip injections–cortisone–have helped.  Her neck has been fine during this period, but she will have to return to odd angles while looking into young eyes, ears and throats.  The computer ergonomics in the office are not ideal for her either.  She’s gotten more and more exercise in over the last few weeks and I hope that means that her stamina is sufficient.

We’ll take it, as they say, a day at a time.

I wish I didn’t have the Woolly Retreat coming up over the weekend, but she’s not working weekends, at least not right now, so there will only be Thursday and Friday nights when I’m not here.  Of course, if she experience difficulty, I’ll give it a miss.

The novel keeps on coming.  In retrospect I think it was the novel that kept me up the other night.  Since I write without much of a plan, it’s quite easy for me to write myself into a corner, or to realize that early ideas, some woven into much of what I’ve written, no longer work.  Both happened with this one.

Since I’m nearing what will be the middle of the book in number of words, the arc of the story has to reach a certain dramatic point here and I had to fiddle with a good bit of the already written material to make that possible.  Part of the change, inevitable really, involves pruning excess characters, locales and plot lines.  When I did this, I reduced the plot lines to three, much easier for a reader to follow.  I also created a key  plot point that will allow all these plot lines to converge further along, and I hope, diverge again as I set up the second book.

Ordinary Time

Winter                              Full Cold Moon

In just two days those of us who follow the Celtic calendar will celebrate the coming of Imbolc.  I’ll write more about it on Monday, but I wanted to note here the difference in timber and resonance between post-Epiphany January and the holiseason just ended.  We move now into the ordinary days, days when the sense of expectation and sacred presence relies more on our private rituals, our own holydays.

In my own case, for example, Valentine’s Day lends this time period a certain magic as its pre-birthday spirit invades the present.  Also, for me and my fellow Woolly Mammoths, this next week marks our annual retreat, so we get ready for it, this time again at Blue Cloud Monastery in South Dakota.  It is, too, for those with any presence in the Chinese world, just a couple of weeks before the beginning of the spring festival, or, as we know it here, Chinese New Years.  This year it begins on my birthday.

Imbolc, too, has sacred resonance and its six week period marks the beginning of the growing season here as seeds for certain long growing season vegetables like leeks must get started.