A Weed on The Curb

 Spring mushrooms and onion blooms, these are the things Spring in Texas is made of. 

There was a seed , there was a tree Then there came a motor and an edge An in delicate labor and now a stump Snuffling the day, restless to rampage A brain torn from the soil Now a new red boar Growling through the foliage : No kneel ing before the cart No pause before the charge No mercy at the root This past week's WordCrafters meeting included a plethora of prompt ideas, including writing from a gardening or nature-based perspective, a word list, a suggested beginning sentence, and a collection of images. I used the word list (the green words above are from the list) and maybe, in a sideways fashion, the nature-based perspective.  And then there were the images. For some reason lately, I've been noodling through two prompts on Wednesdays, writing one out for sharing and keeping the other to turn over during the week. The image this week? A woman drumming light. It caught my eye and then my brain and then it embedded itself into an old idea that I'd abandoned years ago a

 I was reminded earlier today that I have a blog. A blog that I haven't visited--much less updated--since January of this year (2024). The idea of having a blog felt surreal and I realized that the past several months have seen a few semi-drastic changes (new jobs, an inability to finish reading/writing projects, a slow wearing away of some formerly close social ties) resulting in a feeling of having been suspended in the past but no longer being supported by...anything.  Am I still even interested in writing? Who are these new characters who are demanding more traditional fantasy settings? Am I coming back to the mineral-eating rats and the dwarves who raise them? Do I need to stop attending my writing group to write? Should I just pat these new characters on the head and tell them it's been fun but they should run off and play elsewhere for now?  I feel like I'm entering my Sarcastic Gen X phase. Maybe rediscovering it.   Or falling back into fantasy, on the other side of

 Salutations, ReaderPeople! Just to catch you up on the Filling-in-the-Gaps TBR, I've read the books for 1973 and 1980 and have switched out 1984's book several times but have finally settled on Dragons of the Autumn Twilight. I might end up switching out 2023 for a poetry book, depending on how the next two novels go. I'm going to update my Goodreads once all the books are done, filling in those gaps. I'm also going to sideswipe the GarbAugust reading event (do the prompts for each week but skip the bingo, etc.), possibly reading Alan Dean Foster's Krull  for week 3 (novelization or book by famous person). I'm going to have to locate books for the rest (Week 1: Category Romance or Men's Adventure; Week 2: Paperbacks from Hell or Vintage Smut; Week 4: Anything Goes)...I'll have to skim Paperbacks from Hell  to see if there's anything my weak stomach can handle.  And then there's the writing. I've been finding NaNoWriMo/prompts really distract

 I think I picked the wrong candle for the computer room because right now I'd really like to sneeze but I can't really take a deep breath. So--tomorrow this candle moves to the den and I stop Vick's flashbacks while typing.  What's up this afternoon? I recently watched a CriminOlly video asking whether he'd read a book published in every year he'd been alive (per his Goodreads' list). Immediately, I had to discover whether or not I  had a book from every year I'd been alive on my  Goodreads list. I did not (which doesn't mean I haven't read books published in those years, just that I haven't bothered to fully populate my Goodreads from childhood forward. This meant I now needed to read at least five books to populate those years.  Which meant that I needed to raid our bookshelves to find books from 1973, 1980, 1984, 1989, and 2023. Interlude for lots of sneezing, being asked what I'm doing, knocking a stack of books on one dog, and reali

 So. My actual screensaver called me out today. Have I been writing much poetry? Is the doggerel below P O E T R Y? Yeah, probably not. However. The real story is that I'm working my way through a few stories for Camp NaNoWriMo. At almost halfway through the month, I'm still not sure what will end up under the pen on a day-by-day basis but I've added to several.  My reading has been similar. Lots of initial chapters or initial handful of chapters but very, very few final chapters completed. I'm thinking about taking a day and just clearing out my zine basket. Summer heat settled in early, so I haven't been doing any outdoor reading, but zines are pretty quick and I should be able to finish several while the squirrels raid the birdseed. :)  Hope you're having a good writing/reading summer! It must have been a movie, black and white, Watched when I was younger, maybe sick, Glancing between Mom cleaning and the screen. A father and his daughter in a lighthouse New