A Weed on The Curb

 For The Sunday Muse , #162 : Is diving the same as flight? Should I ask a duck? When the moon wonders, leaving prints in the puddles, I ask whether I follow her truly with dry toes and feathers? One swift peck and the sleeping duck quacks: Follow the dark path that drains still, shallow; pull hope's pinion and leave it beside her flight-print, find form between swan, hawk and  her bright, hazy darkness.  And then leave me alone, restless beast . I can't help it. Even you pick up lost coins. *** This week's Muse  entry is caught up in everything (or maybe casually assembled around other projects) relating to getting words out of each others' way. I visited a local author event this Saturday and was struck by how sad I was that this year I wasn't able to participate. And I realized how angry I was about the year that was. Slightly unstable rocket fuel to start wrapping up drafts and moving them toward book form (as witnessed by the mess of a poem above)--but I'm ...

  *wild Muppet cheering* Made it to 10,000 words yesterday (and, more importantly, from beginning to end of a short story) sometime around 10 pm yesterday. I had purposely allowed myself a late start, so I wasn't expecting to be done early...but my productivity really drops off after around 5 pm, so it was a slog to the finish line. The document (11 pt font, space between paragraphs but not lines) came to about 16 pages.  I wanted to try this because I'm often incapable of finishing stories (I start with a static situation & have a hard time making it move) and because I'd seen a challenge going around online for a 10K a day for 7 days, 70K word novel draft. I adore the idea  of a having a complete draft to work with after just a week of a work (instant gratification? c'est moi?). Anyway...before committing to an even more intense NaNoWriMo situation, I thought I'd try it for a day. First lesson learned : I do not  want to do this for seven days straight. Typing...

WORD*CRAFTER*PROMPT ~Comparison & Contrast Write about anything that strikes your fancy. It could be "Hot & Cold", "Beauty & Ugly", "Night & Day", or "Heaven & Hell" for a few examples. If this leaves you feeling empty inside, then you could let the image below fulfill your writing purpose....he he he see what I did there!! “The Soul of a Mustang” by Victoria Ivanova Nonsense  Ring a contrast where the shadows fall Only light will show them tall, The spirits dim behind them. Jockey bright and horse in marble Run a race along the wall Only the sun will drive them. WORD*CRAFTER*PROMPT ~Birth: It can be the birht of a child, or birth of a thought, or a birth of anything that hits your muse. If you are not hip on that then here is an image as well (photo by Tom Chambers & the last image posted at Magpie Tales). Glass Flower by Tom Chambers We fed the Wild on blown glass chips in our good soup bowl, Frozen tears of melted sand,...

 Yes. The short answer is yes. Blog over. And...more frequently...no. I'm a squeamish reader (I just started Cherie Priest's The Toll and you can pretty much tell from my face that I'm waiting for the jump scare. Maybe there won't be any. But I am pretty sure there will be and Arthur, who is being held tightly on one side, is probably hoping for none.) and I don't really care for multiple POVs because I will choose a favorite and snark my way through the others.  This is probably a childish way to look at it, but I'm pretty sure I want the story to take my hand and drag me off to the next really cool thing I need to see and eventually, after a fun afternoon of adventuring, let me go, relatively safe and unharmed, at home. I don't want a bunch of hyper, left-over emotions that explode out at weird times because it takes me a loooooong time to digest the horror that I consumed in the name of "fun." Which isn't to say that I don't want my tast...

 Welcome to a blog in which I continue to avoid working on a fiction project because my brain just starts screaming whenever I consider picking it up. Why? *shrugs* Who knows? I was informed yesterday by a younger family member that I was no longer allowed to blame anything on the pandemic...so let's just say my writing schedule has been thrown off by rain, heat, and the general desire of my brain to go on periodic screaming jags. Change of seasons are always tricky for me--what I want  to work on varies with my ability to enjoy reading and writing outside and whether we're trying to cram activities into less-hot parts of the day and so I've been feeling the pull of different projects to begin with. Then the rains came. I have a dog who gets shaking and trembling  nervous when the thunder begins. We're not in a flood zone but he also objects to going outside when it's wet. So he's under the desk right now, panting. And my brain is taking a deeeeeeeeep breath. Wh...

  Posted for  The Sunday Muse #161: Gemini . Come peruse the poetry! There was a haunted story about a haunted house We used to tell it quietly when it was dark without. Hot pepper bushes hatch butterflies Already flaming on the wing Catch them in a metal cage-- Careful not to singe. Church windows birth a pair of girls named Shadow and Reflection Careful which you look upon for that is your direction. There was a haunted story about a haunted house I've forgotten every moral, every light I've doused. *** Can you tell I might be ready to skip the heat of summer (and the potential hurricanes) for Halloween? Anyway. Second shot out of the way!! My shoulder swelled up like a golf ball, partially due to me jumping slightly at the shot (sorry, I'm a huge baby about pointy things) but otherwise not a terrible experience. I was worried about a dog punching me in the shoulder afterward (it only happened once) and I may have caught up on my month's ration of YouTube & sleep ...

I was looking at my TBR shelf yesterday--the books aren't as neat as they were in the beginning of the year but they don't seem to be leaving the shelf, either--and it struck me that maybe I don't like to read anymore. Or...maybe I don't know how to pick my books. And then I saw an announcement for the 2021 SPFBO (a contest for self-published fantasy books) with a long list of 300 self-published fantasy books and I thought...maybe I could take a genre that I used to like but have fallen out with and see what's up with my taste in books. And so I typed up the entries in my own list, looked each one up on Kindle, downloaded a few sample chapters and reshuffled the list into samples downloaded, samples I might want to download, categories I don't have any desire to read, and books not available on Kindle. Having followed SPFBO for the past couple of years, I'm well aware that my tastes don't generally align with the grimdark, longform tastes of many of the ...

Time it, call it: last image from the bath, camera already checked in,  grades...I guess they're fine, no one stopped me to talk before class. And Shelly's gone again; caught her when she was  back for a weekend but there're no jobs here. She's left for some campus where the gates are high as the bars. Last Saturday we were at the pool and only this smelly square remembers. Greetings and salutations. Inspired by the image provided by the wonderful Shay at The Sunday Muse  for The Sunday Muse #160 and the beginning of summer here on the verge of the edge of the Texas Coast. The dogs are confused by why the door doesn't stay open half the day anymore and why we seem to have taken up slapping ourselves when sitting on the patio (mosquito season!) but the plants that have been lurking are beginning to bloom and I'm not unhappy about that. I'm still thinking about a writing accountability partner because I've fallen off the Nameless Project schedule again and...

  Too far away for the water to show me leaning out When the dolphin leaps, suddenly close A second ripples, as if we are in a show, a summer Shatters and soaks the absent crowd. This week's WordCrafters prompt was themed around Reflections and this popped into mind, a memory of the dolphins running before a tanker at Surfside, going to SeaWorld on an orchestra trip in high school, and all the water under the bridge... -- chrissa

The weather keep promising and warning of showers--maybe strong storms--in the very near future. This is mostly hype; however, as we have a dog who refuses to go outside if its raining and will sit on top of you and shiver when it thunders, I pay more attention to the forecast than otherwise. Which means that I've been a little on edge as summer creeps in and the humidity zooms and the little thunderstorm icons start to march across the screen...but nothing materializes. In addition, the Jack to my Sally got his second shot yesterday and, again, rumors of a few bad days following the second shot had us laying in the soup (for him) and pizza (for me) and waiting.  The tension!! So, of course, something needed to be straightened. It started out as organizing writing projects so that the notebooks for the most current projects were close to hand and then turned into rearranging the closet and progressed to updating the TBR shelf because, let's face it, as soon as I put something o...

  Sunday Muse #159 ( come join the fun! ): The Birds Know When the bars fell and the trees cracked our shell,  a fable returned to our streets. Even the zoo knows the birds travel true by the light of the city's defeat. Dragonflies will weave us diamond lies while the cicadas shatter the chorus Wait for the parliament at the lake where we sat, plastic swans sinking beneath Perch where the water distorts the clear air, wish on rainbows where fountains are bare Dragonflies will speak our liar's high while the cicadas rattle the forest The ducks and the geese, mockingbirds swallows--  and we-- might prove the moral is fair.  Okay, I couldn't not  create a tiny zine for this poem...because I'm still on that kick. :)  Hope everyone is having a productive week, a pleasant week, or a peaceful week (all of the above?)!  -- chrissa

  What would a backyard poetry/zine festival be if you couldn't have a few craft projects? This was a great excuse to get my poetry dinosaur, a draft notebook, and multiple colors of pens to create a few tiny zines of my own. When I do this again in the fall, I'm going to rely more on crafting the zines themselves rather than printing and photos -- these were fun but it felt like they could have used some additional handcrafted elements.  This was a fun project-in-hindsight rather than in the planning and I'd like to do something similar in the fall: three mornings worth of reading and at least two afternoons worth of tiny zine writing. The two projects below aren't necessarily finished (there's plenty of notebook left to keep noodling in) and I'll be interesting to see what might be inspire in the fall (a parliament of birds in the patio gazebo?). It looks like this summer will be without a moonflower tower (last year's seeds haven't sprouted) but...so ...

There is a short stack of zines for today and I realize that I've missed an opportunity--Backyard Zine Fest 2021: Spring! Reading in the morning has been awesome and I'm lucky to have been able to do it. Now there's going to be the crazy heat of summer to get through, but fall might be a fun time to have another several days reading in the morning and crafting in the afternoon (that's the next post). I'll be on the lookout for fall zines to add to my collection and maybe do the reading over Halloween weekend?  I've been collecting books for a few months now: everything goes in the Zine Basket so that I don't lose track of smaller pieces. The zine basket is now empty (except for the craft notebooks) and my poetry shelf is slightly fuller. Time to start preparing for the fall! :) This was how the basket looked when I started today's reading, which included the longest book in the collection.  I had a more varied response than the on the previous two days a...

Good afternoon! I'm making good use of the cool mornings we've been gifted this week to explore the zines I ordered to celebrate Poetry Month (April) and really enjoying what I've been discovering. My favorite way to discover zines is in person at local art/author fairs but 2020 trained me to look at spaces like Etsy as well, which has worked well as we wait for in-person events to begin again. The zines I've received have been in excellent shape and this has proved a fun way to discover authors.  Which brings us to today's round-up of zines.  After settling down with a dog on the back porch, I read Hannah Smith's Alchemy . This was full of gorgeous phrases ("mica sunlight" is my favorite and one I'll remember when walking by our local arboretum's pond). Smith has a captivating way of describing nature and her inclusion of daily activities alongside these descriptions makes these poems read like a missive from an observant and talented friend. ...

 Finally! Zine season has begun. This morning I started in on my stack of Etsy poetry books/zines and lucked out with the first two.  Starting with The Untier of Impossible Knots , which has a perfect cover illustration--these are poems to lift overhead and read and then pause to see what you're thinking or feeling. My favorite poem in this balances between "Today Four Crows" and "Never Trust a Vehicle" but enjoyed the volume as a whole; it's the kind of volume you can return to and find a different favorite for the day, a bit of solace, or a concept to think through. Would recommend. Maybe you don't do this...but I worry that the next book you select after one you enjoyed will suffer for being next. But...there's the basket of poetry and Anna Bayuk's Venus of the Swamp  was waiting. I read the back first--Ms. Bayuk was the 2020 South Florida Youth Poet Laureate. So far, so good. Lovely cover. It includes art and poems! She has a gift for selecti...

 It's the season when every morning feels like a prelude to rain but not all of them end up there. Time to bring in the shamrocks from the back porch and check our hurricane preparedness list. Hope, then pray, that there are no hurricanes this year anywhere along the Gulf Coast. Order more tuna fish.  After the previous year, however, I feel that all my planning and prep circuits are blown. Which leads through twisty paths of consideration to how I'm going to move forward with the poetry book I've been working on (and just got the cover art for!!!). So, so happy with the cover, which really captures the book itself, which experienced a swerve from a general compilation of poems written to prompt at our local writers' group and poetry blog to a collection of 2020 poems written as the group moved online and the rhythm of weeks disintegrated into the transition period between one normal and the next.  I'm not so good with the between-times. Now, as we get our shots and...

  I'll tell you flight is good balance-- Witches don't need to master the sweep of the wind; we are in its lift. This is skill. Where the dance requires the footing and the leap, we only want the slip. Let go from the wild branch, fall backward; join our airy trapeze! The fear is the trip. -- chrissa

April was a swerve. I was in the closet grabbing a shirt last night and glanced at the Small Board of Writing Inspiration. It was still a pretty minty green and makes me happy...but I didn't work on either of the projects mentioned during April. I ended up landing on the zine:  ordering several from Etsy (post on those coming up!) and deciding that smaller stories with more handcrafting was where I wanted to focus. This meant that I worked more in notebooks and didn't make the word count that I had originally aimed to make in April. Of course, this also meant that I wasn't working on those stories that I'd hoped to (although that WIP designation could mean anything...) and now I'm not sure which direction to take for May. My particular challenge is finishing. This is the stage of the project (ideas collected, a draft existing in notebooks and/or the computer, and an artificial deadline passing) where I'm most likely to lay it down and chase the next shiny new pr...