uh, oh, ah, and also um
I'd like to have summer back now, please. I'll be good, promise.
Well, I'll try to be good.
The writing went well yesterday. and I did 1,201 words on "The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer." This story is taking me strange and unexpected places. For example, yesterday, I spent several hours conversing with the God of all Rats and puzzling over how one goes about politely declining gifts offered by gods. The story is set in no particular American city at some unspecified time in the future when things are even worse than they are now (which is, I think, saying something). I'd hoped to finish the story yesterday, but what I thought would be a vignette decided it wants to be a short story. This has become a significant and ongoing problem with Sirenia Digest. The constant reader will recall that when I began this affair, I specified I would be writing vignettes, usually two or three thousand words in length. But mostly I've been writing short stories, because I have this fear of not letting fictions go where they wish to go (wild magic) and at whatever length they require. But there is so much writing that is not Sirenia Digest that has to be done. Try to tell an ambitious vignette that it can't grow up to be a short story. Just try. I dare you. It'll end in tears.
She's the kind of girl who gets her slings and arrows from the dumpster.
The kind who tells you she's bipolar just to make you trust her.
She's the kind of girl who leaves out condoms on the bedroom dresser,
Just to make you jealous of the men she fucked before you met her.
Sorry. I'm just sort of obsessed with that song right now. And those four lines in particular.
No walking yesterday. Only typing, writing, spewing story. There was a bath afterwards, and leftover chili. We watched Christiane Cegavske's Blood Tea and Red String, which was quite entirely delightful, filled as it was with treacherous white mice, a frog shaman, a spider who eats bluebirds, a coach drawn by a turtle, a stolen ragdoll, bat-eared rat crows, and, of course, blood tea and red string. Afterwards, I played about three more hours of Final Fantasy XII. Presently, I am trapped aboard an airship trying to rescue Ashe B'nargin Dalmasca.
I was in bed by two, but sleep was still an hour away, my head too filled with noise and words and light and nagging questions. The conversation turned to magick, as it so often does in the small hours of the night: my perception of magick as something wild and untameable, entirely unsuited to rigid ceremony and morality; the nuisance of New Age, fluffy-bunny nonsense; how Nazis, Neo-Nazis, and Odinists have tainted Norse mythology; the search for a witchcraft free of the elements of Judeo-Xtian mysticism that Gerald Gardner built into Wicca; my inability to distinguish magick from delusion/insanity; how the Greek pantheon is making more sense to me these days than it once did; how I will always be an atheist, no matter what; my need for a new athame (Look! More Judeo-Xtian freemasonry nonsense!); Joseph Campbell and my inability to follow my bliss; how so many pagans seem terrified of Nature and actually seek to avoid the ecstatic, the erotic, the wild, the amoral, the celebratory, opting instead for dry ritual, happy fairies, dolphins*, visualization, pretty crystals, and watered-down, westernized Buddhism; the fear many pagans have for their own and varied histories. The usual. My pet gripes. I need some time alone with the trees and the wind and the sky.
We're supposed to be moving my office tomorrow. Jim and Hannah and Byron have all promised to help. Hopefully, it will come off without a hitch. Hopefully. But it means I need to finish "The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer" this afternoon. Get to it, nixar!
* I adore dolphins, but really.
Well, I'll try to be good.
The writing went well yesterday. and I did 1,201 words on "The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer." This story is taking me strange and unexpected places. For example, yesterday, I spent several hours conversing with the God of all Rats and puzzling over how one goes about politely declining gifts offered by gods. The story is set in no particular American city at some unspecified time in the future when things are even worse than they are now (which is, I think, saying something). I'd hoped to finish the story yesterday, but what I thought would be a vignette decided it wants to be a short story. This has become a significant and ongoing problem with Sirenia Digest. The constant reader will recall that when I began this affair, I specified I would be writing vignettes, usually two or three thousand words in length. But mostly I've been writing short stories, because I have this fear of not letting fictions go where they wish to go (wild magic) and at whatever length they require. But there is so much writing that is not Sirenia Digest that has to be done. Try to tell an ambitious vignette that it can't grow up to be a short story. Just try. I dare you. It'll end in tears.
She's the kind of girl who gets her slings and arrows from the dumpster.
The kind who tells you she's bipolar just to make you trust her.
She's the kind of girl who leaves out condoms on the bedroom dresser,
Just to make you jealous of the men she fucked before you met her.
Sorry. I'm just sort of obsessed with that song right now. And those four lines in particular.
No walking yesterday. Only typing, writing, spewing story. There was a bath afterwards, and leftover chili. We watched Christiane Cegavske's Blood Tea and Red String, which was quite entirely delightful, filled as it was with treacherous white mice, a frog shaman, a spider who eats bluebirds, a coach drawn by a turtle, a stolen ragdoll, bat-eared rat crows, and, of course, blood tea and red string. Afterwards, I played about three more hours of Final Fantasy XII. Presently, I am trapped aboard an airship trying to rescue Ashe B'nargin Dalmasca.
I was in bed by two, but sleep was still an hour away, my head too filled with noise and words and light and nagging questions. The conversation turned to magick, as it so often does in the small hours of the night: my perception of magick as something wild and untameable, entirely unsuited to rigid ceremony and morality; the nuisance of New Age, fluffy-bunny nonsense; how Nazis, Neo-Nazis, and Odinists have tainted Norse mythology; the search for a witchcraft free of the elements of Judeo-Xtian mysticism that Gerald Gardner built into Wicca; my inability to distinguish magick from delusion/insanity; how the Greek pantheon is making more sense to me these days than it once did; how I will always be an atheist, no matter what; my need for a new athame (Look! More Judeo-Xtian freemasonry nonsense!); Joseph Campbell and my inability to follow my bliss; how so many pagans seem terrified of Nature and actually seek to avoid the ecstatic, the erotic, the wild, the amoral, the celebratory, opting instead for dry ritual, happy fairies, dolphins*, visualization, pretty crystals, and watered-down, westernized Buddhism; the fear many pagans have for their own and varied histories. The usual. My pet gripes. I need some time alone with the trees and the wind and the sky.
We're supposed to be moving my office tomorrow. Jim and Hannah and Byron have all promised to help. Hopefully, it will come off without a hitch. Hopefully. But it means I need to finish "The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer" this afternoon. Get to it, nixar!
* I adore dolphins, but really.