 Summer has blown past like a train that missed the station, but here are some updates about the goings on in my little pocket universe. Writing: Athena Summer is the season I work my ass off at the restaurant so that I can take time off in the winter to write. So usually, there’s not a lot of writing time in the summer weeks. However, I have been burning the midnight hours (and lots of wine) on getting Plague of Gargoyles ready for beta. Somehow with all the mad crush of season, I was able to compile a working V.1. I can’t even express what a relief this is. Sure, it’s the dreck draft, but going into the writing season with a block draft will make this winter so much more productive. Hopefully, Plague of Gargoyles will go out to beta readers in November or December, so I can put Tangle of Mermaids on the V.1 track to beta by summer next year. With all that being said, I also went a little nutty after a few glasses of wine and began remodeling my character files, and organizing my world notes. There’s something to be said about late nights of drunken casting, sifting through celebrity photos and rebuilding character sheets. So. Much. Fun. I’m dearly looking forward to sharing my hopeful casting notes with prospective producers. Let’s just hope they understand my wine-laced vision board notes….  The Elder Glade Cottage Stead Most of June and July were so unseasonably wet and muggy that the growing time for many of the garden plants just never got enough light or heat. The tomatoes are still about the same size as they were eight weeks ago. Other plants molded from the rain and gray. However, the roses loved it. Mister Lincoln, the rose variety that features heavily in The Pillars of Dawn books, specifically in Murder of Crows, finally bloomed. Three years ago I’d decided to plant several of the roses that grow in Auntie Celeste’s garden, so I could bask in the inspiration that is her special zen. Mister Lincoln was one of the first roses I planted, but each season I was sure I’d killed him. He never really took off…until this year. Suddenly, as everything else was dying under the muggy gray sky, Mister Lincoln shot up five feet and declared one perfect flower, as if to say, “I’m here! Don’t give up on me!”. And he was so worth the wait. It was like a little hello from Auntie Celeste, a nod and a smile and her voice saying, “Mr. Lincoln sends his regards.”  Also on the list of successful plantings were several quarts of raspberries, a pound of fresh rhubarb, and a mountain of herbs from pineapple sage, to mint, rosemary, and thyme, dill, and fennel. Still to be harvested, dried or frozen. I even managed a small harvest of baby potatoes, before the ducks destroyed the remainder of the plants (will put the potatoes in raised beds next year). The black Cherokee corn, and the lilies are doing well. And in a week or so I will have the first blooms from a dahlia bulb that was a gift from my neighbor. So, this mixed bag of summer growing output has been a good learning experience of what I need to alter to create a more vibrant landscape that can weather many climate variables. All the more delicate plants, the peppers, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, and peas all shriveled in the gray damp summer. The new chicken coop has been framed. All the wood is old or was donated by friends and neighbors. I hope to get it done before the rains, but if not, I’ll be looking to re-home the birds, as I refuse to keep them in the small coop for the winter. That’s just not fair to them. If it comes to that, I’ll start over on a new flock in the spring.  Along with the wood donated for the coop, a friend has donated the lumber for me to create a bridge over the creek. I’m so excited about this! Once the rains come I’m not able to forge the water to the land on the other side, so nothing gets done to the property on the south bank until spring. Hopefully with a bridge, I’ll be able to do some work across the water on nice days in the winter.
All in all, it’s still baby steps, but finally after three years, the land is beginning to feel like it’s establishing itself. There are signs of flourishing, sporadic, and irregular—but there none the less. Thank you for tuning into the mid-month update. Next month I hope to have photos of the grow site, and news on some upcoming sculpting projects scheduled for winter. I will also update on the planning for upcoming creativity workshops. Stay tuned!
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 My Dearest Athena, Happy forty-first birthday! Or as Traci would say, “Forty-(w)Onderful!” Finally, the number bar rolled over the forty counter and leveled on the new path. There has been a lot of transformation in the last few years. This year alone has seen the launch of a new business, another book on the market, and changes around the homestead. You let go of some of your oldest friendships. You faced an inner demon, and won. Then you let go of some old, outdated ideas about yourself, and began a new evolution. You could wax on about all the things you hope to achieve in the next year, or all the tidbits you’ve discovered the hard way along the path—but this year…this 41st Note to Self is all about wishing. This year you have wishes to give away. This year the Note to Self is about spreading the joy. For your birthday, you decided to give away forty-one wishes to strangers and friends. If you, dearest reader, are reading my annual Note to Self—we are wishing these things for you. Take what you desire, and give the rest away. Keep the wishes that are meaningful to you, and let the rest drift off into the great unknown. Print them out. Read them as many times as you like. Share the wishes you hope to carry close to your heart so that those who love you can support your dream. To whomever you are, fellow traveler on this wildwood path, we wish for you a blissful, abundant, fulfilling year. May you know love, safety, joy, health, wealth, and freedom.
Dearest Athena, on this 41st Note to Self, you have finally let go of the ruminating of annual failures. Congratulations! How liberating. What took so long, eh? This year your roots are finally deep enough and your branches stable enough to spread. Your face is turned up to the sky, and the sense of a great unfurling is building. I think we both have the sensation that this time next year, the game will be completely different. What a delicious taste in the air. Go forth this year, my friend. Party on. Build. Laugh. Smile. And write…always write. Love, Athena P.S. Refresh your travel luggage and passport, you’re going to need it.  Wishes tied to flowers and delivered to strangers and friends.  Polymer Clay Project: Selfie in Clay 2018 When people hear my story and the reasons why I’ve chosen to live in the woods and write, the long litany of challenges that make up the daily average in my chosen field—they ask why.
Why do this to yourself? Believe me, I ask myself that question all the time. I ask, but then, I already know the answer. I do it because I love it. It’s tough to explain to someone who doesn’t love something or someone as much as I love telling these stories. I go to bed thinking about these books. I dream about them in the night reverie. I wake up thinking about them. I stare at the storyboard while I brush my teeth, drink my coffee, and dress. I puzzle over character issues as I drive to work, serve beer to customers, and then drive home. I ponder plot points while I feed the chickens, and water the garden. I rehearse dialog while I’m puttering around the kitchen, or folding laundry. I live out in the boonies so I can have uninterrupted creative space. The phone rarely rings. I get visitors once in a blue moon. My freedom to disconnect from the real world, and plug into the world of The Pillars of Dawn is limitless. I chose this life because I love it so much. I live small so I can give more to my work. Gone are my days of city living, night clubs, boomerang relationships, relationships of convenience, and electric neon metropolitan barely controlled chaos. Now my days are spent between work, and doing what I love. There is still tweaking to be done in that equation, but my connection to the writing grows stronger each season. When people ask why, what they really mean is: why try so hard? Why give up all the modern conveniences? Why hurt yourself to achieve the dream? Why not just make the changes asked and be accepted into the literary world easily? The short answer is…I’m stubborn. The long answer is…I love it enough to hurt myself to make it happen in the true shape and emotional intent by which it is being entrusted to me. Ergo, I know it’s just a matter of time—because my heart is in it, and my teeth and claws are dug in tight—if I have to drag it over the finish line with my last breath, so be it. I hope it doesn’t come to that, obviously, but I am prepared to fight long and hard if need be. It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t created something what it feels like to be responsible to characters, a message, and stories that aren’t even real. That responsibility to give your characters the best chance at representation, a running start in the world, a chance to be seen as they are asking to be seen. It’s tough to explain to people why you are prepared to fight for a character, a story that hasn’t yet drawn full breath or manifested into a shared reality. For now, that fight means living a little off-grid life in the woods and putting the bulk of my focus on the next book, the next arc, the next point of development and so on. It means earning a paycheck as a waitress, and getting by on a small income so my expenses are low. It means squaring my shoulders for conversations with managers and prospective agents about holding my ground on the gender balance of my series. It means being willing to say “thank you, but you’re not the right fit for my books” to those who insist on compromising the core message, even if they’re in a position to snap their fingers and make publishing miracles happen if I would only bend on that one topic. I’d gladly bend on a two dozen other topics, reasons, expectations, requests and needs. Gladly. Happily. Brilliantly. I would be delighted to work with all other topics and suggestions. Until then, I can only keep working, writing, building, creating and getting ready for that phone call wherein the topic of gender representation is not a focus of the re-write requests. That day is coming. The world has changed a lot in the last decade of rejections. The awareness of the female voice and story is maneuvering into the light. The best thing I can do to support my series right now is to keep writing. Keep going. Keep pushing, even when I’m exhausted. Even when it means picking up another part time job to pay bills. Even when it means I’m behind on all the things—keep writing. It looks like masochism from the outside. I can totally understand why people wonder why I do it to myself. I get it. Who pushes that hard for so long when giving up would be so much easier? A decade of “no”, a decade of rejections. Ten years is a long time. One can get completely worn down in a decade of what feels like perpetual failure. But then…I stand in front of my storyboard and stare at my character profiles and I remember why I’m doing this. I love it. I love these characters. I love the world of The Pillars of Dawn. I have a responsibility to them and to the readers. I get to live art-fully when they breathe. I get to write about the Muses every day. It’s a privilege. It’s a joy. And I’ll keep doing it so long as the Muses continue empower my pen. How many of us get to say they do what they truly love to do? Choose your story. Trust your story. Bring justice to your story. #savethemuses  Whilst working on the creativity session planning schedule and building up the workbook, I came across a curious response from people when I asked, “What inspires you?” The section of the workbook is about revving the creative engine, and sometimes we need to “borrow” inspiration from other areas of our lives in order to jump-start a creative spark. Testing the hunch, I’ve been randomly asking people what inspires them. I was shocked to realize how many people don’t know how to answer that question. It’s a fairly simple question, but it stumps a lot of people. Picking at this curious thread it began to unravel, as I asked people what they think inspiration IS. Nearly everyone agrees that inspiration is a force that compels, motivates, uplifts, and elevates our responses and actions in some way. It kicks thoughts, beliefs and ideas up a notch, as it were. But when I ask why they can’t think of anything that inspires them, there’s a gap between the daily inspirations, the long-term aspirations, the profound epiphanies, and the what they would classify as “inspiring”. Ah. When I ask “What inspires you?” Most people think I’m asking for some iconic emblem of human achievement or sacrifice; Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., veteran war heroes, powerful examples of leadership, a moving book/movie/story, and so on. Those people and things are inspiring, yes, I agree. (interestingly, most people answer the question with the name of a human being: an actual person or that person’s life is inspiring = people can be enormously powerful inspirational catalysts) But on a day to day level of your own life, does the story of human compassion and sacrifice of mother Teresa get you out of bed and moving through your day? Separating the inspiration of the lives, actions, and achievements of others, from the microcosm of your “day in and day out” experience in order to find smaller, consistent, accessible inspirational fuels is the goal of the creativity workbooks and sessions. I realized I’m going to have to re-word some sections, and add definitions to some categories in order to make some distinctions in how people are referring to their daily inspirational fuels. It turned out to be an important discovery for many reasons. Not just for my work in creativity coaching and boosting, but in my writing as well. I am writing the story of the Muses. The inspirations, or pillars of our cultural systems. In the fantasy genre you can speak both literally and figuratively about reality through a filter of fantastical possibility. I channel conversations about inspiration, creativity, social structure and culture through the modernized mythological Muses. My fictional Muses support the inspirations from which our cultures are founded: arts, science, law, language, story, movement, performance, history, mathematics, and so on. Realizing the common way inspiration is perceived and spoken about has made me realize I have tuning to do in my fictional series, and in my workbooks. Instead of asking, “What inspires you?” I’ll ask: What stimulates your curiosity? What do you find yourself daydreaming about repeatedly? Who or what offers a touchstone to keep your personal creative energy charged? What do you see/hear or interact with that consistently makes you feel awe? These questions may not be easier to answer at first, but they will separate the classifications of inspiration out into smaller pieces for easier dialog. What stimulates your curiosity? History. New culinary experiences. Music. Genetics. Quantum theory. Setting difficult challenges for myself. Foreign cultures. Contrasting ideas. Geology. Archaeology. Theology. Foreign languages. Architecture. Wine and whisky. Human innovation. Agriculture. What do you find yourself daydreaming about repeatedly? Travel. Castles. Venice. Flying. Building fun projects. A finished studio. Restaurants I want to try. Meeting like minds. Travel. New chapters to write. New horizons to explore. Partnership. Dancing. Travel. Who or what offers a touchstone to keep your personal creative energy charged? Hanging out with other creatives. Going to a good movie, well produced. Discovering a new culinary dish. Trying out a new art or craft technique. Actors/Actresses whose works move me. Musical performances that elevate my mood or speak to my needs. Fresh flowers. Reading well told stories. Sitting by the river. Authors/storytellers I trust and respond to, again and again. Pinterest. Cookbooks. Youtube videos for projects. Walking through the craft store or hardware store for ideas. Waterhouse. Illustrators. Painters. Lyrics. The library. What do you see/hear or interact with that consistently makes you feel awe? The forest. The St. John’s Bridge in North Portland. My animals. Good books. Phenomenal cooking. Amazing acting performances. Great sex. Live music. The ocean. Violins. Cellos. Pianos. Excellent whisky. Libraries and bookstores. Lightning storms. Calving glaciers. Thunder. Alaska. Mountains. Bold color schemes. Architecture. People overcoming challenges. Random acts of kindness. Flowers. From the crossover in my answers I can say that nature, culture, music, art, foods, and people inspire me. There are more common threads to pick out. I’ll do the work on overlap and start patterning in order to find a way to make the workbook and the creativity sessions have a higher payout productively. Still, is seemed like a minor breakthrough and worth mentioning on the blog. In the meantime, how do YOU answer these questions: What stimulates your curiosity? What do you find yourself daydreaming about repeatedly? Who or what offers a touchstone to keep your personal creative energy charged? What do you see/hear or interact with that consistently makes you feel awe?  From the Letters to Lovers I've never Met ArchiveA Thousand Years Ago (Published Spring 2009 on Theblissquest) I could hear the smile in your voice - that half crooked grin that catches in a dimple on the right and puts mischievous sparks in your eyes. I could hear you smiling at me and I knew what you were thinking…I shivered a little and grinned back. It seems like we’ve known each other for a thousand years. Perhaps we were lovers or best friends two lifetimes back. Probably again in a few lifetimes hence. But the important thing is that we are here - together again – with so much catching up to do! Do you still ride horses? Do you still like to build furniture with your hands? Do you still plan on spending a year wandering around the world and exploring another culture? Do you still get flustered and chuckle when a pretty woman looks you right in the eye? Remember when we were camping on the beach and the tide was out? We could see the meteor shower in the wet sand like a mirror of heaven and we got up and danced together with stars falling up and stars shooting down all around us! Remember that? Or has in not happened yet… I forget. But I do remember you kissing me and saying that I made you feel like stars falling heavenward and heaven crashing down to earth. It made my toes curl and my belly tingle. Do you think I could still do that to you? Make you feel that way? Are you still the free-spirit that I remember? Do you still like to have time alone and in the spaces of your imagination? Do you still like words? They used to mean a lot to you. Do you still wear a hat whenever you go out? I feel like we’ve lost so much time in this life and that when we catch up it will take us forever! I want to know how your childhood was. Did you get into trouble – you usually did. Did you fall in love? Did you fall out? Did you have children? Are you a good father? So many questions I wish I could ask you in person. But really, mostly, I just want to know… are you happy? Are you living the life you have dreamed for yourself? I’m so proud of you and I can’t wait to see it for myself! You were always so good at manifesting. I am still me – missing you, from a thousand years ago. Let’s catch up. If you are ready. I just miss my best friend.   Many years ago I felt like my efforts to create were going directly into the void. I struggled to find my voice and my niche in the creative sphere. I realized then that while my work is an amalgamate of all the things I’ve encountered, experienced, researched, discovered or been exposed to—so too, is nearly every artist’s body of work. Hence the phrase on my business card, “Inhale life, exhale story”. I decided then, that whenever I became conscious of an influence in my writing, storytelling, sculpting, or cooking…I would make a good faith effort to reach out and say thank you to the creative inspiration that lent me that particular bit of tool/nudge/craft/energy/wisdom. I wasn’t sure at first how it would work. I sent emails, notes, cards, and thank you treats to chefs, songwriters, performers, directors, and most importantly—my teachers and mentors. I knew most of the letters would be skipped, or dumped in a fan pile bin. Some would be read and likely tossed. Others would be wrongly addressed as it’s difficult to find a way to deliver what is essentially fan mail to the proper recipient. Even knowing that, it seemed really important to let other artists and creatives know that they are not producing into a void. The void can be a lonely uninspiring place. At the very least, I hoped a thank you note would get through to any one of them if they were in a space to really need it at the time, because I know what that feels like. When I realize I’ve been influenced or inspired by a creative who has passed away; J.R.R. Tolkien, Marilyn Monroe, or Audrey Hepburn—I try to add a piece of gratitude to the Universe for their contribution, and quietly acknowledge they had a part to play in my humble creative hodgepodge. Whatever collective amniotic fluid I drift in as an artist, I consciously know nothing is original. Still, there are days I sit at my computer and bang away believing I’m a regurgitative hack. I worry everything I’m writing is crap, and I have the rejection pile to prove it. Some days are better than others with the internal battle of originality versus circular creation. Then a funny thing happens. Usually at my lowest point, a reader walks into the restaurant where I work, and they want to talk about the books while I serve them beer. It’s weird. I don’t look anything like my author photo. I still work a part time job to pay bills, yet somehow they recognize me right away. At first they’re confused about why they’re seeing me out of context. Then, they change and become super talkative, and encouraging. Perspective is not letting positive or negative feedback become an ego challenge or boost. It is only feedback, and must be calculated as any data would be tallied. But I’m not ashamed to say that after these encounters I feel much less like I’m writing into a void. The story went somewhere, it found a home. Once it’s out of my hands it doesn’t belong to me anymore—but knowing it landed in the reading pile of someone who took it in makes me feel somehow like the world is a conceivable size…an understandable circumference. I am a small, nobody artist---who touched someone somewhere I’ve never actually been, and they touched me in return. Connection is the antithesis of the void. Usually, this encourages me to double my efforts to say thank you, to express my gratitude for my experiences and influences. So, I rush home and write a pile of thank you notes, because gratitude is as contagious as creativity. And this world could certainly use more of both. I stopped in to my old stomping grounds in NW where much of Murder of Crows takes place. It felt strange to be sitting down to crepes at Café Vivace almost fifteen years after the conception of the novel. Back then (2004) when I was writing the first incarnations of the drafts, I’d write at Café Vivace, or McMenamins, or Tara Thai, or any of the businesses along 21st, 22nd, or 23rd that would let me linger with my laptop at a corner table out of the way. When one shop closed or got busy and needed me to free up a table, I’d pack up, and walk to the next open spot. I sat at the park, and on sidewalk benches, and spent countless hours walking up and down the alphabet blocks writing scenes in my head. I did the loop up and down NW 23rd from Burnside to Thurman hundreds of times over the course of several years.
My trip to town after being gone for four years was both nostalgic and heartbreaking. The bistro where I’d fictionally placed The Glade Café is gone; torn down to be replaced by a big, square, gray and lifeless building. Also, New Old Lompoc has moved, and with them my favorite bowl of mac and cheese in the city. Even Uptown Billiards is closing its doors. Much of the quaint, patchwork charm of twenty-third is now branded and uniformly sterilized by corporate creeping in. Alas. They call it “progress”. The ultimate irony is that my last corporate job, the one on the Oregon Coast that I quit a couple of years ago, recently purchased a block of building one street over from Café Vivace and gave the whole corporate headquarter make-over to the site. So as I was noticing the corporate creepage onto a neighborhood that once supported art, creativity, and community that was once very much about discovery and collaboration—I could almost see the toxic company I walked away from and their new headquarters from my old writing table. Two years ago I gave a speech at the book launch of Sinnet of Dragons about the standardization of corporatized thoughts and behavior patterns that suffocate creativity and innovation. My series about the Muses reborn into this world to save us from the new Dark Age is a not-so-sly commentary about corporate creepage and sterilized imaginations. It’s not lost on me that, company X, that I walked away from in order to keep writing this series about the dawn of a new creative age—now owns the block next to my original writing spot-where the series was first born over a decade ago. The irony is as thick as their cheese. Just like them to be riding a wave that crested a decade ago, trying desperately to soak up the creative juices of an area that once flourished with arts, collaboration and creativity—but the artists, and much of the originality and fresh voice of those businesses have been driven out by the property price hikes caused by corporations eager to cash in on the richness and novelty that once inhabited the scene. Expensive condos, development and blanched business models now own a large patch of the NW trendy-third quarter. Codos are so expensive that even the middle-salary workers from the corporations at the heart of this gentrification wave can’t afford to live in them. There are still some spots, though, such as Café Vivace where, despite the property price hikes and statistical failure rates of cafes and restaurants—they have survived (probably because they have had to hike their prices to keep from being driven out as well). They were my first Nanowrimo outing, and my go-to spot for years when I was on the NW side of town. During that Nanowrimo the seating capacity for the write-in was to host 75 writers—but 200 showed up. There were people sitting on the floor of the café, and in the original clawfoot bathtub upstairs (before it was made into a salon business). We were crammed into tiny spaces, sharing the steps and standing along the walls as we all wrote furiously on our novels. The baristas could barely keep up with the orders. Coffee flowed like imagination. Friends were made, stories collaborated on, and writing problems solved by total strangers. And when the clock ticked to close—two hundred writers packed up their gear and dissolved back into the city. If you looked closely, you could almost see two hundred tracer lights of pulsing imagination weaving back through the night to feed the population with tales of escapism, romance, fantasy, theological essay, poetry, erotica, and all manner of nourishing literature. How strange it is that cities, populations, whole nations forget the absolute necessity of creative arts and collaboration as the foundational nutrients of innovation for entire civilizations. These nutrient rich clusters of originality and output drive spiritual evolution, human connectivity, and yes, even form the basis of modern commerce. We would not have a financial infrastructure without innovation and creativity. Fifteen years later the books I wrote while in that magical window of shared creative and kinetic energy are on the shelf, and the bones of that refuge are being picked clean by big business and giants moving in with a need to refresh and invigorate their starving imaginations. Too late. Worse, they employ the very tactics that cause their own shortage of creative energy, and apply those tactics to the inventive community they’re trying to sponge from. Soiling their own water supply, as it were. The Pillars of Dawn has dozens of scenes that take place along 23rd, and Thurman, and the alphabet quarter of NW. Those scenes are frozen in time. They take place in 2011, and 2012. The old bus routes, the old walking paths, and along business fronts that may or may not still exist. Progress, as it’s called, happens. The cycle of arts communities making property valuable, then being driven out by price increases, then gentrified to the point of the property and community losing its voice and its energy—oldest urban development story in the book. This may all sound harsh. Embittered, even. Nostalgic for the loss of a time and space, a once-upon-a-dream. It may sound like I’m trying to stick it in the eye of a former employer. That may all even be true- but it doesn’t change the reality of the data. Businesses that can no longer imagine for themselves will feed on energy where they can find it. Profiteers will always raise the rent as those businesses come searching for creative resource. Artists and creatives, and small businesses that support those imaginations will always be driven out by this feeding frenzy. Hundreds of years of urban development stories around the globe make for a compelling study of economics chasing after ingenuity. The oasis becomes a dust bowl. The part that I find heartbreaking is that it is entirely a preventable situation. Let me be frank. Times will change, and social priorities will change. Businesses and communities will come and go. Always evolution. Always change. BUT---it IS possible to have both the richness of creativity AND the flourishing economic abundance of big business. They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they can be symbiotic if encouraged and allowed to be. Few large business models incorporate artistry as a functional and bolstering place in the matrix of employment culture, employment wellness, and even community connectivity. Even fewer businesses hear and accept input from creatives on strategy and development. Bloated businesses built solely on profit consider the creative edges too risky to glean from, even though the statistical reality shows profits will follow innovation and creative ingenuity. Instead they wait for the trend to show, then once others have risked the edge of the known product world…only then do they try to catch the wave. By then it’s too late. Be there ahead of the wave. Even better, hire the creatives to build the wave for you. Spare the neighborhood the picking over. Spare the artists colonies from having to pick up and leave. Build them INTO the plan…and everyone wins. I’m writing The Pillars of Dawn because I believe in the kinematic energy of creativity. I believe in its dynamic power to evolve lives, humanity, communities, business, and even economy. Will I be able to express that clearly in my work? I don’t know, but I will keep trying. Mostly, I hope to write stories that provide an escape, some entertainment, and a little food for thought. Because I believe creativity has the ability to save us…and we are in desperate need of saving. |
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