Hellebores and Chorin’

So far Monday hasn’t been its usual sweet self, but then again, neither have I. At least the hellebores are still blooming.

Half the weekend was spent working despite my best efforts; I meant to take it completely off and get a bunch of chores done but 4k of Cold North fell out of my head. One of the elves brought the heroine a gift with teeth, and I just had to see how that worked out.

Sometimes, when a story heats up, one’s required to put everything else aside and get it out of one’s aching head. Come Sunday, though, I had to get some damn chores out of the way.

So I did, and read a lot of manga. I finished Amu Meguro’s Honey So Sweet series, which was a lovely palate cleanser; then I started on the kids’ Rurouni Kenshin collection. For years, I used to take the kids to Borders (now closed, sadly) and they got one or two manga every time; as a result, they’ve quite the mountain of right-to-left reading. Years of the kids excitedly telling me everything about the stories at the dinner table mean it’s like meeting old friends. They can talk for hours about plot points, ins and outs, and character motivations; I love listening.

I like manga a bit more than anime; I’ve always liked reading more than just about anything else. The kids are fond of Yu Yu Hakusho in anime form, and if I ever got around to watching it I’m sure I’d recognize everyone just from the descriptions I’ve gotten during dinner.

As a result of dipping my toe into the manga waters again, the Princess is reading Hellsing once more, and the Prince is watching a new anime he’s going to give us all a rundown of at the dinner table. I’m sure the kids will argue about the difference between Hellsing‘s manga and anime form, and I will once again mutter about Vampire Hunter D.

Goodness, that takes me back. Wow.

In any case, I also got a chunk of chorin’ done, including sweeping the garage and taking a swipe at the car upholstery. Miss B got a bath once the Princess got home–she was furious, of course. The funniest thing about bath days is about an hour after the washing is done, when Miss B is still damp but doesn’t remember quite why, she only suspects something dreadful happened and is determined to express her displeasure through interpretive dance around my feet.

She gets many a pet, pat, and treat to make up for the horror of being bathed, poor thing. And of course Boxnoggin needs a brushing (his skin gets irritated with too much bathing; he is a very slick-coated fellow) and many a pet, pat, and treat as well. He loves bath days–unless it’s time for him to get in the tub.

That was the weekend; now it’s Monday again, and neither the day nor I are quite ready for it. I’ll be all right once I have a run under my belt and a few moments to fall into a story. Not quite sure what’s going to happen in Cold North today, but I know precisely what Hell’s Acre needs next, and that’s a very tired heroine learning the rooftops of an alt-historical Victorian London.

She might even make a few friends, or at the very least, engage in combat with a very surprised hero.

And of course when I get to bed tonight there’s a nice big omnibus of Rurouni Kenshin to make my way through. It’s something to look forward to; I’ve just got to survive Monday’s attempts to shake me from its back. And I should water those hellebores.

I think today’s run will sink my teeth firmly into the day’s ruff, and once that happens I’m impossible to get rid of.

Off I go, then. Wish me luck.

No More Anvil

I lost Sunday to post-vaccine fatigue. I’m not entirely sure if the exhaustion was from my body being taught how to fight off the plague or the sheer relief of getting the first dose. I suppose it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Spending yesterday catching up on Sunday chores means I feel like today’s Monday. It isn’t, I swear I know it isn’t–but I keep checking, just in case. I probably need more coffee, too.

That’s a given.

Walkies were accomplished in a state of near quietude. There was nobody else out, which meant the dogs could take their time and Boxnoggin wasn’t disposed to yell at anything. He’s very certain any fellow pedestrian is suspect at best and openly threatening at worst, especially if they’re accompanied by their own canine duennas. Miss B, of course, just rolls her eyes and nips at him, but that sets him off further and I have to separate them like toddlers in the ball pit.

All the time I’m telling him, “This is why nobody will play with you, you’re bossy and mean. If you’d calm down I’d let you say hello–No? This is how you want it? FINE.”

Other walkers no doubt find this hilarious.

Today’s run, the first post-vaccine, went extremely well. So much of running is a mental game, I literally can’t tell if it’s just the relief making the activity easier or if the vaccine has genuinely wiped out some long-hauler’s syndrome. It doesn’t help that we were never able to get tested to see if we’d had the damn plague, but at least the entire question’s academic now. I managed a full run, though somewhat slower than usual. I’m going to blame the time off after finishing the diptych and the further recovery time after the jab.

Normally I do the Morning Walk Report on social media, but I felt like changing it up today. It’s just such a blessing not to carry the anvil anymore. And there were a few bees, bumbling into my hair and making themselves at home for a short while before staggering out, falling into the air, and zooming away upon their regular business.

I don’t even know, man. But it’s nice to be back. Today I work on Hell’s Acre, getting chapters ready for the June launch–there’ll be a cover reveal soon–and also a little on Cold North, since I want that in good shape before I make final decisions on my post-June writing schedule. Soon I’ll be getting revisions, proofs, and other stuff back, so I’ll be complaining about revising when what I really want to do is write.

But that’s (say it with me) another blog post. For now, there’s more caffeine to be had, and plunging into a fresh new world to accomplish.

I can’t wait.

Hole-y Habitat


I went for a ramble last night after dinner, and found this in the park. Woodpecker holes? Insect holes repurposed for mason bees? I kind of wanted to bring it home for our mason bees (we have quite a crop this year) but I don’t know what else I’d be bringing, so I decided against it. It was still super cool to see.

The recent spate of warm weather has made quite a few things flower and stressed a bit of the groundcover, but the dryness has cut down on slugs and snails. Maybe we got this instead of a hard freeze to keep the gastropod numbers in check.

I also celebrated some very good news by grabbing some vinca, lithadora, a couple begonias, some golden millet grass, some oxalis, and a salvia, all in tiny pots. Now everything is in the ground and watered, and tomorrow’s rain (should the forecast hold) will only do good things for the entire garden. I may almost be recovered from the push to finish the last zero.

Almost.

Have a lovely weekend, my beloveds. (And subscribers–you guys may get a treat before said weekend is done…)

Pleasant Waiting

I woke up from a barrage of weird Silmarillion dreams (I’m doing a reread) to find Looney Tunes playing inside my head at full volume–orchestral stingers, Bugs and Daffy singing tunes, a whole Coyote-and-Roadrunner cartoon’s background music playing on loop.

It’s interesting inside my skull. Especially right after I finish a book.

I’d thought that taking a day completely off–no work, no chores, nothing even resembling proper nutrition, even–would cut down on the recovery time from finishing what is, in essence, one very large book broken into a diptych. It doesn’t appear to have; I’m still nerve-scoured and twitching.

I did get some gardening done yesterday, though. Many of the seeds are old, so we might not have a good yield. But if even one sprouts, it’ll be more than we had before. I’m not even going to try tomatoes this year; they only bring grief and pain.

Instead it’s pumpkins, beans, and peas, blue hyssop, nasturtiums everywhere (I love the peppery little darlings) and sunflowers (we’ll see if the squirrels leave any of those to sprout), rudbeckia and a bag of seeds I’m not quite sure of. They may be California poppies; that’ll be nice.

We’re supposed to get some rain soon. I know better than to turn on the sprinklers in April. Another thing that only causes grief and pain.

It takes a while, but yes, I can be taught.

I probably was inspired to actually get outside by a couple documentaries on the Emerald Triangle. I watched Netflix’s Murder Mountain, then went straight into Hulu’s Sasquatch, which was surprisingly good. I suppose my inner hippie perked up; go figure, I watch stuff about weed harvesting while knitting and am tempted to braid my hair up and plant beans.

Growing into the hippie I always knew I was has some benefits. Even the rosebush I was pretty sure wouldn’t make it is showing signs of resurrecting. The roses have all summer to recover, and–drumroll please–both grapevines as well as all three blueberry bushes are alive and well too. The grape I moved to along the north fence is showing fresh leaves; I’ll have to trim it once the season’s over because otherwise it’ll try to take over the dogwood. But that’s fine.

Even the tiny oak seedling I replanted, pretty sure it wouldn’t make it, has fresh, hard red little buds on the branch-tips. Considering it’s from a stray squirrel-hidden acorn, it’s doing really well. I put a couple peas near its roots to maybe get some nitrogen into the soil.

All told, the garden’s doing better than I thought it would. It was therapeutic to get my hands in the dirt. Now all I do, as mentioned, is wait for rain and try to get out to do some weeding every once in a while. The kids are excited at the chance to help, since they’re both old enough and the Prince will have his last totally free summer on his hands in a month and a half.

He won’t want to spend it weeding, but we’ll have downed branches and stuff to burn, and that’s right up his alley. The ash makes a good addition to the compost pile, too.

I would go out and do more today, but the Looney Tunes music inside my head is sort of disconcerting. I mean, the last thing I want to do is step on a rake, and I feel like my brain is warning me there’s a stratospheric chance of hijinks if I test the patience of the gods. So maybe I’ll just try to get some work arranged. Not done, mind you–just arranged.

After all, there’s Hell’s Acre to get situated and Cold North to fully schedule, not to mention getting the master to-do list and the hoovering I didn’t get done this past weekend sorted. But every once in a while I’ll look out the window, waiting for rain.

It’s a pleasant kind of waiting when you know the forecast says “soon.”

Over and out.

The Diptych, Done

I’m gonna need a few days to recover from the weekend. I spent said weekend in a fever of typing, and the zero draft of The Black God’s Heart Book 2 is now…done.

Whew.

It’s a difficult project, because it’s not really two books. It’s one monstrous book split into two parts, a diptych. I’m used to working in book-sized chunks, but I feel the way a fresco painter must have felt when finishing a giant cathedral piece. I mean, there will be revision, especially on Part II, but the main corpus is out of my head and lies, steaming gently, on a zinc table ready for slicing, arranging, padding, and painting.

To mix a metaphor.

So for the next few days I’m going to be all but useless. I did manage some Sunday chores yesterday, but the hoovering is going to have to bloody well wait. I’ll probably get it done tomorrow as an antidote to thinking; a big spate of physical cleaning is normal after I finish a zero draft.

The “real world”–the world outside my head–looks strangely flat this morning. It’s not being filtered through the story throbbing in my head. Black God’s Heart is hypersaturated, its palette either greens and bright gold light (in Nat’s POVs) or sepia with crimson highlights (very movie-300, in Dmitri’s). Now that the zero is gone, both of them have moved on and I’m left with just the regular world. Not only that, but the scents are gone too–which is kind of a blessing, given how some of the scenes played out.

Fortunately, the real world is always beautiful and vivid enough. It’s just a huge change to go from four or five-plus streams of sensory input (regular world, what’s under the regular world, and stories’ POVs) to the regular two (regular world and what lies under it). There’s a sort of ringing echo, a sense of empty space, like after Faure’s Requiem ends and the silence containing beauty is brimming with the memory.

Anyway, I’ve plans to recover from this, involving getting through the daily run and a whirlwind of cleaning. The recovery phase is always difficult. The persistent feeling that this was the last leftover gauntlet of 2020 to run–because I wrote most of this project last year–has been a millstone around my neck, and being suddenly free of that weight is a decompression sickness all its own.

Usually, the morning after a zero, I’m already aching to get to the next project. This is one of the few times I’m simply grateful for a chance to breathe before diving again. And with that, I’m going to finish my coffee and get the dogs walked.

They don’t care what I’ve finished or when; they only know that it’s morning, and that means walkies. Simple joys and rituals are their bailiwick, and I am pleased to have it so.

Over and out.

Good Morning, Vitamin C


Apparently my body wanted something only to be found in potato-leek soup last night, because I had two bowls, went to bed afterward, and am feeling much better this morning. The quiet, shaky sense of returning strength–I hesitate to call it health–is entirely welcome. It’s akin to the relief after one finishes throwing up and slumps trembling near the cold porcelain of a commode, knowing illness will return in a short while but savoring the temporary relief.

So to speak. And you’re welcome for that mental image, I’m sure. Still, it’s the only one that comes close to expressing the feeling.

This morning the sun came through the deck door, making everything on the dining room table glow. The oranges looked good; I could almost taste the light and vitamin C in each one just by watching.

A bowl of soup, a pile of oranges in morning light–such are the simple things that end up saving us. Short-term relief or not, I’ll take it. Maybe if I sleep enough today the tremulous sense of survival will strengthen.

I wish you a sunny Friday and a peaceful weekend, my beloveds. Be gentle with yourselves; we’ve all been through a lot lately.

Over and out.

Some Magic, and Some Mystery

I’m still ill and only upright for short periods of time, so I’ve got something a little different for you today, dear ones. I’m participating in an upcoming ebook box set with a collection of some very fine writers, and just LOOK at this beautiful cover!



Secrets mixed with magic can be deadly.

Secrets have the power to protect or destroy. Forgotten lore, mysterious weapons, and magical libraries can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Covert missions, secret societies, and lost memories can provide salvation. Prepare for adventure and unlock the many secrets in MAGIC & MYSTERY!

Delve into these exciting worlds with USA Today and International best-selling authors Megg Jensen, Lilith Saintcrow, Krista D. Ball, Skyla Dawn Cameron, Jane Glatt, and Rhonda Parrish.

This collection of 6 novels includes:
•DAUGHTER OF DRAGON ASH (Artifacts of Indarra Book 1) – by Megg Jensen
•SOLOMON’S SEAL (Livi Talbot Book 1) – by Skyla Dawn Cameron
•A MAGICAL INHERITANCE (Ladies Occult Society Book 1) – by Krista D. Ball
•ONE IN THE HAND – by Rhonda Parrish
•PIRATES & PRIVATEERS (The Intelligencers Book 1) – by Jane Glatt
•DESIRES, KNOWN – by Lilith Saintcrow

On sale April 9, 2021; available for preorder through Amazon, Amazon CA, Amazon UK, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Apple.


My particular offering for this ebook set is Desires, Known, my genie-and-accountant romance packed with snark and not a little gore. This is a limited-time, limited-edition set only in ebook, and it’s chock-full of amazing. I was thrilled to be asked to participate.

And now, since I’ve been out of commission for days and look to be out for still more, I have a few fires to put out while I’m upright and conscious. Pretty sure I’ll run out of steam in an hour or so and have to stagger down the hall, barely making it to the bed before I collapse. I hate being ill, and whatever this is, it’s awful. It doesn’t seem to be Covid, though, since I’ve been able to smell all the way through, there’s no fever, and no digestive upsets. (More than you wanted to know, I’m sure.)

The more I rest, the better it will be later. At least, that’s the hope.

See you in a bit…