woolgathering

Funny - after my last post I woke up this morning to find the "word of the day" in my inbox was ... woolgathering.

Perfect! I'll be imagining myself collecting bits of brightly colored wool all day, and weaving them into something lovely tonight.

Just had to dash out the door to see what Keil Bay was hyena-shrieking about. Alas, he and the pony were having one of their frosty morning play sessions. Keil Bay goes down onto his knees in order to bite the pony's belly. They ended with a flying gallop up the hill and some quite lovely trot circles.

time changing and other things

I'm feeling sad about the time change tonight. It will be dark when I GET to my office some days, and the horses will come in earlier now.

I'll adjust, but I expect to feel perpetually behind for a week or so, and I already feel like that enough of the time.

A good thing for the writing life, though, more hours in the evening, and I came upon this quote just now that seems appropriate:

"Stories are medicine ... they have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything -- we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories."

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

I have an aspiration to sit by the woodstove on a series of cold winter nights and knit myself a poncho. This is complicated by the fact that I don't know how to knit. I'm not likely to tackle this complication in time for this season, but instead I'm going to think of myself knitting with words. A story that remedies.

Addendum: I was looking through some old writing this a.m., looking for a particular passage that I thought might fit into the work. Didn't find it, but did come upon this dream I had back in 2005:

a huge garden (writing) spider built a gigantic web over my bed - it was thick and wide, the shape of a book when lying open. woven into it was a cross (runic cross??) there was a beautiful hummingbird hovering behind the web, trying to get through, but the web was so thick ... and then it began to glow, gold and green.

My gosh - I have absolutely no memory of that. What a wonderful dream. This is why we should write them down - we forget, even the ones we don't think we will.

first day - writing update

I tried to get a photo of the partners in zen today to kick off this month's new project writing frenzy, but the battery in my camera died and I haven't had a chance to recharge.

However, I did get my 2k words done and am quite pleased - I had writing group today and so had to prepare the section from my second novel to read there. I was worried I'd get crunched and start off behind with the new work.

Hope everyone else doing this had a great first day. Here's to the second one!

UPDATE: As of right now, Sat. evening, I am inching toward 11k total words. And very happy with how this is going!

Halloween and Sense of Place

We have giant orange pumpkins on the front porch and smaller "ghost" pumpkins inside, painted by the kids in celebration of the season.

The horses got fall shots today and were perfectly behaved. They're now prancing around the front field, showing off in the cool weather.

While mucking this morning I was thinking about home and homesteads and how many of us are so mobile now we've lost some of the sense of being in a place for a long time and what that offers us.

My childhood was quite stable that way, although we moved to a different house when I was 11 and so my childhood years were in a different house and neighborhood than my adolescence. During college and graduate school I moved so many times it's hard to remember them all.

There was one rental house, though, that I rented for 3 and a half years in my later 20's and then again when I moved back from California. I came back to a house where I'd lived through some major angst and two painful relationships - but I returned with a professional degree and a career and a heck of a lot more insight into myself and life than I'd left with.

The dating I did then was smarter and the men more mature and emotionally healthy. As it turned out, I got married while living in that house, and we stayed there for several more years because it was such a great house. My son was born while we lived there and it strikes me today as somewhat remarkable that I went through my first major relationship angst, my first real therapy, marriage, AND my first pregnancy and childbirth in the same space.

This all has a point, I promise.

Earlier this week I was reading Toni Magee Causey's Murderati post on ghosts, and it made me think of a paper I wrote in high school about paranormal phenomena. Part of what I wrote about was the idea that houses, places, store up energy from the people who live in them.

If that's true, imagine how powerful it is if you have lived through major life phases in the same place. All that energy. all that knowledge and insight. I wonder if this explains what often happens when families go "home" for holidays and major intensity occurs. Sometimes it's negative.

But today I was thinking of it from a different angle and realized there's a lot of potential there if we choose to tap into it.

Embrace the ghosts. Celebrate the struggles. Create something good with all that energy.

Here's to a happy and insightful Halloween.

writing in November

There's an annual writing challenge called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - where you write 50k words of a novel during the month of November. I'm not generally one to go for this kind of thing, but someone on Backspace wondered if we could do a smaller-scale version of this on there, and reading everyone's comments got me excited.

So.

I've decided to keep doing my second novel edit much as I have been, allowing my writing group to keep me focused as I read sections and get their feedback.

And starting Thursday I will simultaneously take the November mad dash approach - with a goal of writing 1500-2000 words per day on a totally new project. A nonfiction book on women and horses that I've been simmering for several years now.

If anyone wants to join in, feel free to use the comment section to describe your work, your goal, and your progress as the month rolls on. As you can see, it doesn't have to be a novel. It could be a journal or a book of poetry or a recipe book.

I aim to hit 2008 with lots of rough draft material to edit, query, and sell.