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Nevertheless…

I could go into some windy explanation as to why I haven’t posted but the plain truth was…I didn’t feel like it. 2022 was not an inspiring or motivating year for me.  It was just 2020 Part 3, and the plot remained the same through all 3 episodes: work, go home, sleep, work, go home. This is the rut that had me panicking as a teenager about graduating high school and college and then becoming an office drone, doing the same thing every day with 2 weeks vacation every year. I wanted my life to have more creative elements than that. I like entertaining people and balancing ledgers, calculating income, and trying to explain why you’re right to someone who is determined to “keep you in your place” and refuses to listen (then gets the whole fanload of smelly consequences in the face because they didn’t listen). It’s a grind. These past 3 years, I’ve made forward strides in security (as in, I now own a home) and pulling together my life (literally. I emptied out two storage units, one of them 300 miles away, one of them 3.000 miles away). It was costly, it was a gamble, but it’s done.

I took a coding course in 2018 at Palm Beach Coding School and earned a certificate for Web Design. I have a Facebook page called “The Grand Duchy of Medieval Merriment” (and yes, I am the Duchess. I’m also selling titles, so if you want to be a Lord or Lady, $20 will get you there). I have had ambitions of expanding it beyond just a meme and joke page. I designed a website with a couple of games, with text, and with a “shop.” My instructors said it was the coolest site anyone had designed for class. I carefully held on to the coding through a couple of moves and even the hard drive dying in my laptop.

The page has become a Grand Duchy in the interim (with a crest, a flag, and even a map!), so those elements would have to be included, and there’s a shop on Zazzle selling merch. That would have to be included, but it’s okay: I have my basic code, I have my notes from class and “Building Websites for Dummies” as the mental WD40 I needed to shake off the rust and make the virtual a reality.

Or so I thought.

Yesterday, I went to upload all that fun code and…

It’s gone. All gone. Even Geek Squad couldn’t find it. It didn’t survive the Great Crash of 2019 (laptop had to get a new hard drive). No fonts, backgrounds, text, images. Nada.

If you watched “Sex and the City,” you know there was an episode with Carrie’s hard drive crashing and learning the hard way about backing up data. While I did not wrap my Toshiba in a pashmina to take it to Geek Squad, I did learn the same lesson in the same fashion (although NOW we have the Cloud. Of course, “Nope” taught us that the Cloud may not be what it seems, but…)

I also love “The West Wing.”  In “Galileo” ( Season 2, I think. It aired November 29,2000), NASA and the White House are planning an event around a Mars probe to be televised in schoolrooms across the country. They never get the signal from the probe, and the debate is whether to go ahead or not.

I am a feminist, a fan of Elizabeth Warren, and anti-fan of Mitch McConnell (read “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell”). In an attempt to condescend to Sen. Warren, in an attempt to put her in her place, he took to the Senate floor to complain, and even though I am loathe to give any sort of credit to that chameleon crossed with a jellyfish crossed with Satan, he did give me a motto. It’s been made into wall art, into stickers, into tattoos (which I’d consider, but I’ve been getting so many MRIs lately, it’s probably not a good idea. Metal in the ink). I have the sticker on my laptop, and my coding instructors commented on it during graduation because I had had issues with learning some of the languages:

 

 

Yeah. It’s what I do. Just ask anyone i have exasperated over a 61 year existence.

Carrie Bradshaw got her new hard drive (and an external backup) and continued on. CJ Cregg persuaded NASA and the White House to go ahead with the broadcast for “the kid in the back of the room afraid to raise his hand. Let’s show him sometimes the big boys get it wrong” and it’s okay to take a chance.

So in addition to that sticker, over my personal desk (as opposed to my work desk), I have a copy of the first check I got for writing, the copyright certificate for “These Foolish Things,” the photo and autographed ticket from “The Perfect Storm” premiere where I met George Clooney and made him laugh, and an important picture of me with my dad and he’s beaming because I’d just gotten sworn in to the Bar of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after taking the bar exam 3 times (missed passing by .67 points on the first try, and by over 20 on the second try. They don’t tell you how you did when you pass).

I also have these two pieces of wall art:

It’s Thoreau and says,”if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Okay. I did this coding before. I can do it again. I can make it better, more interesting (well, now it’s paraphrasing “The Six Million Dollar Man”). I can make the virtual Duchy a virtual reality.

Because I persist. And because, I need to advance confidently in the direction of my dreams.

Let’s take it from the top, and…

 

Two Truths and a Deep Dive

If you follow me, all five or six of you stalwart stubborn folk, you know that I’m supposedly working on a historical fiction series at this time. This is comical because I started, and got the “Oh, God, what the hell was I thinking?” mindset, which is quite common among authors, and the mental writing police immediately put up roadblocks as they are wont to do. Little bastards.

Part of my anti-block therapy (which is really just feeding into a research addiction) is to get books (I know that should say “read books,” but did I mention that I like to shop and Amazon was foolish enough to give me a credit card?) about all the minutiae of the subject I plan to write about, like clothing, historical backdrop, ships (seriously), firearms, law, etc. I have done that.

I also burn candles and do vision boards. When it comes to procrastinating, I am creative.

I’ve taken care of the stressful things that I was blaming for my lack of words in a form visible outside of my brain. I have shopped until I dropped and found inspirational images…

“Chicks with Guns and Knives,” a working title (and the image on the left is a shower curtain. No I will not buy it).

First truth: I am not really a romance writer. There, I’ve said it. When I was a tween and teen, I would Hoover up all the historical romances I could lay my hands on at the library (and ran up fines on a monthly basis for being late with a LOT of books) and go through them like a bulldozer. Regency romances, the Almacks patroness of the historical romance genre (and if you recognize the reference, you are also a consumer of them), Barbara Cartland, with essentially the same delicate, feminine heroine (time periods ranged from 1790s to 1910. According to Barbara, she didn’t want the men wearing wigs from the early end, and didn’t want to get too modern and WW I on the other end. Fine by me) who was either broke and at risk of being exploited or fading to nothing in the countryside, or wealthy and at risk from fortune hunters. Until the hero swoops in and saves her, at which point our girl would inevitably develop a severe stammer and couldn’t get a sentence out in less than 3 paragraphs. Lots of ellipses. Es.

Whereas teenaged me soaked that stuff up, grown up me sits back and says, “Really? She’s not pissed off? There’s a gun on the table and she’s going to wait for someone to come in and use it? While the bad guy is threatening to rape her?”

There is also a category that I loved of women who went from poverty and abandonment to self-made wealth and power (Not always happily, but if it was smooth sailing all the way, it would be boring). “A Woman of Substance” by Barbara Taylor Bradford caught my attention. She didn’t wait to be rescued or look to marry well. Emma Harte rolled up her sleeves and got to solving her own problems. Romance was not the central theme, but she got her heart broken a couple of times, then got on with her life and taking care of herself. You also get a variation on this with “Mildred Pierce.” Mildred is abandoned with 2 girls by her husband, gets a job as a waitress, works her ass off, opens restaurants, gets wealthy, and gets her heart broken again by a cad she married (fortune hunter) and who had an affair with her daughter (Ick). It didn’t end well for him.

I love Jane Austen, but the Bennett sisters and the Dashwoods were simps for waiting to be married well and have someone rescue them. Sorry Jane, but you set a tone here that’s been duplicated. A lot.

Now, I get that Austen was writing in the mode of her times when women were sidelined from making their own way in the world sans husband (the exception being a companion to an older relative in hopes of getting an inheritance. Essentially, waiting for rescue). In the film version of “Sense and Sensibility,” Elinor Dashwood speaks to the rock and the hard place of modestly well-bred women with no great fortune to attract suitors and essentially barred from earning their own living (I think that was more Emma Thompson than Jane Austen, but I’ll take it).

(Personally, I gave up hoping for rescue a long time ago. No takers. Enough rejection and you get the message. You’re on your own)

When I got older, I discovered the historical novels of Amanda Quick (aka Jayne Anne Krentz). She wrote Regencies, too, but her heroines had scholarly interests in things like how seashells formed, or illuminated manuscripts. The heroes didn’t try to change the girls, but became intrigued by their passions (or were already rivals on the hunt for a particular manuscript), and fell for the smart, independent women they were. Now we’re talkin’.

The second truth: I am out of excuses for not progressing on this story. I’m not worried about a publisher; whatever Amazon is calling Createspace these days makes that unnecessary. Either people will read these books or not. Getting at least 2-5 in the series in published form will give me a good reason to hit the book fairs again, so I can see my author friends in person.

But…I have one more procrastination trick up my sleeve.

There’s a certain “voice” in writing historical romances. The language is more formal: you can’t have your heroine saying “Yeah, right, I bet” or “that’s so gross.” She would be more likely to say, “I do not believe you” or “Heavens, that’s disgusting. Ring for the maid to clean it up.” (Servants. Always. Even the “whatever shall we do?” heroines living in genteel poverty have faithful old family retainers who seem to work for them out of love, loyalty, and hopes of better days when maybe they can collect 25 years of back wages). I don’t quite have that voice.

An excuse for more research! And books in the genre to get my head back into the game! Shopping! Goodie!

(I just grabbed a cover from Google)

Julia Quinn to the rescue (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – I’m not into rescues. I’m a hypocrite. Go suck an egg. See? I don’t have the voice. Yet)

I watched the Bridgerton series on Netflix and enjoyed it immensely. Took me a minimal amount of time because I stayed engaged. I had not heard of the series before the TV show. Right off the bad, some of the tropes were turned upside-down (the teenaged girls who were not part of the debutante/ballroom world were no shrinking violets). There was humor. It wasn’t all genteel. Julia Quinn had done to the Regency romance genre what I would have done years ago; taken it, shaken off the tired, rusty pieces, and infused vibrancy by tweaking things a bit. Atta Girl.

So, the deep dive? I got all the books from Amazon, and whereas my reading lately has been heavier slogs (“The Diabetes Code” by Jason Fung. Two posts back, I discussed my recent diagnosis. This book has helped a lot). I have some leisure time, and I am going to immerse myself back in the Regency world and good writing, then grab myself by the scruff and get my damned books done and out in the world.

Wish me luck. I have candles burning.

 

Books and Bracelets

(This is an attempt to re-create the post that I wrote yesterday and it…disappeared. It was fucking LYRICAL and it vanished. Poof. Time to un-poof it. Remember how I told you I learn things the hard way? This, Campers, is how I learned to SAVE blog posts as I write them)

Yes, I write books and stories and blog posts (that sometimes get read). I also make and sell (hint hint) bracelets. I have a day job, but the side gigs keep me from going postal.

“Books and bracelets?’ you may ask. ” Storytelling and stone. Those are worlds apart. Do you have ADD or something? Can’t focus?”

Not really. And they’re not as far removed from each other as you may think.

We think of storytelling as words related orally or symbolically through alphabets, pictures, or gestures.

Stones can tell a story.

Stone is millions, billions of years old. They have survived intense heat, unbearable pressure. Exposure to one element will make the stone blue, a trace of a different one and it becomes yellow. Or green.

Crystals line up in precise formations, reproducing the pattern as they grow, making great structures, but the molecules all line up in the same order as the first.

Some were moved by landslides, by glaciers. They’ve been blow thousands of feet in the air by volcanoes or waiting millennia in the dark until someone decided they had enough value to dig up.

It didn’t end there.

The stone was cut, polished, treated with heat or chemicals to enhance its color or luster, carved or drilled before it came to me.

Matter.

It’s a word with multiple meanings. Something of importance or significance. “What’s the matter?” “Mind over matter.”

Or

The physical aspect of the Universe.

Stone is matter.

We are matter. Us. Humans.

But, if you ask a meta-physicist, when you get down to the subatomic level, it’s just energy. Vibration.

We are vibration. We respond to vibration. A cat’s purr vibrates at the same frequency that heals bones. It’s not just a pleasant, soothing sound. It’s healing.

Stones vibrate as we do. They vibrate at different frequencies. Healing frequencies.

A friend suffers from anxiety attacks. I wish to help her avoid them. Sodalite. Or lepidolite. Quartz crystal to amplify their vibration. Black onyx to absorb negativity. A Buddha head-shaped bead to represent serenity, tranquility.

That’s the story: “I am with you. Be calm.”

As I make the bracelet, I lose myself in the making. I hear the soft click of beads against each other on the wire. I feel the coo firmness of stone.I think about their purpose in assembling them.

Dragon’s blood jasper. It inspires courage. The creamy green with a slight blueness to it. I also have metal beads shaped like a dragon’s head. Who wouldn’t feel courageous with a dragon coiled around one’s wrist?

What’s the vibration of the stone that attracts? The seduction of color? The feel: solid, unbreakable? The promise of healing? It’s magick, the art of utilizing nature to bring about change. Wearable magick.

Using magick to change the vibration, to change life. That’s the story.