Oh, so it wasn't a cold, but the real, actual flu. Certainly it's hung on like the flu, and I've been exhausted enough to enter the lethargy Olympics, and take gold in the ooze-under-the-bar jump.
I'm a little better now. Coughing less, but today's hot north wind, and dry air has set off hayfever, because I'm snorking again. Sigh.
Anyway, I'm here, because doing this makes me feel like I'm contributing to the world, doing something, and not just lying on the couch, reading werewolf stories. I found a huge book at the op shop a few weeks ago: 'Werewolves and Shapeshifters'.
And as I write this, I look across the loungeroom floor, and there is my tiny white dog. He might be the wolf part of a baby werewolf forever stuck with the change because someone burnt his bunny rug. Or wolfie rug. I'm sure if I had my writers' hat on, instead of my invalid hat, I'd make something of that. I'll put it in the ideas folder, and none of you thousands of readers pinch it, okay?
My mind leapt straight to the shapeshifters in Mercedes Lackey's 'Children of the Night', and the Japanese vampires that exist merely on perfume. They must have had a hard time in some eras, if born into a peasant village, where everyone smelled of turnips. Or even a Japanese fishing village. They long for peonies, and get only fish-head odour.
Don't steal that idea either, readers.
Not much else has been going on of late, except an excess of flu in the house. PB, and TP both have it, the house is awash in eucalyptus oil, and tissues, and bottles of cough mixture. Hey, Japanese perfume vampires, do you like eucalyptus, tea tree, lavender, and clove?
We have mounds of camellias in bloom, but none of them have any scent. Not sure if it's an Aussie thing, or just our yard. They all look a bit wilty today in the warmth. Most of our camellias no sooner bloom than drop to the ground. What's the point, truly? If these strong winds keep up, our lawn will be covered with blooms tomorrow. And our compost bin is full, and awaiting complete decomposition before we can empty it and start again. I guess I'll just chuck the fallen flowers onto the garden and hope they decompose and add something to the soil.
The perfume vampires would be disappointed here at the moment. The daphne is past its yearly prime, the camellias have no scent, the rosemary flowers are all but spent, and nothing else has much perfume yet. I wish I had jasmine planted. No roses out yet, but I'm wondering which of the many bushes here will win the race to have the first blossom. Most years, it's the big yellow standing rose bush, but last year, the apricot one beat it out by a week.
Spring Equinox today, and all I've had the energy to do is a tarot spread for myself, and refresh my altar. That's enough. Some years I forget to do even that.
Well, enough rambling. Back to the werewolves. And as I look up again, there walks Tilly TinyPony, our hugely fluffy black and white longhaired cat. Imagine waking up and you're a werecat, covered in masses of fur, and it's 30 degrees outside, and you find you have a tummy of dreadlocks, and very little brain, and you think you keep seeing the fence wavering and dancing in front of your eyes.....

Can I just say that I have been the total grown up today? Not only have I done the admin and phone calls for transferring my superannuation to an ethical fund, but I've done a bunch of things for TwentiesBoy's VCAT financial report, and paid a bill.
Not much else to do with myself while I'm down with a virus of some sort. I'm not terribly sick, but very debilitated.
So, I thought tackling these pending issues was good use of my couch time.
And three things off the huge brain dump list of stuff that I did last week.
I took a few hours and wrote down every issue that was whizzing around in my head, and categorised them into 'financial', 'family', 'health', etc.
I then pick 2-3 per week to tackle.
Some are unpleasant, like financial admin. Some will be wonderful, like 'go to Scotland'.
Not all will get done in the next year, and that's okay.
But at least I can feel like I'm making headway.
And I can hope that one day, there will be much less to write in the six-monthly brain dump, because I will have dealt with stuff.
And now, to lie down on the swooning couch, and swoon.
I'm reading 'The Spoonbenders' and rather wondering why, except for Irene, the only interesting character.

Wholefood Merchants in Ferntree Gully has a café attached to the 'supermarket', and serves quite nice food, even if the menu changes on a whim, and every single thing I've ever liked there eventually gets supplanted by something containing wheat, quinoa, eggplant, or something I simply loathe.
I like to go there for brunch, to read, to shop, to browse, and sometimes to write. For that, I go in the non-rush times from 9.30-11.30am, and 1.30-4pm.
The café has a large water feature that's treated as a wishing well. It's a low, square pool of water, with a metal sculpture acting as waterfall.
Today, I gave a two year old three ten cent pieces to throw into the 'wish' for me, as she'd already emptied her mother's purse of all silver, and one gold coin ("Go all out, and make it a big wish!").
Whatever the poppet wished for, shortly afterwards, I finished the short story I've been mucking about with, and decided to have another crack at the idea of a water spirit living in the water feature. Two aborted short stories, and this time, a poem.
Well, that came tumbling out of me, and I thought I'd never find an end to it. I returned, yet again, to the idea of a female discovering she has a link to the water spirits.
So, thanks little girl, whatever your wish was. I feared that poetry had left me.
I'm so unsure of myself re poetry that I'll need to give a couple of people a look, and then I'll be brave and send it somewhere.
I have grave doubts about this. Every time I access Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, I find 80% of the poems inaccessible. I just don't get them. And the remaining 20% are so sophisticated that I quail before their cleverness.
This poem I've just first drafted is very simple, and just says it. No obscurity, no high-falutin'. Both concepts are my enemy. Can't be doing with high-falutin' poems.
Anyway, maybe there's a home for it somewhere, once it's been tidied up. It would be nice to have one publication to my belt this year.
As for the short story, I'll also run that by a couple of likely suspects. And then see if the competition I aimed for is still open. I had an uneasy conversation with my muse on this story.
Satya: Here's the criteria: X, Y, two Z's, and a K.
Muse: Hmmm.... While you're in the bath tonight, riff on it to PizzaBoy.
Satya: But that's just silly riffing.
Muse: It's called brainstorming.
Satya: Oh.

Satya riffs to PB. PB gently eggs her on. Satya, as usual, takes it to weird places. Much giggling, and self-entertainment. Satya feels sparkly.

Satya: Um, Muse, how about that story....
Muse: You have the idea. The riff?
Satya: But that can't be the story, surely. It's...simplistic, silly. There's no logic.
Muse: Take it or leave it. That's what it is.
Satya: But Margaret Atwood is a judge. We've just finished watching 'The Handmaid's Tale'.... This isn't going to fly with her.
Muse: Want me to take it back?
Satya: No, no. It's just that....I thought our idea would be more....important.
Muse: You don't do straight importance. You go the Pratchett, Adams, and Asprin route. You use humour.
Satya: People don't take it seriously. They think there's no skill to it.
Muse: Must I remind you that those 'writer people' you're thinking of write shitbox clunky humour, and you don't. Now, here's a nice new notebook, and your favourite turquoise Lamy fountain pen. Get on with it.

Tomorrow, I start trying to transcribe my handwriting. Not as easy as it used to be. My handwriting is even worse, and my eyesight...well, I can see I'm in for a 'squint at the page, then type a few words, then squint at the page' session or two.

But that's tomorrow. Right now, I can tell you that all this chipperness is a smoke screen for The Sad, and The Exhaustion. I didn't sleep well last night, so fibro symptoms are rolling through me, namely joint and muscle pain. The Sad is nagging to consider images of hanging and being shot in the head. The Exhaustion wants me to lie down and die.
Yeah, well, not tonight, thanks. Now that I've realised that I'm on to my second World War II book, and I've been listening to another WWII book in the car, I've ceased 2/3, and am applying 'The Utterly Ultimate My Word Collection' by Frank Muir and Denis Norden. That should make me laugh, and I can forget about Nazis.
Full Moon in Aquarius, plus a partial lunar eclipse. No wonder my brain is messed up.

SnakyPoet alerted me to the way my chosen blog skin was playing out for visitors. I've hopefully fixed that now.

I'm sitting in the sun, which is coming in through my bedroom windows. I'm cross-legged on the floor, squinting at the screen against the sunlight, with Penny right in front of my legs. She's more cranky these days, don't know why. Hisses all the time, has started biting visitors when they pet her. I'm going to apply coconut oil to her paws again, and when she licks it off, she will eat it, and hopefully, it might affect her skin. I think she has terribly ichy skin, and it's annoying her.

An anxiety day for me today. Far too much in the world recently. Body had had enough by last night, mind has had enough today. I've done a bit of house tidying, not that you can tell, and I've been on the couch late morning, reading. Reading will continue after this blog update.

Not much else to report. Still very down, although I put a jolly good face on it. Still anxious, so nothing new there. Still got fibro, although a friend has signed me up to a 'detox through cabbage and kale ferments, kill the candida, kill the worms, be prepared to piss and poop and vomit, as this is good' group, and the admins say that if you cease naming your diseases, they won't exist. So I don't have fibro. I have SparklingHealth. Which I am treating with Nimbin oil, chinese herbs, rest, and gentle exercise. Not to mention the occasional Voltaren.
I will not be treating my SparklingHealth with cabbage and kale ferments, which makes one sick as a dog.

Good gods, there's an ant crawling around my windowsill. There must be warmer weather on the way if the ant scouts are out and about. I would have thought they'd still be below ground. Then again, only another six weeks or so, and I can start organising my back yard beehive. The bees will be ready by then, I think.

I live for the warmer weather, for not so many clothes, and because I'm too chicken to inflict enough pain and discomfort on myself, and others, to end it.

http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com.au/

I've not written poetry much at all this year. I've been deep in memoir territory, and I feel dry, used up, a leaf in winter scraping on cold bitumen. So, I toddled over to my favourite poetry inspiration place and I'll try to do something with Brendan's prompt.

Knife through butter
to measure out half a cup
for this new recipe.

A good sliver off the Larsen Ice Shelf
loosing itself into the ocean.

Sugar weighed out into metal bowl,
white and silver.

Snow and ice gleaming,
deep within larimar-blue.

Crumbled almond meal,
the tang of vanilla essence.

Icebergs melting, salt biting deep,
the smell of krill
from a minke's mouth.

Apply heat.

The cake rises.
The land bares itself.
One more palatable than the other.
****

That felt like grinding dry concrete. But it's a start.

I'm watching THE HANDMAID'S TALE. I always knew it would be a hard watch, just as the book is a very hard read. I read it once as a young woman, and thought 'ugh, I don't like Atwood at any time, and this is one fucked up dystopian read'.
I read it again earlier this year, as an older woman with more perspective, and thought: "Dear Gods, it's here."
I'm up to the second-last episode of season one. What have I just remembered?
That my ex-husband said to me that if I couldn't bear him children, he would have to divorce me, and find someone who could. Only he didn't put it like that. He said 'get rid of'.
I was a vessel to provide the dream family he envisioned. They were the last few things on his 'Stuff To Get' list: house, wife, two children.
I was the wife, I birthed the two children.
What a good handmaid I was.
#triggered
#horrified
#mortified

What a busy writing day it's been. I met with Saraswati at 11.40am(ten minutes after she finishes teaching yoga), and we wrote for two hours. She's writing about 'yoga off the mat', and I'm still deep in A TEAR IN THE AIR land. Through the worst of it now, I think. The Ordeal is done with, and now I start the return journey to the ordinary world.
Then, pick up a new thumb drive, one that can attach to my key ring. I'm fearful that if my computer gets stolen, my months of hard memoir work will be gone. With a thumb drive in my purse, and another on my key ring, I can back up each time I finish a café or friend's house binge writing session.
I'm home now, and have just copied all my poems from The Followers project of several years ago into a file. Over the next week, I'll go through them, rewrite if necessary, and do a coupla paragraphs to talk about the experience of The Followers. Then, send them to snakypoet, I guess, who once again is assuming editor hat. I might even find some title suggestions in amongst the poems, because so far, we are scratching our heads.
I'll be glad to knock off writing for the day, and tend to a few other things. Pets, husband, adult offspring, the state of the house, reading, meal planning. Gosh, even down time for day dreaming. I think I've forgotten how to do that.
It looks like I'll finish A TEAR IN THE AIR this month (and about darned time). I know it's only first draft stage, but I'm going to seek appropriate beta readers for feedback while I attend to other writing projects. THE STORIES SO FAR has languished for a few months. It's now time to turn my attention to it again, and get it out in the world. The dreaded synopsis, and all that jazz, to try some of the smaller presses like Ticonderoga, and such, to see if their keen on my collected published short stories.
Then it will be time to take a look at the ambitious goals I set myself in December at the break-up party of the Secret Keepers Memoir Group. We each listed three projects we'd go crazy on this year.
And that should be enough to be going on with for the rest of this year.

Surely some poetry must come out of me soon. Surely.

Well, so much for the good intentions to be here twice a week. Most of that motivation was to 'build my on-line platform', and you know what, fuck that for a joke. I'd rather be writing actual stuff.
Which hasn't been happening either. I had a great rhythm going there for a bit, and then fell of the bike. Now I have a head cold, which won't kill me - I'll just wish it would.
It's 4.41pm, getting dark already. Winter Solstice, and I've done nothing about that, apart from a brief foray to Lincraft to buy a swatch of black and white cloth for my altar. Instead, I've spent most of this afternoon either reading the 4th Harry Potter book, or dicking about online.
I have three candles burning on the coffee table in front of me. There, that's my big ritual to welcome back the light. Even though we're still in for the coldest months of the year, and I feel cold and dark, and insular.
Rather shitty too, that this head cold has caused me to miss a seminar through the Emerging Writers Festival, and cancel my planned trip to Alice Springs for the Beanie Festival.
Fuck! on both counts.
Part of me wants to just lie down, turn my back to the outside world, and mope. Part of me wants to watch classic movies such as 'All About Eve' until late Spring is here. Part of me hopes to forge ahead with 257 writing projects and burst on the scene like a comet.
A very small part of me might like to attend Medtrek 6, but I dunno, I'm not much of a con-goer these days, and would know only very few people. I'm not much good at sitting around reminiscing about Medtrek 1, and 2, because I didn't attend them.
Oh, I'm a gloomy person today. A curse on all the head-filling gunk of viruses.
Okay, that's it, no more moaning. Stop putting this shit out in the world.

Just back from seeing ALADDIN in the theatre. Maybe it's me being super-tired, and shaky, and almost smelling illness in my nose(got that pre-cold feeling), but apart from the Genie, the performances felt flat. The guy playing Aladdin had a hard job coming up against the actor playing the Genie. Then again, the Genie is such a BIG part in every sense of the word, that any mere mortal role would pale beside it.
I'm tucked up in bed now, and will haul myself out for Dr Who with PB and TB, but then it's back to the swooning sheets again.
I'm listening to a vimeo thing for the course I'm studying, and truly, I don't have much else to impart.
I've just started listening to the audio book THE MONSTROUS CHILD, and I'm not sure that a whiny teen is the right personification for the Norse Goddess Hel. And whine is all she does.
So, consider, Satya, how would you portray one of the 'negative' Goddesses. There are plenty of books out there portraying the Aphrodites, Athenas, Hinas, Artemises of this world, but how to make the likes of Hel, Pele, and Kali. How does a teen goddess react to finding out she's got an unpopular gig? A certain amount of whining. But come on, She's Goddess material! She's gotta love it, right? How does Persephone deal with her Queen of the Dead gig, never mind the Spring Maiden thing? She's also Hades consort.
This bears thinking upon, because there's a story here...

My amateur peering into my tea cup this morning netted me several butterflies standing out from the general wodge of herbs. A few odd specks of herb formed into butterfly wings on two different angles. For me, butterflies signal transformation.
I truly hope so, because just yesterday, at Mastermind group, I was whinging about how I saw writing as work, wanted to reframe that back into play and adventure. I was reminded of an NLP exercise BunnyGirl took me through some years ago, to reframe a difficult incident I'd just experienced.
Today will see me trawling the web to see if I can find something similar to help me reframe my writing life. My mind just don't like Work, and Job, and Career. Not even Calling, Gifts, Destiny. It all sounds like a drag to my child-mind.
Nevertheless, three new pages written this morning. Two on the spiritual memoir, one on....wait for it, a new memoir called A GIRAFFE IN MY TEA CUP. Writing memoir. Title came shortly after the tea leaf reading I had at the Tea Festival.
"Nice title," I thought.
"It's a great title! Now, let's get on with the writing memoir!" said Creative Brain.
"The what?"
"The writing memoir. You know, for the boxed set of memoirs."
"But I'm not done with the spiritual memoir, the PizzaBoy memoir, the TwentiesBoy memoir, or the belly dance memoir..."
"Writing memoir. Start now."
Sigh.
Because who doesn't want 20 unfinished projects?