In A Bookish, Quilty Mood

Going through a manuscript with a fine-toothed comb, or the equivalent method of revising. Or deciding the next stage of a medallion quilt. Or how to use one's energies to oppose a false democracy. Well OKAY Very Recently Past Me, ahem. Very Recently Past Me (VRPM) seemed to be teetering on the edge of her high horse, but sure, I'll run with this prompt. Uh, yeah.... I'm only hesitant because VRPM made this post because 1) I mostly liked the title in conjunction with editing a new (LOL) book. Not that Give Her My Love: The Hawk Book One is old news, but I do like me a shiny, the shinier (and seemingly more labor intensive) the better. Okay, so that's the main reason for this post. The current round of pink-ish and green hexagons is halfway done, woo hoo! The second reason is.... 2) The above quilt! Or what's emerging as nightly I ecstatically stitch away on Alexandria. OMG I am SO IN LOVE with SEWING this QUILT! I'd been deeply (DEEPLY) concerned if a medallion...

Cards made yesterday morning while avoiding cleaning my house, lol. How editing out of order helps as well as hand quilting the perimeter is occasionally necessary. But when creative time is squeezed, better to adapt than not create at all. Well okay! I thought this up about half an hour ago after spending the early (but not stupid early) morning reading through The Enran Chronicles Book 3. Not like delving into it from Chapter One, more like opening the document, peering at the first paragraph, then smirking at myself because right now there are not enough straight uninterrupted days to begin a proper read-through of the novel. Yet on one particular morning, like today, I could peruse a few chunks, which I did indeed do as I scrolled more than halfway through the story, plopping myself into a scene, then within a few minutes finding a typo! What? Well, okay.... Good thing I landed on that page, with enough wherewithal to notice said typo, then correct said typo. I completed that chap...

  Jawbreaker candy that illustrates my current state of body and mind. Physically, emotionally, mentally.... Are there any other ways to be roughed up? Not spiritually, because only in that sense am I feeling like my feet are on the ground. It's a weird Sunday, but hey, sometimes they happen. Occasionally it's a bad Monday. Or a wild Tuesday, or discombobulated Wednesday or.... You get the drift, in that at times life feels HARD. Unpleasant. Frustrating. Wearying, etc, etc, etc. I need some ice cream, or a strong drink. Ice cream is better, lol, and now that the sun is shining, perhaps it's time to scoop up some Ben & Jerry's Phish Food. No gluten in that, just small chocolate fish amid delicious chocolate ice cream and plenteous marshmallow filling. Yeah, I'm going to retrieve that, then return here. Okay, that was delicious, maybe not nutritionally satisfying.... But I'm in a mood today, feeling overwhelmed and grateful, lonely and uplifted, mildly disgust...

The Hawk , placemats, finishing a lap quilt.... These are the endings I'm pondering today. First, the book: The Hawk . All 266 chapters of it. LOL. So I completed my read-through/revisions/edits yesterday afternoon after a marathon session that has lasted a few days. I really wanted to finish it, wanted to know how I'd reached The End, wanted to.... I wanted to savor and inundate myself with a cast of many that seriously eased the transition from wife/mum/daughter to wife/mum/grandmother/both parents passing away in the course of nearly five years. I started writing The Hawk in October of 2013, finished it in April of 2018, released it in parts (thirteen of them) as I wrote it, then unpublished those and re-released it in three volumes in 2020, then unpublished that early this year. I began the latest edits on 10 January, noting in my journal the temperature at 8 p.m. that night was 44 degrees Fahrenheit (Brrr!), hoping that by the end of this year I'd have read through ...

  Folders I kept. The last few days I've been steeped in novels I wrote over eleven years ago. I'd been listening to the playlist connected to these stories, and well.... Pulling up 2007-2013 in the books not currently under construction folder, I clicked on Forever of One Heart Part 1 , scrolled through the manuscript, then began to read. I didn't read anything else until I reached the end of Part 2 , which happened last night. Then I went to bed. After breakfast this morning I got dressed, wearing warm-ish clothes because we're actually receiving rain today. Then I breathed deeply, and from the closet I retrieved a box where I store notes from previous books. The big question was if I had purged the folder for Forever of One Heart a few years back when I did a massive clear-out of that box and another, fully aware I didn't need to keep information for drafts I had no plan to revise and release. Apparently Forever fell into that category, because to my chagrin, ...

  Photo courtesy of my husband. While much in our garden has been attacked by critters, the green beans seem to escaped unscathed. Fingers crossed these purple bean plants, pictured above, as well as the regular green bush variety will continue to grow well! In other news.... Sewing has been a pleasure, but it's not the only joy. This morning I finished revising what will be Book 6 of The Hawk , and wow, what a treat this section has been. Fast-paced action and plenty of it makes for a quick read, amazing this author how deftly a large cast with lots of drama seamlessly winds between characters old and new. I completed not only what will be the sixth installment, but also the second volume, from where I have been reading. One more remains, broken into, ahem, four books. Yeah, it's quite the saga, not at all what I had initially envisioned over a dozen years ago when the idea popped into my head. But sometimes that's how life, and books, goes. Not that I bit off more than I ...

  A screenshot from this morning's revisions of The Hawk . Coming home, even from a brief absence, usually proffers an altered vision. That used to not be the case on a consistent basis, but lately I've found even a weekend away brings insights not previously considered. I don't know if it's aging, I guess it must be. Suddenly I see things, from writing to sewing, in a different light. Perhaps it's the light itself, altering from spring to summer, adding to the emerging notion of change. The lengthening days are a beauty in themselves, as though the winter months were fiction. I know better, lol, but it's still a sight to behold. Currently I'm reading from the Alvin's Farm series, not having checked out those books in a while. I make notes where I find prose that needs a lift, then last night I scrolled through the story on my phone, updating the manuscript. I'm not alone in this task, recently reading about Alice Munro , the Canadian short story au...

One quilt top completed, perhaps photographed later today. Many scrunchies sorted, and many more to stitch. (Which led to three different fabrics being used up from my stash, yay!) A bowlful of hair adornments! The Lavender Quilt (EPP) is also starting to coalesce, in a manner that will move my butt from the couch to a better place for design, although not the wall because paper pieces don't stick to batting. Lavender quilt being arranged last night. More room definitely required! A Myrtle EPP block is nearly done; somehow that quilt, started at least three years ago, might end up as a near-finish by the end of the year. (Hopefully I haven't jinxed it by such a claim.) New hand-quilting needles arrived this week so I delved into the Cornflower Quilt, hurray! All the inner squares are stitched, but several outer blocks and the perimeter triangles remain, yet I love the new needles and hopefully those will inspire me to finish the hand-quilting and COMPLETE THAT QUILT! Cornflower...

  I wash my dishes. We don't have a dishwasher, although we're planning a kitchen remodel, and at this point it is looking to be a 2025 project. Which is fine, because if I'm happy manually washing mugs, silverware, etc, I'm doing pretty well. Revisions have been my morning focus, as I wash dishes in the afternoon. Every other day I work on Enran Book #2, mixing it up with an older novel that I might or might not publish. I didn't plan to alternate the edits, but in the last several days, that's how it's been going. It's refreshing, both in the switching round and the spontaneous nature of how that evolved. I'm chalking it up to the twenty-nine times two theory, not stressing out about it. But if I wanted to analyze it, just a little bit.... LOL, that's what this blog is kinda about, looking at my life, from writing to kitchen maintenance, through an altered lens. Or a lens rarely considered while I'm poking at prose or scrubbing teacups. Or ...

  For Christmas I received the above pictured journal. It's not my typical decorative choice, but I saw it in a local bookshop and pointed it out to my husband, who took note of my affinity for it. I didn't know what I would write in it, but something about it called to my heart, and suffice to say my hubby was glad for the gift idea. After we returned from our Christmas sojourn, I scribbled a few entries, nothing more than trying out various pens and pencils. It sat to my right on the sofa where I hand-sew, quietly trying to muscle its way into my evening routine. It wasn't having much luck until I started my nightly edits on The Hawk , where I decided to loosely keep track of the revisions. Magical realism figures heavily in this book, so this particular journal seemed perfect for the task. Those edits are going more quickly than I first imagined; a couple of nights I've read through three chapters, merely because the story is so captivating, lol. I haven't read t...