In A Bookish, Quilty Mood

Trinidad Head from Saturday, 11 January 2025. It was blowy and cold, but nice to observe from inside the car. "I don't see how anybody can predetermine how their movie is going to turn out, or why anybody would want to, because it's a creative thing that is changing every day, and you're changing every day while you work on it. You start to make a movie, and when you finish it you'll be a different person." - Barbara Loden I read this quote earlier today and obviously it struck a chord. Not that I'm planning to make a movie soon (or ever). Only that I'm hoping to start writing soon (or ever again). And the first (long) line proffered me a whole lotta freedom. I have notions how the story will end, snippets of ideas for the middle, but no clear path for how to get from Chapter 3 (because I'm keeping Chapters 1 & 2 that I wrote last year) to say, Chapter Question Mark. I don't even know how lengthy of a story this will be. Not The Hawk l...

Hearts sewn with my left hand to assuage my achy right shoulder. These hearts took nearly twice as long to sew, but sometimes the best things don't happen overnight. What's so frightening about peace, love, and understanding? My first novel featured a white woman with a biracial sibling. My second, and first indie publication, concerned a bisexual author, his long-time liberal Catholic girlfriend, and the AIDS epidemic. My focus has always been on inclusiveness amid varied genres ranging from literary fiction to fantasy, women's fiction to sci-fi. Sense a theme? It's all about peace, love, and understanding. Today's title hit me yesterday morning, but other than ranting how different Jimmy Carter is from the incoming president, I didn't have much plotted for this entry, which I didn't want to turn into some raging blah blah blah that has already been done to death. Yet I want to mention how hearts matter more than male appendages, and while yes I'm a wom...

While the Carter family absorbs the loss of their patriarch, I watched Jimmy Carter's funeral with a sense of peace. Joy. Recollection to simpler times before all this modern technology when it seemed that strength of character and honesty mattered. Perhaps I'm blinded, wearing rose-coloured glasses tinted by the vibrant pink sun pictured above. Regardless, I needed a throng of eulogies to lift my mood and dangit I received that in full yesterday morning. It's funny what can herald a breakthrough in one's emotional state, their creative endeavors, or physical well-being. I needed a presidential state funeral, okay! What I NEEDED was the reminder that goodness matters, selflessness is imperative, decency isn't superfluous. Good lessons all round. But what about that bright pink sun? That scrap of Kaffe Fassett material had been slated to go into the block below. Yet when I tried fitting it in, its massive PINKNESS overwhelmed the rest of the hexagons, so to the offic...

Yours truly from summer of 2001. I still have the shirt and canvas bag behind the purse. If I write about calamities, am I hoping to ward them off within my personal life? I'm in a wonky headspace right now. This post was going to be about the sentence above, but I don't feel like analyzing that. I'm.... Meh. Sometimes one just feels meh. A dear friend became a grandmother again this morning, a little girl entering this world that at the time of her conception didn't seem as crappy as it now feels. I'm trying to keep that stiff upper lip, but all my years of living in the UK feel like a dream as this year begins, as so many unknowns linger. I feel like when my mom died in 2018, lost and bewildered with a major case of WHAT THE MUCK! I didn't write for a couple of years, trying to sort out my brain and heart. Therapy helped, time's passage did too, making quilts up the friggin' wazoo because the whole noveling gig was mired in grieving. Maybe that's w...

Hearts can be very efficient. And so begins another post! Prepping a novel for release, and other quirky notions... I thought about this around mid-morning, how I was waiting for the pot of soup to simmer, meanwhile filling a couple of pitchers with water, not wanting to simply stand by the pot because a watched pot often takes ages to boil.  LOL. Yet it wasn't merely lunch on my mind, but my fictional WIP, as I'm in one of the last revisionary cycles. Hoping to release Splitting the Sky in two weeks, egad! Where have the last several weeks gone? Wait, don't answer that. Time's inadvertent march onward can't be analyzed, in that it moves too damn fast for me to consider. But here I kind of am, regardless. This isn't so much about me not liking to be idle, although I don't like being idle. It's more about using time to its best, um, usage. Being efficient. Not wasteful. Because I'm two times twenty-nine, okay, fifty-eight. Maybe the whole two times t...

Hexagon block for Alexandria, a wonderful ongoing process! Quilts. And novels, ahem.... I almost titled this Sincere considerations , because to blithely discuss writing (actual writing not revising) or machine-piecing a quilt seems precarious. Why? Because it's been over a year since I finished writing anything new and a few months since sewing with my machine which is STILL UNDER ITS COVER.  But I'm not going to change the title. In leaving it alone, I'm possibly setting myself up for disappointment, but damnit, I REALLY WANNA WRITE SOMETHING NEW! And look at something different on the design wall. I stretch twice a day in the room where the design wall resides, and I meant to take down the blocks just minutes ago after completing my stretches, but I forgot. Jeez Louise! I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached (and I'm a little afraid I'm forgetting how to.... Not write, but, but, but....)! The out of order bit relates to the quilt I'm sincerely consi...