bleodswean

the unwavering stare: self-portrait, skull, Hasselblad remote, my father's watch, tree of knowledge

Welcome to my Sticky Post. A first for me in over twenty-three years of (live)journaling, but it seems like today’s journalers are more discerning. I don’t do Tumblr, or X, or IG, or Facebook / Meta, or TikTok. And sadly, I don’t really do LJ any longer as I can’t get the cross posting to work. In 2022, I made a dedicated effort to commit to DW and here we are. It ain’t the glory daze of olde, but I’m coming to terms with that. Every few months I will fall into a despair-like need to lament those long-gone LJ times and then it’s out of my system and we’re onward and upward. Although this is happening less and less as I move further and further downstream in the River of Life.

I have no friending policy. I read the flist every morning and comment as much as I can before work starts. I’m interested in almost all things and all folx. If I’m not interested, I won’t make a scene, because I’m not interested in drama. Been there, done that.

I’m a professional photographer by trade. Semi-retired now. Although it seems I'm shooting more weddings and babies lately than I have in a long time. I'm currently compiling a work of Serious Children portraits.

We run a family business. We live in a gorgeous hand-built home, on many forested acres, in a small mountain village in Northern California. Military brat and I’ve traveled the world and moved every three years of my minor days. English and Philosophy major, dropped out to manage a Tower Records import section. Spent the 80’s mohawked and living a very downtown alternative life. Spent the 90’s and 00’s raising children off the grid and living a very nature-based alternative life. LOL.

I do write and have published short fic and flash fic and poetry (and will make it a point to create a link post for my original work soon!). I also write fanfic and have some fic over at A03. I dabble in fandoms, wait to become obsessed before I write and read for a fandom and that seems to happen a couple few times every year. That being said, I do have a personal fandom I write in continuously - a modern dress Persephone / Hades. It's a myth that I've been working with for decades.

Music IS the soundtrack to my life and an important part of my days. I’ve been listening to Nick Cave since 1982 when I bought my first Birthday Party album. I still listen to him today. He is my musical muse. I also listen to a lot of darkgrass and folk, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Swans, Beefheart, and Cameron Winter.

I’ve been reading voraciously since I was 10 years old when I contracted rheumatic fever and a librarian sent home The Narnia Chronicles to keep me company in my sickbed. Now I read: Cormac McCarthy *genuflect*, AS Byatt, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Mary Oliver, David Whyte, Brian Evenson, and all things folk & fairy tale.

I’m older than most of you, younger than some. I’m finding myself here less and less and that’s disappointing, but a natural attrition, I suppose.

Merry Met!

ETA: In July of 2024, the Park Fire destroyed 2/3rds of the mountain village of Cohasset, California; I have spent the past year helping my friends and neighbors - survivors - tell their stories.

SEEKING OUT MY GOAT-FOOTED MUSE

There you are.

And there you are.

I’m not the one who’s been missing. For like ever.

I’ve been right here.

I didn’t know where here was, right?

Yet here you are.

I came looking, you see. I’ve been looking for you.

You have a, what is that, a leaf, a stick in your hair.

Yes, I’ve been in the woods. This meadow? Surrounded by woods. And not like a nice forest one takes a Sunday afternoon stroll through.

No?

No.

Elaborate.

I think I’ve been lost. The woods aren’t friendly when you’re lost. The trees close in on you and you can’t see the sun or the moon; the stars just ragged ribbons in the crowns, the clouds wispy reminders of wider open spaces. It gets cold and very damp.

Your feet are filthy.

I’m barefooted.

You left the house unshod?

Why do you sound so offended? I thought you preferred women to be au natural?

Certainly. Often. You’ve just always struck me as far too uptight to play the maenad.

Nevermind that. It’s time to come back home now. The seasons are changing. You’ve been gone a long time. Too long.

All relative. This feels like home. Here.

How does this feel like home? It’s a meadow, ringed by ancient trees, bisected by this harmonically babbling brook, tall grasses, and you lying here on your back.

I’m looking at the clouds.

The sky is blue. Not a cloud to be seen.

They come and go. Doesn’t your skin, your flesh, tell you it will be quite overcast soon?

Yes, because Autumn is on her way. Almost here. Summer is gone and I don’t know what to call this sort of in-between time.

You may be confusing or are just simply confuddled by astronomical seasons versus meteorological. And then, of course, there’s indigenous calendaring. We ought, you and I, to think of yet another seasonal foretelling based upon what nature herself would define as a recognizable transitionary time. Or more particularly, seasons of life, we could consult with the gods and goddesses who are in charge of such things.

For what possible end?

To the means, of course. But here, if you’re not going to sit, then let’s go wash your feet clean in the brook. Can you put a bit of a jaunt into it? Not asking for a full-blown pirouette but you’re plodding. As we walk, I will query you, why have you been looking for me? Don’t you have other things to occupy the hours?

Plodding?

Whatever you call this foot dragging, shoulder drooping step. Every time I’m upright, I can sense the dance moving through my long bones.

That's not really a common experience for me. Without a glass or two of wine.

How do the poets declare - stay drunk on life? Whatever, sit here and put your feet in there.

That tickles.

The dirt is quite caked betwixt your toes.

Don’t look so put out. Not all of us can boast cloven hooves.

Alas, tis true sadly. Nor these elegantly curved bone cornets. You didn’t answer my questions.

Yes, yes, I have other things to occupy me. A lifetime’s worth. A week’s worth, a month, a year. My days are filled, my nights likewise. My hours bursting.

I thought you said you’ve been lost in a dark wood.

That’s kept me busy, too. Looking for you.

Hogwash.

Rude.

It’s nonsense. Rubbish. Bull, blatherskite, madness, absurdness, tosh, and drool. You haven’t been looking for me. I’ve been right here always all along evermore.

It felt like you were missing.

Felt?

When you feel?

Feelings.

You object?

It’s not that. At all. Your feelings are yours; my reality is mine. I’m not a pet. Goat like? Yes. Domestic pet? Nope. I don’t come at a whistle. Not a genie in a bottle. Not a servant. As a matter of fact, I don’t really do your bidding. Like at all. As you’ve discovered, you must come to me.

I’m here.

You’re here now.

I’m here now.

Then let us declare that magick is afoot. And get you dancing.

Milk tea and cookies. Knitting and dark stories, maybe fairy tales. Harry Potter moviethon. Goth tunes. I'm ready for it.

It's raining! Somewhat unusual? But not completely crazy. We are hearing that it will be El Nino this year which means wet wet wet. Always delish when it's happening but makes for a very bad fire danger next year. Because 80% of the village is burned out, those properties aren't being cared for and the weed, scrub, and sprouting trees are really becoming a serious concern. The County doesn't care and the community association is just sillier than ever. We still have massive log decks from the logging, and we still have a decent amount of folks who shouldn't be up here and are pretty consistently starting fires with illegal burns. It's troublesome.

Nothing I can do about any of it. I'm done with my civic volunteerism. I did my time up here - fifteen years on the board plus all of the Tell Your Park Fire Story articles and even agreed to edit the newsletter for a year. Small town politics are the worst. I wish them well, of course, but currently they are a hot mess and seem doomed. We are still active in our neighborhood Bucket Brigade and D never stops fire hardening the house and property.

Would I move up to where Kidling1 is with her new baby??? Maybe? I don't know. I'm not a big fan of heat although the town is super cute and well run. D won't ever move again, is my guess, so here is where we are. We are talking about an RV ... and that has near endless possibilities for seeing more of the kids and the country, too!

I'm heartsick for Mr Inbetween. AAARGH!!! Might write a bit of fic but talk about tiny fandom, there's two fics over at the Archive. But I really told myself no more fanfic! And yet here I am in longing for it. But with Idol lurking just around the corner, I really don't have the time / brain power regardless.

Anyone have tv recs - movies or shows?

20-year anniversary of The Real LJ Idol! You all know that saying – the days are long the years are short – I’m here to settle into the proverbial rocking chair and tell all of you, yes, this this this.

I joined LJ in 2003 but didn’t learn about Idol until twelve or so years ago! I was one of the many folks who

halfshellvenus coaxed into the game. Thanks, K! I love it and hate it almost simultaneously. I’ve done some of the best writing of my life as an Idol contestant and read some of the best writing, too! It’s an amazing “game” and I’m here for this ostentatious anniversary season!

My writing chops are unpolished, and my Muse is sleeping somewhere. Life has changed a lot since my first Idol season! But the friends (and enemies) made, the great reading and the astonishing freedom in which to write one's heart out will always make for a worthwhile venture. This game is definitely worth the candle.

Here's the sign-up link and I think all the writers on my flist should jump in, the water is warm and the sharks are warmer!

LJ IDOL SIGN UP

Major part of my teen years. Rocky Horror Picture Show WAS a gateway drug to the mainlining of punk rock. Especially in 1980. Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter was just about EVERYTHING to us. Friday night midnight viewings downtown. In Sac we had a full cast and the cinema was vintage and boasted a real stage. It was one hour and ten minutes away, but we made it a near weekly ritual. How could a handful of quite silly girls crush so intensely on a drag queen?! We just did. I had the posters, the two albums, the dialogue by heart. That coy brow lift was worked on diligently. We even went to opening night of Annie for the sole reason that Curry was playing Rooster.

Anyway. Feeling quite melancholy about it.

We had a cool down, but it is still August and the heat will return this coming week. Just not quite as devastating. At least up here. And that’s good. Summer is settling into a deck chair with a cup of coffee in the mornings and a warm throw in the evenings. Nice.

We are slated to be moderately busy through the end of the year now! How did that happen? We’ve got a wedding and a family lake vacay. A couple of birthdays and a big Oregon road trip. Because of circumstances, we have a forced three-week break from work late September but are trying to make the best of it. It may interfere with our regular Winter holidays. One nice thing about being older and having zero bills – no mortgage, car payment, loan of any kind, credit card bills, etc. – is that you worry less about money than when you’re in the thick of kids at home and monthly obligations. So, we can take time off and enjoy ourselves. Plus, there really is a ton of stuff that needs doing around here. We’re currently a quarter into the house and pool house staining gig. I also want to do some Autumn planting.

You know how some form of entertainment will cause you to crawl around on the ground lovesick for a character? Yes, of course most of you do because most of us are here because of fandom. Anyway. I’m lovesick right now for a character named Raymond Shoesmith. Of Mr. In-Between. An Aussie comedy that isn’t as funny as it is thought-provoking and actually quite sad. Dark comedy, I guess, is the genre. Anyway, this Scott Ryan is utterly compelling, and I’m hook line and sinkered. Anyone seen this? We’ve got two episodes to go before it’s finished forever. *cries*

Watch on YouTube

Not getting any closer to that elusive “room of her own”. When Kidling1 was two years old we moved into an old farmhouse in the middle of suburbia. Quite fun! And one of the bedrooms had a very large closet with a window in it and I turned that into my space. I used to duck inside every afternoon for two or three hours while she napped and would write. I was working on some sort of novel then, main character named Skelly (of course) and a gravedigger to boot, but that’s all lost to a plastic box of floppy discs that I still keep along with that computer but only to convince myself there’s something of worth there not to boot it up and actually climb into that beige colored time machine. But I did dearly love that closet.

That’s a strange thing about this house. The lack of closets. The house lingered on the market for a long time because of the lack of storage and the bathrooms and the layout upstairs and the lack of overhead lighting. Our place is one of about a dozen homes that were built by hand up here by a group of tuned in turned on dropped out guerrilla marijuana growers who all moved up here in the 80s. I’ve seen the pictures, long hair, long beards, nude sunbathing, naked children running to and fro, partner swapping, common law. It was a crazy decade. None of the men had jobs, the women were all teachers. All, every single one of, the men are felons because marijuana was illegal in the 80s. I’ve tried and failed to get any of them to commit to telling their stories for posterity. They’ll stand around my kitchen or around a campfire and regale for hours. And the stories are so worthwhile. Are any of you other writers story whores? Will you forgo any update of your life just to LISTEN and LISTEN and ABSORB the stories of other lives? Anyway, to explain the idiosyncrasies of this house would require an essay and all I have in me today is a short post. No closets and originally no shower, just a massive clawfoot upstairs. They finally had to install a shower downstairs to entice a buyer. Did they just have European style wardrobes in every room or what in hell did they do about their STUFF??? Foodstuff, too?! No pantry.

I finally found the perfect way to declutter. I'm boxing it up and driving it to Kidling's every other week. She's selling it on Marketplace and it's win win. She gets some pin money and I get some headspace.

Watch on YouTube

Mindully aware that with Idol on the horizon, I’ve got to start a daily practice and make it habit. My issue is the “room of her own” bugaboo. For such a huge house, we are thin with privacy. I do have large arching visions of how things could be set up here but neither the money, inclination, energy, or help. Bah. I think I’ll sit down with The Viking and see if we can’t come to some sort of decision and then act upon it!

Heat is going to stay through the weekend and then a cool down next week. It feels strangely end-of-summer here. Not down in the valley, per se, but up here on the mountain.

Reading and knitting. I’ve got a very cute plump hen on the needles for my chicken-loving sister’s birthday next month. And then a massive Advent project for same sister. I’m not inclined to craft for local sister much anymore. The distance between us continues to grow. Not with animosity but just absolute indifference. Strange. I’m not sure there’s much to be gained by a deep psychoanalytic dive at this point in my life. My family of origin was always about each other and blood being thicker than water and friends for life, but somehow someway all that disappeared. It just began to not matter. My two youngest sisters seemed to be the driving force, both are narcissists, but my mother’s personality was in no way helpful or healing either. All I can do at this juncture is be present for my mother and continue to remind myself that life is what YOU make it and you’d better make if full of love and kindness and supportive conversation.

Still reading the Shelley Byron Hunt bio. It’s quite fun. Such intense young people but then aren’t most of us during those years? Free love and righting the wrongs of the world, art and poetry and wine.

I’m as hooked as everyone else on Gone and waiting for the finale this week.

These pretty pretty boys have returned with a banger -

Watch on YouTube

Found an endearing little film last night - Your Monster. Ending sucked but that's why we have fandom and fandom delivered. I recommend it for the first 95%, after that YMMV. There's a dance scene that is *chef's kiss* and had me down a youtube rabbit hole with the endless amount of GREAT dance scenes in films especially enemies-to-lovers. Although, the best surely is the dance scene from Only Lovers Left Alive and that one is NOT tropey just delish.

It's a boring day and I'm OKAY with that because I need a little boring in my life right now.

I am reading a Writing Craft book and it's so so good and some of you might really enjoy it and be inspired by it, too. Into The Woods.

Trying to round up the doll photos. It’s emotionally grueling. Perhaps I should just set up the small photo corner and start again … Sigh.

Reading Maria Tatar’s Classic Fairy Tales which is so affronting that it makes me laugh out loud. This is, actually, a trait I possess. I can laugh at myself. We do this often as a family and it often causes non-family members to feel shocked. But c’mon. It’s really a gentle way to learn a lesson and grow. Or to recognize oneself in the mirror of others. Anyway, Tatar AIN’T a Jungian. Like in any imaginable way. As a matter of fact, she’s as dry as a bowl of desiccated flies. And that makes her boring. But she’s done an admirable job collecting a variety of versions of the better-known fairy tales and it’s fun to read them like that. Just thicken your skin if you’re a person who interprets fairy tales through a Jungian lens.

Have to read non-fiction after a McCarthy outing because any other fiction will pale.

It’s been hot here, but the whole house fan sure seems to be doing the trick. Kidling2 is determined to update our lives, lol.

My mother turned 86 this week. She’s struggling but isn’t really aware of it? Not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse. She sees the neurologist the week after next and I’m really hoping we get definitive answers so that we can make definitive plans going forward. At this rate of decline, she won’t be able to stay in her home by this time next year. She doesn’t want to live up here because of the fire danger and she doesn’t want to live with local sister because local sister’s husband is still in the guest room and uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to live with East Coast sister because they can lock horns although I think that time is past now. The current challenge is convincing her to let go of her stall at the antique mall that is literally two hours away. It just has to be done but it seems to represent something to her that she can’t bring to a close.

D’s mother turned 84 last week. We had everyone up here last weekend for the birthdays and so that D’s mother could meet Baby T. It was an exhausting day. D’s mother is HARD HARD HARD. After she left and he was forced to listen to people who aren’t me telling him how terrible she is to me he acquiesced the tiniest bit. How have I done this for 37 years? Well, I love him and I can see his wounding, and she is the cause, still a sharp knife, and I feel bad for that frightening abusive alcoholic childhood. She herself is wounded. Autistic and with her own set of alcoholic parents and a dead sibling. And now everyone is just OLD, including me, and it’s easier for me to just throw all this shit in the river and LET IT GO.

When I think of my decade of Asian ball-jointed dolls I think of the excitement of collecting, the ability to acquire some truly astonishing dolls, the idea of the ABJD as art you can play with, the friendships, the challenges of moderating DoA, the conferences, the honest back-and-forth commerce that was both grassroots but also small artist run ateliers, and the joy of a rewarding hobby. But looking through my folders of doll photography now, I’m struck most by the indisputable fact of the creative version of “the rising tide lifts all boats”.

The BJD world was a fandom, and it was a deeply creative endeavor, and more, it was a healthy sharing of skills and a satisfying urging to a higher and higher level of creative expression. It was a world filled, for the most part, with positive encouragement and selfless admiration for accomplishment. Collectors who wanted to hone photographic skills or faceup skills or costuming skills were inspired by one another and rewarded for their efforts.

Very much like the more positive aspects of fanfiction back in the day. Of course, there’s always drama and sour grapes and whathaveyou, but I’m choosing to let all that shite go and hold onto the memories of a heady unifying sense of artistic expression and an enthusiastic audience.

Art can oftentimes be like sports. Many human endeavors do benefit from surrounding oneself with like-minded individuals who want everyone to reach their optimum potentiality. Whether out of teamwork or competition.

I miss that.

Cooled down considerably. Or what they call the June Gloom. July will be hot. Of course. The guys purchased a whole house fan on Prime Days and have high hopes for that cooling off the house. We shall see. It will definitely force us up into the attic to clear that nightmare out. I do have a fantasy in which that space is finished with tongue-and-groove and becomes a child nook with walls of books and art supplies. We shall see.

New mantra. LOL.

Finished the Terri Wilding and it WAS good for what it is. Derivative but all of us here love that. Actually, I think Wilding would tell you that it’s all derivative, eh? For some reason, I picked up Blood Meridian … but We Shall See. After mediocrity I always long for genius. What’s all of you reading?

Watched S2 of The Agency this past week. Silly but so good.

Spent all of Sunday down in Sac with D’s mother. These ageing folx are making us all weepy. Their bodies are failing, their minds are failing, their homes are unkept. D’s mother needs a regular monthly workday, D’s father needs a regular quarterly workday, and my mother needs weekly help. I’m going down today to wrangle with my mother’s doctor about her current meds. It’s all exhausting and frustrating that gaining an inch feels as though a mile has been trod.

Getting ready to start a Practice. The modern dress Persephone / Hades is whispering louder and louder to me and it’s time to sit and listen and transcribe.

Also, with all the stupendous online merchant sales, how could I possibly say no to a MASSIVE canvas print of Bouguereau’s Nymphs & Satyr? I couldn’t.

This. Guy. *swoon*

Watch on YouTube

I've decided to begin shopping my magical realism novella - The Maiden & Death. I think it deserves this. I think it's worthwhile.

So, anyone here interested in beta reading? Anyone here do any editing for pay? It's 51,000 words long.

Please let me know if you're interested!

There are beds that become vast plains. Cribs, shared rooms, hotel queens with broken springs. Mattresses on floors, vintage iron bedsteads. Alone and with others. Rocked in arms. Hospital cots and the satin lined coffin. The earth cradle. Sleep now. Dream.

The prone form, the skeleton at rest. The lovers entwined, the bodies estranged.

In the dream, they sleep in beds grown cold, wrapped in the shroud of sheeting. The dreamers rise and leave their houses of mourning, walk until they find one another; meeting at a crossroads, shovels slung over their shoulders. She is veiled. He has a linen handkerchief over his face, held fast by his own hand. These are the weeping veils that protect them from the season of their sadness. Dressed for the climate of inward sorrow. They cannot see the other clearly, cannot see past the fabric limits of their grieving. All shape and form, movement and muted shades. It is a dream and she dreams in black and white, he dreams in vivid technicolour.

Under the low-slung, full moon, they stand. Each has their secret wish, the sacrifice they are willing to make, the oath wanting to be sworn. The trade, the deal, the dark hope. Shoeboxes tied with gut tucked beneath their arms. Hands bloody. Looking far off in the distance for the approaching devil, they find only angels weeping on the edges of the vast and empty plain. Kneeling in the gravel, digging with their hands now, shovels discarded, fitting the body into the grave, realizing it is their own body, the shoebox in the form of man, of woman, eyes urged closed, pulling a blanket of dirt up, they tuck one another in, pressing the wormy loam tight around shoulders and hips. Sleeping again, the dream inside the dream.

Their veins are filled with bone marrow. Their pockets are filled with seeds.

They both wake. The shared dream that lingers throughout the day. A déjà vu, an unremembered name, a familiar face in a sea of strangers. The ghosting of touch, the haunting of elicited reaction.

The Problem of Fiction ~ Marie Ponsot

She always writes poems. This summer

she’s starting a novel. It’s in trouble already.

The characters are easy—a girl

and her friend who is a girl

and the boy down the block with his first car,

an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes

these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing

in dressy clothes though it’s still light out.

The girl has a brother who has lots of friends,

is good in math, and just plain good which

doesn’t help the story. The story

should have rescues & escapes in it

which means who’s the bad guy; he couldn’t be

the brother or the grandpa or the father either,

or even the boy down the block with his first car.

People in novels have to need something,

she thinks, that it takes about

two hundred pages to get.

She can’t imagine that. Nothing

she needs can be got; if it could

she’d go get it: the answer to nightmares;

a mother who’d be proud of her; doing things

a mother could be proud of; having hips

& knowing how to squeal at the beach laughing

when the boy down the block picked her up & carried her

& threw her in the water. If she’d laughed

squealing he might still take her swimming

& his mother wouldn’t say she’s crazy, she would

not have got her teeth into his shoulder till

well yes she bit him, and the marks

lasted & lasted, his mother said so,

but that couldn’t be in a novel.

She’ll never squeal laughing, she’d never

not bite him, she hates cute girls, she hates

boys who like them. Biting is embarrassing

and wrong & she has no intention of doing it again

but she would if he did if he dared,

and there’s no story if there’s no hope of change.

*************

Now there's a poem after my own grizzled heart. I've played - off and on - over the years with this Idea. That one could pen a poem to preface or inspire a prose piece.

Anyone care to try this as a prompt? Take a plot bunny/character you've been holding near and dear but have not been able to translate into fic just yet - it could be original it could be fandom, but I think we should focus on original writing if we can - and write a poem. THEN we can try to write the exploded fic.

I'm going to work on this all morning and will return with a post. Please comment with a link if you would like to join in on the ~~agony~~ fun and we can read, comment, and discuss.

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Come join us at a new Wuthering Heights community where we are beginning our Wuthering Heights read-a-long and will soon be discussing this complicated novel! Is it really a love story? Is Cathy certifiable? Does Heathcliff have a wounding story that justifies his revenge? Why is everyone so reprehensible? Or are they? Do the children shed the legacy of betrayal and rage?

There might be icon challenges! And fic prompts! And discussions of other writings female and gothic!

OUR SOULS ARE MADE OF

our_souls_are_made_of | Recent Entries

READ UP TO CHAPTER FOUR AND CHECK IN SATURDAY MORNING!!!!

OVER HERE -

our_souls_are_made_of | Recent Entries

I know there aren’t any diehard Cormac McCarthy fans on the flist and that’s too bad. I will hold forth about him regardless. LOL. I do recognize that he’s a bit of a peculiar flavour for an unusual literary connoisseur. I was standing dumbly in the library wanting to read something and feeling that strange deep brain itch. What is it what is it? And my eye fell on the Cormac shelf and I thought HUH I never finished my plan last year to read the four Tennessee tomes. And when I reached up for the thin volume title Child of God, it was as though struck by lightning, and I remembered that I had loaned that to my father the year before he died. And that was all a complicated bit of emotion, but I drew it down anyway and decided to take that dark, unsettling plunge into fetid waters. This book is difficult. And I had to LOL when all the pearl clutchers were outraged that Cormac had some sort of underaged bird in a cage at some point in his life as though they were exposing a saint as a chronic masturbator and yet I’m pointing wildly to this book – PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE! This is the cat who wrote Child of God, puhleaze get yourselves comported. This book. Sheesh. And I thought my father should read this. WUT?! Actually he was a Cormac fan but like most Cormac fans, the SouthernGoth foursome are rarely known. We did discuss it at the time and then I loaned him Annihilation. Which he actually enjoyed muchly.

Anyway. I read CoG and spent most of yesterday in a dreamlike space in which my mind wandered the universe seeking out this man’s spirit. I love him so very very very desperately. He was a genius and a wordsmith, yes, but more, his was a Dangerous Intelligence and a life laid out with strange signposts and somehow someway he managed to take his brilliance and observational gifts from start to finish. The Tennessee four are IMPORTANT in his oeuvre and some in the Ivory Towers need to put Blood Meridian the eff down and study these four novels. They are biographical in that this man clearly had an issue with his Family of Origin because no one would write Child of God unless they truly wanted to self-flagellate and publicly humiliate themselves as a way to punish their father.

So, I read The Orchard Keeper which is dismissed by academicians. I love it and it shows McCarthy reveling in his discovery of language. HIS LANGUAGE. Then I read Suttree which is his biographical masterpiece and most clearly obvious outloud musings about a symbolic meaning of Death. Then I had to gently gently return to my favourite novel of all time – Outer Dark and relish it entirely without wearing it too thin to hold onto. And yesterday I read Child of God. I find myself purged and resatiated and now am ready for the Westerns. Which I don’t care for as deeply as I care for the SouthernGoths, however, one must ruck through in order to reach the Dantean conclusion which is his twinpack – Stella Maris and Passenger.

That’s where my head and heart and body have been and currently are. I have time to wallow in this pit. But by tomorrow I have to return to what we call The Real World.

Ooooh, I'm going to need a WH icon! Maybe we should start with an icon challenge!

Anywho. Let's set a date for our Wuthering Heights discussion. Once a date is set, this gives folks time to procure a copy and begin reading. This book is best discussed in small bites. So, once we set a date, we can then set a reading assignment. I'm sure this would be "cleaner" in a dedicated comm but I've started so many comms these past few years only to have them shrivel up and die from lack of brain food. I don't mind hosting here, but that's not idea either!

Discuss!

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

PETS OF FANDOM

Interestingly enough, I have no pets in my fanfics. There IS a pet in my personal myth - Cerberus, the three-headed dog. And I have only ever mentioned him once. In an older Persephone / Hades modern dress fic here - Imprint the Stars to Remember the Sky

Challenge #1

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

Here's my journal's intro post!

My goal with Snowflake is to create a daily posting habit! Also to meet new journalers!

I'm not currently writing in any particular fandom. Last year, some of us were writing rabidly in Nosferatu. That was invigorating, to say the least! I'm always interested in drabbling and miss the drabble communities but will post one from time to time. I do have plans for a writing project for this year!

Happy New Year! Here's to 2026!

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bleodswean

September 2026

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September 2026

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