February 28th

I can't resist, I must tell you about the story I've been writing. I've been working on the faerie tale "A Sprig of Rosemary." This is one of the best faerie tales ever. Here's how it goes:

Once upon a time, there was a dirt poor peasant girl whose father worked her very hard. She's sent out into the woods to gather firewood and she sees a sprig of rosemary and thinks "Hey, rosemary! I'll add it to tonight's pottage."

No sooner does she pick it but she sees a handsome nobleman in the woods, and a la Beauty and the Beast he says, who sent you to pick firewood out of my woods?

She says, "My dad."

And he says, "I"m a great lord; how about coming away and marrying me?"

(Seriously. That's how the faerie tale goes. They're not big on explaining things.)

So she says, "Okay."

Off they go, they get married, everything being (presumably) great. So they get there, and there's this old woman who keeps the castle and has the castle keys. She gives the keys to the new mistress but she says, "Don't use them, or the whole castle will fall to pieces."

We all know how that's gonna to go. I mean, seriously? Who does that to a person? Here, take this book, but don't read it! Don't even crack it! If you do, the IRS will magically appear at your door for an audit and then garnish your wages for life.

Anyhow.

Of course she unlocks a door and what does she see, but a snake skin. Because why? Because her husband is not just a handsome nobleman, but a magician and a shape changer.

It could not get any cooler than that. Not only is he not a boring prince, not only is he a sorcerer, but he can take the shape of animals, a la Merlin. That's when I knew this whole faerie tale was for me.

However, as soon as she laid eyes on it, the whole castle disappears and the girl is left alone. Her husband has disappeared. She breaks off a sprig of rosemary (What? You don't break off a refreshing herbal sprig whenever anything cataclysmic happens to you?) and wanders, weeping, into the woods.

Eventually she comes to a house of straw. (Because every faerie tale is a better with just a smidgen of "The Three Little Pigs".)

The mistress there takes pity on the girl and gives her work, warning her never, ever to sneeze.

But all the girl does is cry, so finally the mistress says, "Clearly we need some girl talk and some strong elder berry wine. What on earth happened to you?"

She spills the whole story and the woman says, "I don't know where your husband could be, but I know someone who might."

So, the mistress sends her to the Sun, the Moon and the Wind.

Clearly she's not just some dame living in a straw house, clearly she's connected. She's got friends in high places, and all that.

Off the girl goes, on a quest. Because, here is another cool part; she is the rescuer in this story. She, the erstwhile poor, overworked peasant girl who used to have no sense of self worth, has become the heroine, with enough grit to go talk to the sun himself, in order to rescue her powerful, but missing, magician husband.

Anyway, off she goes. So she gets to the Sun, and he says, sorry, I don't know anything about him. But the Sun does give her a nut.

Why? I don't know why. This isn't my story, I'm just borrowing it. Maybe it's some celestial peace offering, like the pineapples of South Carolina. It's what they do up there. In any case, he sent her on to the Moon.

So she gets to the Moon, and he's all, nope, haven't seen him lately. But he also gives her a nut. An almond, to be exact. Then he sends her on to the Wind.

The Wind says, I don't know where he is, but I'm pretty sure I know where to look. So off he blows, looking.

What does he learn? He learns that her husband is being held hostage secretly in the king's castle, soon to be married to the princess.

Oh yeah, that's right, in this story, the king is the bad guy and the princess is a fashion obsessed, vain accomplice.

I love this story.

The girl begs him to delay the wedding until she could get there, so the Wind gives her a walnut and then blows off across the land in a gale and blows the wedding garments right out of the tailor's exacting little hands.

Now, for any other woman in love, the marriage would continue apace, right? Not for this princess. There's no way she's getting married in last season's fashions. The tailors have to start all over again, and the wedding is put off.

So on comes the girl. When she gets there, she's pretty much out of ideas. So, maybe she's hungry, or lord knows, she's a curious one, in any case, she cracks open one of the nuts. Of course there's a fine mantle in there, what else would be in there?

Then she gets an idea. She's goes before the Princess who gets all excited about the cut of the mantle and wants, wants, wants it. The girl sells it to the Princess for gold, but they also girl talk a little, because lord knows, the Princess loves an audience.

The next day the girl cracks the almond and it contains petticoats, which the Princess just dies over. I mean, hello? Needlework? Lace? You have not seen the like before. The Princess has to have it, so she buys it for gold. Then the girls chit chat some more, wedding stuff, probably.

The next day, the girl opens the walnut and finds a gown. We know how this is going. It's like this season's Gucci, alright? It's like, totally, Marchesa dreaming in Gucci, with a little Dolce & Gabbana thrown in for good measure.

This time, the girl says, "Sure, I'll sell you the gown, it's not in my size anyway and I'm an Autumn and this color is all Spring, which is totally your season." (She learned to talk like this so she could communicate with the Princess in a way the Princess could understand. When in Rome, and all that.)

"But," she says, "I don't want gold for this gown. I'm just dying to see your hunk of burnin' love that you've been talking about so much." (No one knows just how much of a hunk of burning love he is like his own wife.)

Well, the Princess knows she's not suppose to, but she can't help it, she wants to show off. She gets persuaded. Off they go, deep into the castle. They come to the room where the magician is, and the girl touches him with the sprig of rosemary that she'd kept with her all this time.

This brings his memory back.

They go back to her home.

The End.

What, you don't like that ending?

Neither do I.

I'm going to change it. I've figured this brilliant way of tying everything together so that the nobleman does not appear to be this vapid dude who randomly marries girls for no reason when he comes across them in the woods, and this reason ties directly into why on earth the king would force him to marry his own daughter.

I've written over thirteen thousand words and I'm literally at the point where the girl is at the foot of the stairs to the locked door, about to go up and bring her whole house, her whole life, tumbling down around her. And what am I doing?

Procrastinating, that's what.

I mean, I can't stand it. I love her. I don't want her to do it. I made up a diabolical lie, told to her by the old woman, who, in my story, resents her for taking control of the household, especially because the girl is as low born as the old woman. That's lie helps a little, but still.

Besides, I love her and the magician together. They're so cute together. He didn't mean to fall in love with her, but he does, he can't help it. It's adorable. I could probably write another thirteen thousand words about what they did, and then what they did next, and what they said, and what they ate, and blah blah blah, but that's not the story.

The story is that everything falls down. And then, after a long struggle (and some random gift of nuts) gets built back again.

Into the fray.

February 27th

So I was reading Beauty by Robin McKinley last night. She's done two versions of Beauty and the Beast, this one she did after she married an Englishman, sold her Maine cottage and moved across the pond. (How romantic is that, by the way?)

She has a little note from the author at the back, where she explains why she's done the two versions of the same story. In it, she writes: "If you're a storyteller, your own life streams through you, onto the page, mixed up with the life the story itself brings; you cannot, in any useful or genuine way, separate the two."

She also talks about how she wrote that story because the current story she was working on was proving too difficult, and so she was procrastinating.

I wanted to talk through the page to her.

Last night Keith was working on some awards and asked me for another word for "success." I got all excited and started babbling about thesaurus.com and had to lean over his shoulder to point out all the ways in which it was the best thing ever.

"Um...I think I can take it from here," he said, raising his eyebrows.

I think I need a writer's group.

In other news, have you guys tried pandora radio? Yikes. It's alive. You enter in a song you like, it takes the aspects of that song and searches for others that match it. It's almost eerie. But awesome.

Accuradio, I loved you, I did. But I'm moving on now. You know you'll always be in my heart.

February 26th

I am in love with my story. I wish I could share pieces of it, or the whole thing, with you, my bloggy friends. But it's far from finished and I'd be terrified to lose it to the vastness of the world wide web.

My characters live and breathe. I love them. Yesterday I was so involved with writing that I forgot to make dinner and Keith came home to a dark house at six fifteen, something quite unheard of. But I just lost track of time.

I got up and sat down again five different times when I tried to get lunch. Every time I stood up, the next line of dialogue just popped perfectly into my head, so I'd rush back to the computer to get it down before I lost it. I'd get back up and into the kitchen and then wham! The next line appeared. It took me fifteen minutes just to the warm the chili.

I thought this would be just another short story, my own retelling of one of the tales in Andrew Lang's faerie books. But it's far longer than any of my other short stories and I haven't even got past the first plot twist. It feels like the difference between telling a story and living a story.

But anyway, I'd better stop talking about it or maybe I'll jinx it.

February 25th

As of today, we are debt free.

Done.

Zip.

Zero.

The only things we owe on are the two trucks and the house mortgage. We have no other payments due.

It's really hard to wrap my mind around it, to be honest. We've been focused on paying off the credit cards for so long, over two years; basically for as long as we've been married.

We didn't have what Dave Ramsey would call "gazelle-like intensity" because if we did, we would have sold the HD, which is just unthinkable. Also, we kept adding on to the credit cards from time to time, like with the purchase of the TV and the two major trips we've taken since moving to Kentucky. That really slowed us down.

I've been syphoning off huge amounts of Keith's paycheck each month, sometimes shaving us so close that Keith would get discouraged and start thinking that he didn't make a good enough salary. That's not true, he makes a splendid salary, we were living way, way under it.

But we got here. Here we are. At the tipping point, where we can stop digging ourselves out and start building our future.

Keith got his sound system as a reward, I'm going to get an ipod for mine, because I want it when I run. Because I do run now, straight up. I walk to warm up, and then I'm off. Not so much like a race horse, or even like a hare. Maybe like a camel- you know, like a slow and steady lope. And I keep on doing that, on and on and on.

I used to time my walk intervals for the uphill parts of my route. I did that quite shamelessly. It seems to be when starting to jog, the hardest and most essential part is building confidence, and it's a huge confidence builder when just starting out, to jog steadily down hill and break to walk uphill.

But I've been steadily adding on uphills to my jog route and today I added them all in and extended my route and I did it. Even the god awful, steep uphill climb from a ravine that Kentucky is so rife with, the one that comes at the very end of my route. I made it all the way up that, jogging. I was swearing too, I was dropping the f-bomb with almost every foot fall. I hope no one over heard me.

I am not the same person that I was two years ago. It almost scares me. So many things are going well. A part of me is half crouching, waiting for the Heavens to hit me savagely over the head with a big stick. I think Keith feels the same way too, which is why he so fervently and genuinely thanks God every night for everything we've been given.

We both know what it's like to live with very little, just hanging on. I remember one time I couldn't afford to buy trash liners. I'll never forget that feeling. It was food or trash liners. So,until my next paycheck, I had to throw my trash directly into the bin.

It's such a small thing, right? But it's huge when you realize you can't afford it.

Maybe I've been getting by for so long, the prospect of being happy and secure feels oddly frightening. I'll have to think about that more.

February 24th

So I have in my possession Clomid. We all know what that means: an all expenses paid trip to crazy town. And, as if the last time wasn't crazy enough, this time they've doubled the dose.

That's right; double the hormonal fun.

Of course, I have to wait until I get my period, and god knows when that will happen. In December, it came on the 14th. In January, it came on the 22nd.

Yes, that would mean that my period in January appeared to be a week late. 'Cause that's how my cycle rolls. It likes to drag out the emotional f-ckwittage to the very last moment. (That last phrase courtesy of Bridget Jones)

This time of the month Keith and I are all about very carefully edging around the very large white elephant in the room.

"Sooooo....." he'll say, sometime in the few days, all very casual like, "have you, um, gotten...your period yet or what?"

"No," I'll reply, either snappily or blissfully, depending on what PMS wave I'll be riding that particular hour, "but it'll come."

'Cause it always comes, just right after I've succumbed, sitting on the toilet seat with my phone open to the calender app, counting on my fingers. It comes later that afternoon. That's when it comes.

Day before yesterday, Keith and I were up in Indiana. Keith's dad had to be rushed into emergency hernia surgery and all his sons converged to be there with him. We made quite the cavalcade down into the surgery waiting room. There was the stretcher with my father in law, reduced by the necessity of the hospital gown and the IV. Behind him came his three tall sons, each long legged in jeans, wearing button down shirts and heavy work boots, slouch shouldered like cowboys, wearing ball caps.

I thought any man would be proud to have fathered such an impressive array of mid western manhood, and to have them all come to the hospital to be at his side and crack jokes about how the urinal was too small and they better call a nurse to bring a bigger one.

We ordered pizza while waiting for the surgery to be finished. I thought to myself, "Only the Indiana clan would be sitting in the surgery waiting room, having pulled the chairs up to a coffee table, eating pizza, wings and bread sticks spread out over the magazines."

When his father came out of surgery, there was a lot of laughter about how he had called one of the nurses "Precious." About the first thing he said, with his throat hoarse from tube, was "So did you go out for some beer and wings?"

"So what have you been up to lately, Jenny?" I get asked, from time to time.

"Oh, I'm writing again!" I say, all excited, forgetting how the next question will be inevitable.

"Writing what?" they ask.

"...um...faerie tales." Blank faces. "You know, like Robin McKinley?" Blank faces. "Like, fantasy?"

Light dawns, eyes wink, "Oh, fantasy!" harhaharharhar.

Sigh.

Then, yesterday, I had my therapy appointment (which went great, as usual lately) and then I had to go straight on post to pick up the medication and then Keith wanted me to stop by and visit him.

Normally I love to do that, mainly because I think my husband is the bomb in his uniform, especially with a loaded pistol strapped to his well muscled thigh.

But right then, I just wanted. some. coffee. I was starting to see light at the edges of my vision, my head felt tight. Ah, the pleasures of addiction.

I stopped anyway and got some kisses from my dusty soldier, who is currently fighting a cold, though you would never know it, unless you were his wife.

By the time I got home, my head was exploding. There is a point at which it becomes too late for the coffee to arrive, and I had reached that point. It felt amazing to drink, but eventually I had to go lie down because of the headache.

And of course, this was the day that Keith's new stereo equipment arrived, so there were hours and hours of adrenalin pumping stereo adjusting and enjoyment going on in the garage, which happens to be directly below the bedroom.

Besides, Keith was so excited and wanted, at various points, for me to come and sit in the back seat of the HD and enjoy the experience. Tell you what, that experience is now like being swallowed alive by sound. I can't even describe it. It's like a living torture chamber. The whole damn thing vibrates, and so do you, when you're sitting in it.

It is pretty exciting for Keith, though. It's state of the art equipment and he installed it himself. His work on the HD is complete; he's now living the dream, in terms of the luxury diesel, chrome accented, turbo charged, four wheel drive, concert sound system experience.

Thank god for the peace and quiet today. It's darkly raining outside, but that's just plain soothing.

February 22nd

I know I didn't write a post about Valentines; I'm a rogue blogger like that. Better late than never.

So, Keith doesn't normally tell me half the crap that goes down at work. The stuff I do end up knowing is sad and disturbing enough as it is. I know he's had a bad day though, when he comes home, pulls me into his arms and buries his face in my neck, takes a deep, deep breath.

'You're the best wife ever," he tells me. "We have such a good life, we have every thing we need."

At night, he takes my hand in both of his and prays. He never fails to thank God for "everything You've done and given us..." and then for God to send us our own little baby, or if not, a little child that needs us.

When he got his NCOER, it was straight blocked excellent. He literally could not have been graded any higher. It was a perfect performance record. He took it into the top of his chain of command, the Sergeant Major, and personally asked that they drop at least one block somewhere so he could have something to strive for in the next one.

I read it, it was pretty astounding. On it were bullet points about how he had made sure all of his soldiers got access to training and education-I know, because doing that is a huge scheduling headache and involves a hundred different calls to other soldiers about where they're suppose to be and who's doing what.

Also, there was a bullet point about his having saved two NCO from failing their PT test, which would have cost them their rank. I know, because he personally ran with them morning after morning until he got their time up.

I read it standing in the dining room. When I looked up and told him how proud of him I was, he put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.

"I couldn't have done it without you, little kitten," he said. "You earned that too. Behind every good soldier is a good wife."

I'm really enjoying writing all these faerie tales and reading fantasy and all that, but nothing can compare to my big, burly, flesh and blood modern warrior. He carries more weight into combat than knights in the crusades, he's battle scarred and has a the temperament of a viking.

We have definitely had some very tough, challenging times. but afterward comes the increased confidence and intimacy from weathering them together. It adds this solid, reassuring weight to the relationship, this growing knowledge that no matter what comes, we'll make it through together, because nothing else in life is more important. Not money, or pride, or the luxury of being right.

Sometimes I look at Keith's hand on the steering wheel as we are driving somewhere together. I see the young strength of them, how wide and masculine and sure they are, the backs of them all covered with curling golden hair, and his weather beaten leather watch encircling his wrist, and the simple, silver band he wears on one hand.

And I get just flooded with love, but more than that, I see how that hand will look twenty, thirty years from now, and I suddenly have this glimpse of how more deeply I will love him then, how all the times will blur together, a long, unbroken history, our history, a history no one else will ever know or share.

And that's far better than any simple, happily-ever-after could ever be.

February 19th and 20th

So, I've been reading the Treason of Isengard, which is just one of many huge, thick books that Christopher Tolkien put together out of old drafts of the LoTR. (And the only one that I happen to own.)

It's fascinating. You can literally watch his father's creative process as he crafted the story. Did you know that at several points he had no idea what was going to happen next? Also that Aragorn was originally a hobbit named Trotter?

I know; thank god that changed, right?

Can you imagine how that story would have gone? "Not all that glitters is gold, not all that forages will become pork..." yadda yadda.

I used to think you had to know exactly how the story would unfold in order for it to be worth writing, but that's not at all true. Even Tolkien did not know exactly how his story would end, or even progress, when he began it.

More importantly, I used to confuse the story with the first draft. The first draft is never the story. The story is what happens after you edit. The first draft is this huge, unwieldy block of raw material from which the actual story is chiseled. The block does have value, because if you have no block, you can't get to the story.

So, I was also reading The Tolkien Reader (ok, ok, I admit, I was once obsessed with the man's work... And I shopped a lot at used book stores), so anyway, in it I was re reading Tolkien's essay on faerie stories. This paragraph just jumped out at me:

"Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faerie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft."

I can't help but whole heartily agree.

February 20th

So, I have heard back from brother and friend regarding my faerie tales and the verdict appears that the stories and the story telling are good, but they want more. More background, more detail, more motivation, more character development, more about particular scenes.

Apparently, I have awakened desire; they want to be more in the story, or to have the story unfold more deeply around them, they want to feel more connected to the characters.

This brings up a question I keep wrestling with. Do I keep them faerie tales or not?

Faerie tales are brief, often bloody, have no nuances and deal with the primary things of human existence, such as life, death, marriage, children, property, religion, hate, forgiveness and the unexplained. They are a window into another word, an ancient world; you can smell the very wind of the Dark Ages in some of them.

Mostly, they leave huge swathes of things unexplained. If I start delving into all the details on the outside of my tales, then they will become short stories, or possibly novels. That scares the crap out of me.

It occurred to me yesterday that I'm not just writing, I'm confronting really old internal conversations that I used to have about writing. For example, I started to fill in more detail in one of the stories and the entire time, I'm hearing these thoughts in my head, over and over again:

"This is stupid. This is a complete waste of time. This is childish. Your imagination cannot support this much detail. The story will get watered down. You can't edit this much material. These ideas are hackneyed. That's a flat idea. This doesn't need to be in the story. This is going to fail. You're going to give up on this. You're going to ruin the original story."

And on and on. It's really difficult to press on against that kind of internal headwind, you know? It got worse when I started to sketch out a really simple map to start positioning places. Oh my lord.

"Who do you think you are? This is the worst thing I've ever seen. This is the stupidest thing I've ever done. I'm so embarrassed by this. This is beyond childish. This is such a waste of time. I can't believe you're doing this, what do you think you're going to do with this? I've never seen anything more stupidly pathetic than this."

Where are earth are these thoughts coming from? They're just brutal.

Straight out of my past, that's where. That's where I lived when I first wrote those stories. And then, soon after I married, I gave up on my writing.

No wonder, right? I didn't have the strength to change my internal conversation and I had other pressing matters, like my failed and abusive marriage, and figuring out who the hell I was, so I put the writing away.

Now that I've drawn it out again, it's alive with ghosts. Not just the stories, though they are too, it disturbed my friend that read it, since she had the same history as me and it brought back everything vividly to her. They are like very unpleasant little snow globes with all the pain and limitations and hopelessness of our youth caught forever inside.

So, I'm having to do therapy work and write simultaneously. Those thoughts are not coming from outside of myself- I think like that. Or at least, a part of me does. My therapists says whenever we come up against a part of us that we don't like, or whose message we don't want to hear, the first thing to do is not to resist, or to try and block the thought, but to wonder what is the self loving motivation behind them?

It's not by accident that Christ says, "Love others as you love yourself." Self love is astounding. Even the parts we think are hating all over us are, in fact, motivated by love. I've found this to be true for myself in every single case.

It seems clear to me that I'm trying to protect myself from failure. If I don't reach too high, then the fall won't hurt as much. I didn't have a healthy way of processing failure, so I couldn't build any true confidence. The only way to avoid the unbearable pain of failure was not to try at all.

So, I have to pause several times as I'm writing, to tell myself, "I hear you. You are terrified of failure. You really believe that I have insufficient talent or imagination to bring this off and also I understand that you operate by this rule that I can only start something that I'm going to finish, by very black and white rules.

"I understand that, and I know why you think that. I understand that this is very scary to you, but let me tell you something; I have already failed. Yes. In fact, I have failed so many times that I can't even count the times. I want you to take a deep breath and really look at yourself. Has the failure been too great? Has it left my integral self damaged? Have I been undone by the failure, has the pain been indefinitely crippling?

"That's right, the answer is no. It has not. All my failures have never taken one thing of value away from me. It only illuminated a hundred other things I hadn't been able to see until then. I'm looking forward to further failure, because I love to learn. Failure is not a method of subtraction, it adds to the sum total and it is not a dead end, it's the road branching off into other ways of thinking.

"Besides, sometimes the doing of something is of more value than the result. Sometimes the process is what is important. So, I'm going to continue on with the process of writing this story. Maybe the story won't come to anything, but I'm still going to put effort and work into it, because just doing that is of value to me."

I have to stop and say these things a lot. My work is progressing very slowly because of this, but as I continue to teach that part of me a new way of thinking about failure and risk, more and more energy will be diverted from fear and into the creative process instead. And the creative process is fun.

February 16th

It suddenly struck home to Keith and I that we are moving in about two months.

Cue: the panic.

Especially because we've decided to do the move ourselves. It's a lot more work, of course, but the military will pay us what they would have paid the movers and well, that right there is a whole lot of motivation.

But that means that we really must have a house to move our stuff into. And boxes. Lots of boxes. And we'll either have to make two trips, or fly someone up or down, depending, in order to help us drive. We actually own more vehicles than there are people in our family, so we'll need an extra driver.

Keith will drive the HD, pulling the car trailer with the Toyoda (or Yoda, as he is known), with the ATV in the bed of Yoda and more stuff in the bed of the HD.

Can you imagine what that will look like going down the road? Neither can I.

I will drive my car with the girls and mystery person will drive the UHaul.

The problem is that Keith's heading into Red Week, straight from the training mission. So, he's not sure if he'll be given a four day leave to search out houses. I searched for hours on line, and as usual, I found one or two that made me want to rent them right now, before someone else gets them.

Urgh.

In other news, today started out cloudy and then became sunny.

I know, right? What's gotten into Kentucky?

Spring, that's what. The bird song in the mornings are delicious and I am currently not wearing a turtleneck.

Also, I have ceased weighing myself (or at least, paying too much attention) because I'm so physically active I don't really care any more. I run.

Ok, not really. I walk to warm up, and then I jog along slow and steady-like and I do that for a long time, fifteen minutes or so and then I walk and then I jog again and then at the last, I sprint all the way home, which is exhilarating.

I actually went outside in spandex the other day and was not afraid. It was the first day that I had only one interval of walking, instead of four. Which means that my endurance is really growing. I'm thinking of expanding my route.

I have been neglecting my housework lately and today must catch up. I spend all my time working on the second drafts of two faerie tales. I almost gave up on one yesterday, I was stuck, stuck, stuck.

I thought, this is a horrible story, it's going nowhere, it's beyond redemption, I don't even know why I'm wasting my time on this. Then I went for a run and watched some afternoon television.

Then I thought, why don't I just put on some trance music and just free write, just write whatever crap comes into my head. So I did that and first came one idea and then the next and then came the right idea and I was off and running again. Then, hours later, I was thinking, I really like this story, this is pretty cool.

There's a moral in there somewhere. One is that trance is very good for creative writing. Try it sometime.

Vague writing goals are floating up inside me and lie there, like distant mountains, far, far away in the hazy distance. I have three faerie tales that are completely of my own making and then I have two or three that I want to rewrite because, as Ann of Green Gables has said, they have so much scope for the imagination. Then I'm going to try and submit for publication.

Which is really, really a long shot. No one publishes collections of short stories, let alone faerie tales. You have to be an established author first, like fantasy goddess Robin McKinley, before a publisher lets you play around like that.

So, I should be working on my novel. But I don't have a novel. I have faerie tales, so that's what I'm going to go with. There's already a crap ton, and I mean a crap ton, of the "swords and sorcerer" type novels out there with an intact magic system and technically solid plot and garish cover art.

I don't want to be another. If I never get published, that's ok, though I'm no longer in denial that I want it. But if I do get published, it will be with something that was inherent to myself, not something I manipulate into being because that's what the market supports. (I sound like one of those snotty artists that live, starving, in garrets and make god awful paintings. Oh well.)

Anyway, I should go; the laundry is calling.

February 13th

I've gotten to that point in my writing where I desperately need feedback, any kind of feed back. Or no feedback, just the knowledge that some eyes, other than my own, have looked over my words.

It lifts me out of my own point of view and I get to see my writing as though for the first time, which is invaluable, and frankly, absolutely necessary for me to be able to continue. Otherwise everything gets murky and bogged down.

Thankfully, I have a brother and friend recruited to read over my stuff, which is not an easy task, poor, dear things. I know, because I have in turn read over other people's things and it's a burden, even if the writing is any good at all. The author is invariable both desperate and fearful of feedback; navigating those waters are tricky.

Sometimes I wonder why I am putting all this energy into this writing. I don't think its universally appealing. I'm not going about it like a professional writer would, which is to choose a target audience and then tailor their writing to suit the target.

I am writing purely to suit myself. Though, I can't be the only grown up who still likes faerie tales. I just can't be. I know I search out authors who can capture the beauty, mystery and fear of one in an adult way. Surely others do, otherwise there would not be such a genre as Fantasy.

Oh to hell with it. I'm having fun. I do wish I could make money and have fun at the same time, but if I don't, who cares. At least I had fun, and brought to life all that was inside me. To be able to do that is a joy.

February 11th

My goodness, this month is flying by.

So, I'm going to see my therapist only twice a month now. I probably don't need to see her anymore at all, but I've grown to love my therapist and I can't imagine not sitting down to chat with her about stuff.

I feel like a book with all the pages restored. I found an amazing piece of writing lost in my old lap top recently. It was hidden deep inside a file for something else, at the very end of some other writing. It's amazing to me because I wrote it back when I was still a teenager, having no conscious idea of the extent of the abuse, or the true damage it had done to me.



Like ice flows, places inside of me are all frozen up, like a quart of Friendly's ice cream at the bottom of the freezer, like the lake in January I am pinched in the cold. Inside of me I lie like a fetus curled in fluid, like a hidden place in spring, like a glass globe with a world inside I am hidden deep until I can breathe again.

All the lights went out, all the power went down, switches fell with a clang, energy slowed with a whir, emergency lights glow softly in the shadows inside me. In the dusty shadows my Savior walks alone, footsteps echo softly.

He places His hand on the door, it slides silently up, He passes through, it falls into place behind Him. Down and down and down He goes, through the mazes, the traps, the landfalls, the alarms, the doors, the heavy, heavy locked smoothly functioning doors.

All is silent, all is locked away. Screens are blank, lights are off or softly blinking, globes of emergency lamps cast a gentle glow, throw dim shadows on the carpeted floors.

Deep in the center there hangs a glass ball, very large, made of very thick glass. It hangs in the center of a room with no door, surrounded by screens and consoles. In the glass globe I am curled up, completely cushioned by warm fluid, I am bent into myself, my head hidden.

He places His hand flat on the glass, palm pressed against the warmth. His eyes are deep as the universe, they fall inward with lights and softness and places ungoverned by time. They are shadowed with concern; He frowns. Sorrow draws lines across His face.

He steps inside the globe and puts His arms around me. I knew He was there all along, I could feel His hand on the door as though it were on my skin. I knew the sound of His step, the rhythm of His breathing. He is free to wander any corridor, to open any door. He has been in places inside me that I have never seen.

Behind my closed eyelids I see other things, they fall faint as after images, like the shifting glare after the sun. They wound me, they tear and claw. He takes them away into His hands, they fall into His wounds and I bear them no more. I know that He will save all my tears.

Outside the globe, outside myself, debts pile up, the numbers ring higher and higher, mail piles in untidy heaps, unanswered letters, unfinished business, unanswerable questions all tumbled, ignored on the floor. I cannot pay back, I cannot catch up, I cannot answer.

Fear runs like quickfire up my spine. I cannot return to my life, I can never go outside my globe and straighten out the mess. It is too much, it is too heavy, I know if I leave this globe the weight will fall in on me and my inner life will be snuffed out.

But if I do not leave the globe, than I cannot attend to my business. Priorities, I tell myself. If you die then you will never be able to fix anything. Live first. Wait and wait and wait and gather strength , let the debts pile up, there is no help for it. When you are strong, you will come out and straighten it up.

My Savior reminds me that His body forms the barrier against my own oblivion. He stands the gap for me, His scarred back forms the barrier between myself and my destruction. He will tie up all the loose ends for me, He will go through all my affairs, He will hold them all in His hands.

I know one day I will leave my globe. I will walk on new legs, with new skin, warm and open as a baby's. I will breath the air, dusty and cool. I will go up through myself, I will throw open all the switches, lights and power will flower with a humming and sounds. Windows will be opened, voices will call, breezes will flow softly down the corridors.

I will renovate, tear down walls and doors, straighten out the labyrinths, and the dead ends. The double backing, the circling, the alarms, the booby traps, the downward spirals to captive dungeons all will be torn down. A person will be able to walk easily through myself, my heart and my mind. A person will be able to reach out and touch my emotions, and elicit a response.

In that day, my Savior will restore to me all that I lost in the sudden crash, in the long convalescence. He will restore all that I am, hand it to me with His own hands, like a gift. I will be knit together again, as His hands knit me together at the first, in the womb.

But that day is not yet. Not for a long time is that day. Until that day I will be kept safe in my globe, in my Savior who comes to me. I will be held and comforted until that time. I will rest quietly no matter the consequences because I know He bids me to and the consequences He has already felt in the fabric of His soul that day on the cross.



Holy crap, right? I mean, how on earth did I know to write this, almost fifteen years ago? I tell you what, chills went up my spine when I was reading it again for the first time a day or so ago. Because it's true. I was restored, I did renovate, it happened exactly as I said it would, years before I was ready for that work. And it really did take me years and years to be ready.

I think all this creative energy I've been feeling lately is the energy that used to go into just keeping a dysfunctional internal system going. Dysfunction takes a lot of energy to maintain, depression takes a lot of energy, anxiety takes a lot of energy, and repression of memories? Hell, yeah, that takes a boat load of internal energy to maintain.

Now I don't need to, so all my own energy just flows as it was meant to flow. I released all my memories, I revealed all my wounds. And it's not just that I'm free of them, it's that they contribute to my being a better person because of them.

I've been thinking about that a lot recently. I love who I am, I love the person I am. I wouldn't want to change me, and everything that I have gone through, the pain and the horror and the degradation, all of it, is now an integral part of who I am. Of course I would never have chosen that, but now that I've processed the pain, I wouldn't want to lose the strength and the lessons I learned from the suffering.

I'm not going to go on living happily ever after, of course. As fond as I am of faerie tales, I don't actually believe in that ending. The same strength that I had to make it through this will be available for me again, for whatever I need it.

Life's an adventure! Who knows what's around the corner. It's the greatest adventure, and whatever it brings, I'm so grateful to have been given my life; my own unique, irreplaceable life journey.

February 10th

It was so cold this morning that the poor girls kept lifting their little paws off the ice and hobbling. It was adorable and heartbreaking, so I cut our walk short, even though they hadn't really done their business yet. Maybe I should buy booties for them, for next winter.

But it is sunny, so sunny that I woke up a half hour early and couldn't go back to sleep. I had forgotten that under all that cloud cover, the days were getting longer and longer.

February 9th

It's dark and cold here today. I am busy, busy, busy typing out my old work and I love it. I unearthed this:


Old Hemlock’s Daughter

There was a dragon of old; lived he in the apple orchard by the river Nan. Met one day by the daughter of old Hemlock, Naomi was her name as she gathered in the mint. A basket on her arm, a scarf in her long hair as she bent under the boughs to pick when was heard the dragon voice.

“Halt there, maiden, long time’s been since girl I ate. Do come hither.”

“I’ll thank thee to come no closer warm, thou foul beastie,” said Naomi. “And I am not worth eating by thee in any way.” And she did not turn to face him, but put a mint leaf in her red mouth.

“Young thou art, eaten thou shalt be.”

“Oh, as to youth, there’s no complaint there, but the taste on thy tongue after swallowing, that’s the unpleasantness.”

“Me thinks thee will taste pleasantly of mint and apple, maiden, of fat and juices.”

“Will taste of steel, of points and pricklings, gormy worm.”

Laughed the dragon, warm his breath upon her legs. Turned about she and looked. Dragon long lay curled among the trees, head on claws outstretched.

“’Tis thy last meal I be if eaten by thou, verily.”

“How so?” For now curiosity roused.

“By this, the steel within my mouth.”

Opened her mouth, behold, great and shinning sword fell out from between her lips. Then knew the dragon of faerie strain came she; it were the very truth.

Turned about tail and ran, that old worm. Well better knew he than eat any such maiden as old Hemlock’s daughter, Naomi.

February 8th

Keith got my ancient laptop (circa 1985! Yeah baby!) to work again! That means I have not lost all my old work. I can't even express how much this means to me. I'm going to be busy typing out all my old stuff, the stuff worth keeping, into newer forms of technology.

Here's one of my favorite ones. This was a very vivid dream of mine that I tried to capture in words.

Eulogy to the Author

No frenzied baying here, no wild uplifted cries
when leash-loosed these hounds were.

But swift and silent to their task, limbed long
and scurry footed, a scrabble of nails on rock.

A foul deed, a foul thought, a vengeance all at once
as after our quiet author they plummeted.

Thatched roofed, garden wrapped and hearth warmed
his dwelling who, we unthinking, of us thought.

Betrayal! we beheld his inky pen, his furrowed brow,
knew we all when knew we him who to our rescue came

Despite the plot. To our settled deaths he could not us
allow to fall, fate wrapped his hand, time unravelled fell.

The dreadful villein, making bold, masked maker's face
to his revenge, too late our author knew his fate.

Too strong by far his nemesis was allowed, when
thwarted of first evil will by rightful revision.

Hate laced, upon rabid annihilation bent, the arch enemy
ignored th'escaped hero and brought down our author!

Who had known all now sat unknown in fireside chair,
out gazing from his window, awaiting those hounds,

Who'd leap somewhere from dry page to bring him
down among his papers, throat torn, hero rescued.

February 7th

It's snowing today.

February 6th

I'm writing again! Yesterday, instead of watching a movie on Netflix, I came downstairs, brewed a pot of tea and started in on a faerie tale.

I tried to watch a movie. I was all set up with watching the new Star Trek....

oh no

That's too hilarious! I really was going to watch the Star Trek movie! And, according to earlier posts, that means that I'm officially a geek. I should have known; it was obvious all along, I mean, I prefer glasses over contacts. I'm planning on rereading the Silmarillion. I have a ridiculous vocabulary and I can't run. (yet)

I'm a geek!

Well, I feel better now that we've got that matter all squared away.

Anyway, I'm writing again and it feels great. Especially because I have lost all my old writing. However, it occurred to me that even if I'll never write quite the same thing again, if it was truly in me before, it's still in me now. I can still capture the essence of those stories.

And I think that's true. I feel all kinds of creative energy flowing through me, I feel downright juicy with imagination. I haven't felt this way since I was fifteen and kept myself up at night on my electric typewriter, giving myself a massive headache with the clashing of the keys.

I used to force myself to finish one story before I began another, and to write in a linear way, always from start to finish and now I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to write anything and anyhow I like. If I feel like beginning a half dozen stories and finishing none, that is what will happen. Maybe I will bounce back and forth between two or three. Maybe I will just free flow one day and edit the next.

February 5th

Downstairs there is this massive plastic bin that contains everything I saved from childhood. It's been there for almost six months, ever since last fall. Only lately have I begun to go through it. It's definitely overwhelming... and adorable... and disturbing all at once.

I saved bloody everything. Going through it is like walking down an overgrown path; I never know what is going to be around the next corner, waiting to poke me in the eye. There are old dress patterns for my wedding dress, for goodness sake.

There are lots of random pictures with charcoal, pencil, pen, watercolor. Each one is a world of its own, a whole, tightly enclosed emotional world that I had forgotten completely about, but springs to life for me as soon as I see it. Loneliness. Despair. Hope. Sexuality (very hidden, of course, usually symbolic).

Then there are poems from the fourth grade, such as:

The Unicorn

In a meadow far away
Stood a unicorn in fading day
As black as midnight
As he stood ready to fight
He is as strong as steel
And to humans He'll never neal
So he lives far away
Seen only in the fading day.

About the Author

I live in --------,
Like Poems, Unicorns, Dragons, stars, comments and any thing that is either mithical or mysterious.
I have four brothers no sisters.
I am also a Christian.
I am also a bad speller (If you all ready have not noticed!)

The End!

How adorable was I? I got a 90 on that project, by the way. Also, I just have to point out that I don't have four brothers, that's the number of siblings total. I was never very good with math.

Then there are god awful entries that I can hardly bear to read through from my early teens. I can hardly bear my own religiosity. It makes me physically cringe. But it was all I knew, I had no other way of framing the world.

The worst part is, I had no idea that mistakes are the most valuable part of our human experience. So mistakes, even small ones, were cataclysmic. Also, I had no idea that life flows along like a winding river, sometimes it curls around back and sometimes it spreads out, slow and deep and sometimes it runs forward double quick. One has a general idea of where one is going, but no idea of the actual path, what places one will pass through on the way.

I thought everything had to be straight as stone, so I was ashamed of my own contradictions. What a burden it is to be young! Poor me; everything to figure out and thinking I had no time to do it and no room for error.

How about this poem....?

here I am all lost in snow of winter's dark
all alone
sweet mary all alone.

I say not when nor how my sweet my own
my dear beloved one

Swing high or low
Swing sweet this all the night
never matter how or when
never matter where

But this the never ending truth
But this to keep me up at night
But this to cry my inward eye
But this to send my soul aleaping
alight a fire and joy,
But this to keep me up at night

-March, 1999

Also, I unearthed these two old buddies of mine:



Also these guys, all carefully wrapped in their own little boxes:


I'm thinking I might take bits and pieces, snips of this and that and put it together in a scrapbook. I think I have an old, blank one some where around here. We'll see.

February 4th

The light seems so refreshing in this picture, I just want to drink it.

Well, now I know. Running really is the nightmare that I remember it being. Holy cow. My chest hurt for hours afterward. I wanted to give up, immediately. Listen to what reality is telling you, my father is fond of saying. And yesterday reality was hitting me over the head with a big stick. (Also, my respect for runners grew exponentially.)

Instead of listening to reality, I have forced myself to try it for one month. If after one month it still sucks that bad I'll still be there at the run- I'll just be at the sidelines with a slushy, cheering my friend on. If, on the other hand, by some miracle I make some improvement, I'll keep going.

Here is my schedule: I will run on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I will walk for five minutes to warm up and then I will alternate short jogs with longer walks, gradually increasing over the next four weeks. Then I will drag my ass home, collapse on the couch and watch documentaries on Netflix.

Oh by the way, as of yesterday I lost another pound! Yay! Also, yesterday I figured out how to eat pizza. The trick is to eat a huge salad first.

I feel different. Younger, in some ways. And I feel like I am overflowing with creative energy. I feel the urge to craft, for one thing. What in the world has gotten into me? I am not a crafty person. I am not a runner. I am not a photographer. It's as though I have so much energy that it's just overflowing into all these areas I've never considered before.

At night I am flooded with dreams. I dreamed that I was a ghost, living in the basement of the house where I was killed. The basement was crowded with dark, old and dangerous equipment, I was scared of what could be lurking in the shadows.

I decided I wasn't going to live there anymore. I bent the bars over the casement window and slipped out through the glass. Outside there was sun on the grass and fresh air. I was ghost, so no one could see me. I could go and do as I liked.

Across the street was a little shop with clothing outside on a rack. I picked out new clothes, spring clothes. I saw a man I liked, so I slipped into his car as he was pumping gas and talking on his cell phone. He got goosebumps as I slipped past: all he felt was a sudden wash of cold air, but he wasn't scared.

Then I woke up. My therapist says this dream is about power. I think so. It's about the power to reclaim one's identity. I left the place of my abuse, I left the sense of self that abuse gave me, which is like a place where I died. I freed myself from that and then reclaimed my original self.

Except that in the dream I was still a ghost. Which is probably speaking to the fact that I'm still on the outside of society. I don't want to change that, I don't want to become a more social person. I've been considering the possibility of that, but I don't think I want to.

Being social (other than blogging, facebook and the few friends I have now) feels like a huge burden. If I'm on the outside, if I form no social group around me, than I'm free, like a ghost is free. But I'm also unconnected from anyone, isolated.

We'll see.

February 3rd

I love this picture even though you can clearly see how dirty my kitchen window is. And yes, lately I have been taking random pictures of my house. I blame it on all those photo blogs I've been following. I'm not going to become a photo blog, because I am not a photographer, but I am starting to see things differently and it's fun.

In other news, I recently discovered that I have a runner friend. Yes. It turns out that she is one of those who must run every day. Not only that, but she is wanting me to train so that we can run together this October, and then eat Carolina barbecue and drink Bloody Mary's.

Once, long ago, I tried running and found that it was excruciating. So I stopped, which is the sane thing to do. I'm a video aerobics/step kind of person, myself.

Don't get me wrong; I greatly admire runners. I follow a few blogs that are written by runners and that sometimes feature pictures of their wee sleekit running legs. It's just that I never thought I would ever be tempted to become one of their tribe.

Ok, no more whining. I'd better get today's torture out of the way and see if it's really as bad as I remember it being.

February 2nd

Mmmmmm..... Chai latte flavored coffee creamer.

There is nothing better that a big cup of strong, hot coffee in the afternoon.

On my therapy days, I don't drink my coffee in the morning because I don't want a coffee induced call of nature coming right as I'm driving down the interstate in Louisville, you know? So I put it off until I get home again.

The day is this enchanted mix of sun, cloud, strong wind and sudden flurries of snow. It's especially beautiful when the flurries of snow coincide with the sunlight. There were moments of pure glitterati on my drive; I felt as though I were driving into whirling sparks of falling light.

I love life. It never works out the way one imagined, but it's so beautiful anyway. Know what I love best about life lately? Putting the house to rest at night. I wash all the dishes, wipe down the stove and counter and empty out the coffee machine. I turn down the thermostat, I turn off the overhead light and everything then is washed in the soft glow of the stove light.

All the clean surfaces shine. Everything is so quiet I can hear the wind outside. I know that upstairs my husband is entertaining himself with online war. Upstairs is our bed, clean and cool, with my latest book waiting for me on the bedside table.

Deep in the night, when the rest of the house is grown cold, I'll be warm and safe in bed, lost in dreams. In the morning, I'll get up and start the cycle all over again. Like breathing in and out, all the things which are done daily, over and over. Those are the things I love the most.

February 1st

Rabbit.

It is a dark and dreary start to the month down here, south of the Ohio. But, it is a new month, if not a change in the weather.

I have been re reading Tolkien of late. Mostly because I'm too lazy to go to the library for new books. It's been a while since I've read The Lord of the Rings. In short, it makes me:

1. Highly dislike the movie trilogy, since I am reminded yet again, in more detail, of how far they are from the actual story. Case in point (and worst, if you ask me): what the movie did to Arwen Evenstar. Hello? The character is not even recognizable.

2. Realize how bare bones the actual story is. I had no idea how much I'd been filling in with my own imagination as I read along. No wonder the movie can't suit me: I had made the world my own.

3. Be fascinated and moved by Tolkien's take on good and evil. Evil: machination, plotting, strategy, fear, domination, power. Good: divine (unknowable) providence, chance, casting off power, redemption, courage, integrity.

4. Was totally annoyed at some of the dialogue. No one, not even Aragorn, is going to talk like that if he really is in the tearing hurry he says he's in.

(Side note: I'm waiting, most eagerly, for the arrival via Netflix, of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, episodes I & II. Which means that I'm officially on a geek fest at the moment, I can deny it no longer. I'll know I'm beyond all hope if for some reason I start to watch any season whatsoever of Star Trek. Or purchase any movie poster, full stop.)

I still haven't lost any more weight. However, I carry on. Yesterday, being bored stiff with my old workout video, I purchased a new one. It was based on "Dancing with the Stars."

Yeah. That was not the best move on my part. I was faced with size zero tweens (ok, maybe they were 17. But they looked about 13) who tossed their chicken bone hips up saucily, revealing their panties at every twitch. They carelessly assumed that any old person could pick up a dance move after the first try and that everyone must be, like, simply born knowing like, how to put one's butt up in the air.

It was not for me. Back to the old tried and true for me. Even if I'm so in tune with Leslie Sansone that we practically breathe in rhythm now. I know now- being able to do the grapevine flawlessly does not a dancer make.