in a little over a week i’ll be off to wiscon, where i’ll be reading on the sunday.
this morning i figured out what is wrong with the story i’ve been trying to start (wrong pov) and at once i could see the rough shape of it and remembered, yet again, that it’s really not worth starting to write a thing until i get that insight.
i placed my last piece of polished writing from 2013 yesterday, after many months of nearly-but types of rejections.
the polar ice caps are now pretty much doomed. last night half of me was screaming at this, screaming at this and how we blindly keep going on and on, screaming at server farms so hot they can be seen from space and traffic so bad you take over an hour to crawl ten miles and all the waste, so much waste, packaging waste and shipping waste and fuel waste, and this endless stream of culture that bombards us every day—
—and my other half was calmly calculating a move inland, to the “country”: how much it would cost, and how much it would then cost to renovate said house for solar and grey water and basically become self-sufficient.
the last year has been far more down than up, yet the ups have felt so right that i cannot but think the downs are right too, a necessary part of the process. bittersweet has been the word of the day for some time now.
a couple of years back (!! was it really—yes, 2012, yikes) i found myself buying a tarot reading online, done in the form of birds: what bird you are now, what bird you will become. i was told my current state was a nightjar, and my future was a lapwing.
i still don’t think i’ve made it to lapwing; i still feel like i’m nesting in the darkness, waiting.