Category: Self-Publishing

Trolls and Bridges

Under_bridge

When campus clears out after fall term finals, I travel down to the university bookstore on the busy corner with the tavern across one street, the bus terminal across the other. It’s a three-story building with a take-away cantina and clothing franchise selling mascot-branded t-shirts, hoodies, and Mardi Gras beads on the ground floor. In the back are a greeting cards and novelty gifts such as college students might give each other. The upper floor carries textbooks, if those are still used in class anymore, the last sad calendars, and a few books by notable faculty. It’s not much of a bookstore anymore.

I turn left down the stairs to the basement.

The ceiling is low and the fluorescent lights glare a little too close over the shoulder. There is a vague aroma of copper and dust lingering on the last step. There is color and texture here in this silo hidden from the rest of the city in the depths of inks and oils. This is the art supply section for the earnest and ragged fringe of an educational corporation exalting in its athletes and MBA candidates. It’s probably the same on every campus. After finals, the floor is nearly empty except for the work-study student clerk.

There are inks here, pens with fine and ultra-fine tips, with caps or clickers to test the line on a notepad. There are Crayola watercolor pencils, pastels, sleeks sets of charcoals. I buy packs of blank hemp-paper cards with matching envelopes that serve for all occasions; I draw an image, scrawl a message, and attach sprigs of rosemary with tiny red clothespins to the face. I need a silver Sharpie, a metal ruler, and more tiny red clothespins.

There are sheaves of handmade papers embossed with gold fans and silver wings. There is tangible tactility in the fibers of hand-bound empty books–here a pressed pansy or a whisper of dragonfly wing pressed between pages. I like to give these beautiful empty books away as gifts. There is implied within a promise of mystery and movement, some curving journey into or out of the labyrinth. These empty books remain beautiful stacked on a dusty coffee shelf despite remaining unmarked by a searching hand. Trolls wait, perhaps, in the encounter with the blank page. Do we give the gifts we want, or the gifts we want for others?

[Memo to self: begin assembling the box of secrets my son swore to burn in a bonfire when I die.]

November & NaNoWriMo

gourdsIt’s November and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again. Sigh.

Write 50K words in 30 days. That works out to 1667 words per day, even on weekends, holidays, elections, and when the power goes out. To all those participating in Nanowrimo, I salute you.

I signed up on October 30, 2016, for my first Nano, having learned about the nonprofit event just that day. I secretly believed it was the quick-start kick-start I needed to launch my next brilliant career as a novelist.I completed the challenge twice, finishing one novel and getting 60k words written on the second.

After much revision and many drafts several years later, I published the first novel, Pandora’s Last Gift, in July. (Thanks to all who bought or read the book!)

Now I’m back to Nano to finish the second novel. Rather than being a love story, it’s dark fantasy  this time titled Nocturne: Three Dog Night:

“When a sheep rancher is killed, suspicion falls on rescued dogs belonging to neighbor Sammi Crow Feather. To protect her innocent dogs from being blamed for the carnage and destroyed, seventeen year-old Sammi flees with them over the mountains into the desert, headed to remote territory in northeastern Oregon. As Sammi desperately tries to elude the state police and forensic biologist pursuing her, she is followed by the otherworldly beast spreading carnage and his omnipotent master. Sammi must fight for her own life, as well as the lives of her dogs against both human and dark immortal forces.”

Third time is a charm.

Another Cusp

harvesting

The moon grows full tomorrow at the penultimate degree of the zodiac to herald the coming equinox. Night grows longer.

Persephone is damn tired and ill-tempered. She’s leaving early, ready to shrug off the birthing work of the field. The Goddess casts down her seeds, takes up her torch, and returns underground into welcome darkness. Comes the cusp of the fallow season.

Tomatoes gathered and stacked on the table before the rain forecast finally arrives to split their skins. Squash and feathers. Clusters of dusky grapes. Rain came, crowned by thunder, fast and fierce and flooded the street.

A cusp is a pointed end where two curves meet. Such a cusp is seen in the pointed ends of a crescent moon, the lip of yet another precipice, molting away one cracked skin for another.

Last Orders

bumble_artichoke

I remember rain.

Wildfire smoke is pushed by a high-pressure bellows to the east, dispersed again when the wind changes to pull marine flow from the Pacific. The grass crunches underfoot; the hill is a tangled warren of burrs and foxtail, all things sere and seeding. Weary of drought and heat, wonder at the prodigious flooding in the east, scanning the sky for rain before the west is ash and withered bone. The cracks in the earth grow wider.

Birch and locus leaves float on the surface of the scrying bowls clouded with wasps. A fresh pail of water set out on the hillside every day during these three months of drought for birds and wild night creatures is drained or toppled by morning. At first, while a trickle of water remained in the creek, they eschewed the metal bucket. Now they depend upon it.

The garden presses to her longed-for languishment and release. The grapes are ripe. The tomatoes sigh and sag under a harvest of Romas, Brandywines, and Sungolds.

tomatoes

The zucchini, the courgette, the green summer squash the Greeks call kolokithia, now dominates the terraced beds and relentlessly births thick heavy fruit. Somehow, through camouflage or inattention, great squash clubs grow overnight. With their large seeds muffled in pulp, these giants are useful only as filling for nut bread, fritters, muffins, or pita. Shred the flesh against the box grater and squeeze out the water between two cotton kitchen cloths while resolving to pick the smaller squash before they transform.

shredded_zucchini

At least the flesh is mild, versatile, and forgiving–

A zucchini cake filled with crushed pineapple and coconut, finished with a buttermilk glaze; oatmeal muffins studded with blueberries, kolokithia scraped and broiled stuffed with tomatoes, feta, and breadcrumbs; slices layered with potato, onion, and tomatoes, bathed in olive oil and baked into Briam; stewed with fresh bay leaves, eggplant, tomatoes, and olives to eat on crusty bread; sautéed in a frittata sprinkled with goat cheese and topped with yet more tomato.

Hungry for a change of season, I remember rain.

frittata_zuc

Queen Anne’s Lace

thistle_moth

It feels like August, but it’s June. The cornflowers blow over the long grass bleached white with a sun pressing too close to the earth. It reached 111F in the south valley, 44C, at a time when dew should linger and rain still scatter into July.

Queen Anne’s lace, the flat white flowers of the wild carrot, bows down. I put a small bucket of water out on the hill for the wild things, changed the water each morning, draining the old out slowly over a squash planted outside the fence. There’s a lizard in the greenhouse between the pots of dill.

I give the deer mouse that lives under the deck a pea pod when I finish picking. I leave it the crack between the wall, the place she darts away and dives to safety when surprised during her foraging in the morning.

It’s a different sort of storm.

I stayed in my light lawn pajamas all day and read Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet beneath the heat pump register laboring to filter cool air from the wet cotton heat. The dog found it too hot to dig a hole to hide in and crept under the bed.

The book is nearly done. The manuscript is finished. The front matter, back matter, and cover design are final.

Everyone publishes a first novel.

Or not.