"Although gold dust is precious, when it gets in your eyes, it obstructs your vision."
~Hsi-Tang



Be cold, stone heart
Turn away witless tears
Chill any passion which rises to throttle you
Kill that waking nemesis, that worm
that vicious light which threatens your drums
Murder hope's black wings
Like his heart
be cold

http://www.myspace.com/zeritas

Bitte gib mir mehr - mehr von dir
Mehr als ich ertragen kann...

I finally finished the front of the chest of drawers/huge cabinet that I'm refinishing. This doesn't sound like much, but I only have weekends to work on it (some of which have been otherwise occupied), and each square foot of surface area takes hours to complete, because I want to achieve that silky polished wood feel over the entire surface. The areas I've finished look good, or so I've been told. More importantly to me, though, when I run fingers over the surface, it feels like silk. I'm now working on the top, the two front legs, and the left side. The right side and back legs are against walls, so the cabinet will have to be moved before I can complete them. I think the back of the cabinet may be unfinished, which would be great, but I don't remember (it's been about 6 months since it was placed against the wall where it is).

Moving it to finish the rest of it and repair the broken back leg will be difficult. It is extremely heavy. Still researching how to repair the leg, and gathering up the tools to do it.

Slowly inching along with this project. This has been much more difficult than the other, lighter-weight pieces I refinished earlier this year and last year.

It occurs to me that I'm now working on two projects that involve dust and fumes of varying toxicity (the other project is painting the Rockville house). I wear a face mask and goggles while working, but I'm sure some of it gets through. Most of the people I know who refinish furniture or paint houses on a regular basis are a little strange. I'm not sure if that's because strange people are attracted to these lines of work, or they became strange from breathing sawdust, paint dust, and fumes. Maybe a little of both. I hope that does not happen to me. I don't want to become a strange little old lady with a fume-pickled brain who spends most of the time reanimating relics from the era of bad paint jobs.

Maybe after I'm finished with these two projects, I will take a break from indoor projects for a while.

Later that day: Finished the top. Just one side and the front legs left and then I have to figure out how (and where) to move it to make any more progress.

after our usual opening, the first thirteen songs were all track thirteen from their respective albums. a little friday the 13th fun for ya.

( audio and playlist herein )

"Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive."
~Elbert Hubbard

Life is a moving meditation. Love is its breath.


My sisters thrive on emotion during the holidays, passionate soliloquies in the kitchen; they viciously raise to life old arguments to toss into each other's faces, then remind the other of their faults with too blunt observations. "You're the sane one," my brother-in-law once said to me. How could I have explained to him then that their arguments were merely expressions of their love for each other? Nevertheless, I'm rather wary of going home for the holiday.


I would if I could hold you, still you long enough to have a conversation, but you're like a firefly, a dashing, darting bright illumination along the edge of the horizon whose beauty can only be witnessed in glimpses.

I must not come home with kittens.
Kittens are the common-sense killer.
Kittens are the little fuzzballs that bring "deth by cute".
I will face the kittens.
I will permit them to climb over me and on top of my head.
And when they have fallen asleep in my lap I will carefully give them back to the shelter volunteers.
Where the kittens have gone there will be deflected cuteness.
Only I will remain (sad and now kitten-less).


Additional verses to be added only in case of extreme emergency:
(I must not come home with kittens.
I must not come home with kittens.
Taylor will kill me.
I must not come home with kittens.)

Monica Richards...pre Faith and the Muse

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Here I am, with a hundred things to post about, the rest of St. Petersburg and the wedding and a new book...and I'm playing Mortal Kombat vs. DC and staying up while everyone else is in bed.

I guess I'm having a bit of wedding withdrawal. For awhile there was so much to do that it could never get done, and then it was done and there were so many loved ones to spend time with that I could never spend time with them all, and then there was the honeymoon and it was all SO MUCH. And justbeast was there all day every day for two weeks, and now he's gone again, from very early to very late, working in Augusta, and I miss him. I'm taking a month off before starting on the next book that's due (Prester John Book I, due oh-my-god January 30th) and I want to do awesome things, I want to do everything I've been putting off, but I'm so enervated and tired and just want to be cuddled and relaxified. But it is not to be, just now.

I'm going to get up early tomorrow, I think. I have the Interfictions reading in Boston at 7:30, but I can do things before then. I'm going to try out my new ice cream maker (flavor suggestions welcome). Maybe take a stab at unpacking. Definitely hit the post office. Pretty myself a bit and maybe get my nails done in town before I go. (I am HOPELESS with doing my own nails. It always looks like a monkey went at them.) I don't know. I want to feel awesome. I feel like butter scraped over too much bread, to quote another small, hapless thing.

At least I made yummy dinners for my house full of people. (I feel that it should have a name, like House Cerulia has, now that we are so many.) Beef stroganoff last night and pelmeni lightly fried with curry paste along with green beans sauteed in a bit of bacon fat tonight. And we valiantly work on ingesting the alcohol leftover from both our weddings.

Thanksgiving is coming up, and along with justbeast , babymonkey , and mishamish , we have blazepoet , yakavenger , ioianthe , and her husband Bill-I-can't-find-his-username. Full house! Right now the menu is looking like: plum-molasses glazed goose with cherry-sage stuffing (I make this every year, it kickes the shit out of turkey), lamb shashlik, borscht, butternut squash-apple soup with bacon and goat cheese, homemade bread, spinach salad with warm bacon dressing, cranberry compote, sweet potatoes ala babymonkey, pumpkin chiffon pie with cranberry whipped cream, apple toffee pie with a white chocolate glaze, and gluhwein. What? My inner Sicilian grandmother kicks in when there are more than two people in the house. ALL WILL BE FED.

For future holidays, we can accommodate two other couples. First come, first seated--let us know early if you want to come and we'll hold a seat at the table. This goes for all food-related holidays, not just Thanksgiving.

So yeah. I'm trying to take it easy but taking it easy is weird and a little unnerving. I need to start knitting again.

Yesterday we went walking to Battery Steele, the WWII fort here. It is so very The Barrens and I mourn that no one in this house has read IT but me. There are even fucking terrifying dark corridors and graffiti and abandoned rooms and I so have to get greygirlbeast up here someday, it reminds me so of The Red Tree, too. I love my island so much. I'm so viscerally grateful to be home, to not have missed autumn, to smell the sea and get mud on my boots climbing around the woods with the bittersweet and the sumac. I just...am feeling disconnected, afloat, dreamy and strange.

Still going through my art supplies and critter bits; there's some new stuff, and some stuff I've posted before with reduced prices.

( SON OF YARD SALE!!!! )

Also, I still have slots available for custom deer antler rune and ogam sets, and I've been making pretty good progress on them so far since I've been taking out time for art as stress relief between school projects.

One, I'm reading at the IAF Interfictions 2 reading tomorrow, 7:30 pm at The Lily Pad in Cambridge, MA. You all are coming, right? Because there's musical accompaniment and possibly an accordion. And Brian Francis Slattery (ZOMG.) Also my last trip to Boston for awhile as I burrow, sick of travel and with a novel due at the end of January (I don't even want to talk about it.)

Two, I'm working on a trailer for Under in the Mere, and searching for music. I want something appropriate to Arthuriana without going full McKennitt, melancholic, probably, but not necessarily un-modern. Any musicians out there want to get some exposure by letting me use one of their tracks? The Palimpsest trailer got over 20,000 views...

Any suggestions of other musicians must be people who are contactable and at all likely to give me permission. Bands I have to contact through MySpace and are on tour, probably not.

Lastly, I am NOT getting sick. I swear.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,--
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

This phrase stuck very clearly with me when I woke up from my dreams this morning:

"(Only) The desert nourishes so that the living can wait their turn..."

It might have been the end-part of a sentence, hence the (only). But it might have been a sentence on its own.

Feels like I should know what it means. But I don't. Typical dream-thingies.

Got a few book reviews in; there won't be so many since I'm on semi-hiatus, but I am working through the few review copies that remain, plus I'm still going to review relevant stuff that I read for the fun of it.

The Pagan Clergy's Guide by Rev. Kevin Gardner - the first book on pagan spiritual counseling I've seen; read the review for my thoughts on the psychological content, too

A Guide to Zuni Fetishes and Carvings by Kent McManis - Ever wondered about the origins of the little stone animals that are often copied (poorly) but never duplicated?

White as Bone, Red as Blood by Cerridwen Fallingstar - historical fiction novel involving a priestess of Inari in 12th century Japan

As always, click the links to read the full reviews!

The final chapter of Fairyland is up.

Chapter XXII: Ravished Means You Cannot Stay

A mother cannot see every little thing, and glad we may be that she could not, as it would have caused a great deal of trouble September would never have been able to explain.

In the following weeks, we will be updating the Museum, filling out the missing audio chapters, and I will be deep in thought planning the sequel. I don't have a release date from Feiwel & Friends yet, but I'm led to believe it will be sooner rather than later.

Thank you to everyone who read and supported this project, who retweeted, posted, boosted the signal. Every member of onaleopard . Who made icons and art. Who loved September and feared for her. Who gave me advice and encouragement. (Particularly alexandraerin , corvaxgirl , and talkstowolves , as well as justbeast , who faithfully created and updated the website all this time.) Who made this particular magic with me. I count us all as Fairyland Family, and make no mistake--what happened between us, in and around Fairyland, was a miracle of no small measure. My gratitude cannot be summed up in a text box. I'll be working on some special treats for you "early adopters" as the print edition nears its birthday.

If you have any questions at this point, any final copyediting notes (I know geek love when I see it), or comments, please feel free to email me. The donation button will stay up and active, as will all chapters, as long as I have a thing to say about it. I'll be posting when we get home (flying out today) about this whole process--many stories to tell.

I would love, now that the story is told, to see some reviews pop up, some discussion of the novel while it still lives only online. It is very hard to get cyberfunded projects reviewed professionally or even by their readers. If you have thoughts, I would love to hear them.

Check out crowdfunding for your next serial addiction. I will continue to post fiction online whenever I can.

Thank you so much. You are all my heroes.

*shrugs on a green smoking jacket, straightens hair, and takes a very small bow*

GLBT/Pagan anthology(Possibly Llewellyn)
Many Pagans compare the "coming out of the broom closet" process of telling family and friends that they're Pagan to "coming out" as gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender.

But is it really the same? And who better to ask than the folk who have chosen -- or chosen not -- to do both?

( More info here )

This image is just to show how much recyclable waste that can be accumulated in a household of six people in less than a month.

In the bag are paper packaging, plastic bottles, plastic bags, etc. Anything that is listed as recyclable on that big green bag containing all the stuff, we put in.



So, well, be conscious of the supposedly waste products in your homes. Bring to the community recycling bins (for Singaporeans living in HDB estates, I believe there are large rectangular blue bins with yellow tops [or something] which serve as recycling bins) or stuff.

I'm opening up the commission list for custom deer antler rune and ogam sets again! This will probably be the last set of commissions I do before the holidays, so if you were looking for gift sets, now's the time to get on the list!

( Information, pictures and current list under the cut )

Please feel free to pass this on to anyone you may think is interested, to include people who may not be on Livejournal--they can contact me at whishthound (at) gmail.com.

Also, all my artwork may be found here. Ritual tools, jewelry and more, all made with hides, bones, beads, and other such things, and ritually purified as part of my spiritual practice.

And thank you! :)

this is a lovely wave that rolls almost through the entire show...the devotional industrial

( audio and playlist herein )

Was awakened at 2 and cannot get back to sleep. Everything is very silent in our room, and my stomach is empty. How I wish the streetside blini stands were 24 hours. Oh my god, streetside blini.

One of the thoughts I kept turning around in my head today was about fantasy literature and the war. WWII is a favorite garden patch for anchoring Western fantasy in historical and moral authority, from Narnia all the way down to Hellboy. It's irritated me in the past, because it seems like a way to infantilize fantasy, to say: look! It's connected to the American idea of the easiest moral choice ever, to go to war against the skull and crossbones brigade! That means it's real, complex literature! And inevitably, those stories that do choose WWII as their adoptive parent show a monochromatic worldview of depressing simplicity. (I'm sure there are exceptions. It's 4 am, this is not a critical piece.)

Now, one of the big set pieces for American and especially British fantasy is the children's evacuation from London. That flight from the horrors of the real world into the pastoral countryside is pretty much the street map for portal fantasy. And yet.

The children of Leningrad were evacuated, too, at least a large number of them (the London evacuation wasn't complete either. Kids are hard to keep track of and for some reason parents are sort of attached.) They were sent out of a urban horror story far worse than the Blitz--and yes, the Blitz sucked, and rationing was hard, but it doesn't even compare to Leningrad and their daily 125 grams of sawdust and turpentine bread, or total lack of power in -38F winter winds, or 60% of the city population dying. No jolly Doctor Who episodes about plucky Leningraders and Captain Jack, you know?

Anyway, they were sent out into...well, it's not pastoral England. But I listened all afternoon to a woman talk about where she went, and it was like a fairy tale. A Russian fairy tale. You know, the kind where you still starve. How the orphans climbed behind the stove and giggled and shared secrets and tried to guess what was cooking by the smell. How they allotted her size 33 boots, and she cried trying to put them on because they were so big, she would never grow big enough to fill them. How she was obsessed with her teacher, who she thought might be a witch, because whenever she woke up in the morning, the teacher already had her clothes on. Whenever she went to bed at night, the teacher still had her clothes on. When did she sleep? Could she take off her clothes? And then how all the children of Leningrad were so determined to stay together, to never loose each other, but now she never talks to the others anymore. (Oddly enough, her orphanage was in Komarova, where Ahkmatova is buried, and which used to be a writers' dacha.)

For me, part of what fantasy does, part of what makes it valuable, is how it can tell a story about the real world in such a way that it jars you out of the endlessly repeated sadnesses of human life and makes you consider it all in another way. How it, mythology and folklore and fantasy, provides a set of narratives through which to see one's own experience, and understand it as part of a much bigger story of the world. Because the world likes to tell stories, the same ones, over and over. The world has fetishes. The world has kinks.

And now, in my heart of hearts, I want to write the book that starts with this other evacuation of children, this shadow-sister to the famous London one. It's a different story, a different starting point that goes to places Narnia doesn't begin to imagine. Again, I struggle with whether I am the person to write it, if it would not be better if my surname were Valentinova. If I maybe don't have the right to put that to paper. But then, I listened to Galina Sergeyevna today, I heard her story and I came to this city and I married into this family with so many war stories. Do I have any more right to write Italian war stories, because I am Italian, though I know no stories of my family during the war? I don't know. All I know is that this someone is sitting at the bottom of me right now, being very quiet and still, little Galina in her size 33 boots, and I look around this city and know I cannot be done writing about it, it is not even possible that I am ready to walk away from it.