I had to reframe my entire day yesterday. It was very stressful from the time I got up until I got home around 4:30 pm. Money concerns, car issues, having to drive a car that was acting erratically when there was a threat of thunderstorms and flash flooding, getting caught in one of those downpours…
This is an edited transcript July 4th Reflections from my Dragonlight Press Presents podcast on Spotify. Yesterday was July 4. As the holiday approached, I was experiencing a lot of ambivalence about it. Sometimes even irritation at the disconnect between celebrating what we call Independence Day while at the same time, all over the country,…
It’s snowing today. I decided to go for a walk in the woods for inspiration. The excursion turned out to be more illuminating and instructive than expected. I walk through those woods all the time, and I realized today that I have a tendency to look down at the ground while I’m walking. Part of…
Unpopular opinion: I really dislike this time of year. My favorite holiday is Halloween because it’s just strictly fun, no pressure. Thanksgiving starts to bring in drama, usually of the family variety, but it’s still enjoyable. But by the time the December holidays roll around, they come with relentless messaging around gift giving, family, indulgence…
Recently, I’ve been thinking about standards of beauty, specifically what I find beautiful and attractive in myself and others, what I find unattractive in myself and others, where my beliefs around beauty originated, and whether the original beliefs still ring true. For at least a couple of years this has been something to grapple with…
A few months ago, I came across a free course on sound healing. On a whim, I signed up. It was mostly just to get people to sign up for a more in-depth paid course, but I did learn a couple of useful things from the free course. One lesson had to do with the…
Thinking about process right now. And what is becoming clear to me as I try to get myself into some routines is that trying to be that writer who sits down and writes for X hours per day and churns out X000 words per day isn’t going to work for me. Discipline isn’t really the…
I was thinking about roles earlier—how we identify ourselves according to the roles that we perform. We live in a culture that has a tendency to be obsessed with categorizing and putting things into little boxes, which is annoying. But we all tend to have these roles that we fit into, like I might have…
I try to avoid all the usual end-of-year trends toward lists and replays, but when the alarm went off this morning, I started thinking of all the things I wanted to accomplish today. This led to the realization that 2013 has been a year of some high highs and some devastating lows. I’m typically a…
For the past week and a half, my Unicorn submission preparations—all my writing, really—has been derailed by illnesses. First, my daughter came down with Strep and was home from school for several days. Now I am trying to shake some unspecified viral sinus infecting thingee. (My brain stopped processing once the doctor said I wasn’t…
