Remember the old Gene Autry song, "I'm back in the saddle again"?  Today I'm reminded of that ditty.  What saddle?  The writing saddle, of course.  If any of my sister crones think she has a story or two to tell, there's only one way to do it.  As Nike says, "Just Do It".  It's a matter of application and discipline.  The discipline comes in when you sit down on the chair, and put your fingers on the keyboard, willing words to come into your mind.  Just get something down.  You can always clean it up on the rewrite.  The important thing is that you're doing it, you're writing, dammit.  If you have to, take the phone off the hook, and minimize all your chat windows.I don't have to.  I can write and chat at the same time.  The people I talk to understand when there's a long pause in between utterances.  One friend of mine appreciates those long pauses because he says I type too fast.  Well, if I typed so fast, I'd have had a straight job all these years.  But as I said in the interview on blog talk radio on March 1st, it's a matter of application, of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair,  fingers to the keyboard, and mind to the task.

But a true writer doesn't write because she wants to.  A true writer writes because she has to.  Because when she isn't writing she's at least a little bit crazy, and the world isn't wagging quite right.  She longs to get into that grand obsession in her work.  It's much better to be obsessed over writing, than it is to be obsessed over a person.  There are fewer bad results that way, you aren't breaking up any homes, or stalking anybody.  Whatever homicides that result are all fictional, all in your mind and in your manuscript.  There won't be cops at your door.  There may be cops at your character's door, but that's all right.  That's fiction.  You can put all your grand delusions into your fiction.  Nobody will bother you, or put you into the psych ward.  

Writing is also great therapy.  I developed a thing called "Crime fiction therapy."  Whenever I was mad at someone, I'd write a story in which that person got murdered.  I could express all of my rage, and have a worthwhile product at the end. Then my cop character would solve the crime. My shrink and my therapist approved.  I let them read the stories.  They thought it was a very creative way of expiating my anger and rage.   

Funny how things work out when you do what you Will.  Why did I wait so long?  Well for one thing, I didn't know about epublishing.  I was told I had to have a straight work.  I wasted a lot of my life spinning my wheels like a car on ice, or in deep mud.  It was only when I let go of that hopeless ambition of having a straight job that I really started writing, which is what I should have been doing all along.  Let go and let Goddess. 

Saturday was a peak experience.  At first, I didn't think it would happen because we couldn't get the landlines to connect to the program's number.  But at last I sat in the southwest corner of the room with Doc's cell phone.  We were off and running.  Chai was so right about that extra five minutes. The questions they asked were deep and insightful.  I told them that afterwards.  If someone does something right, I believe in complimenting that person.  I quoted Mark Twain when my mind went blank suddenly on the theme question.  "Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most."  I wasn't aware that it was he I quoted at the tine, but I found out later when I asked Yahoo answers.  So I'm giving credit on my blogs.  Mark Twain I salute you.  You have added immeasurably to the English language.

I wonder if I've used up my 15 minutes of fame yet or if I'm using someone else's now.  There must be lots of people who don't want to be famous. 

 

 

I mentioned in the immediately previous blog to this one that several in the guild, and a few out of the guild, in other guilds were Wiccans and/or Goddess worshipers.  Since I am the senior witch, that puts me in the role of teacher/mentor, and since I am one of the medics, I am also a healer.  Last year at Dunsmuir, His Highness asked me sternly as I knelt before him and the Queen, if I had the craft of healing, and I answered in the affirmative.  Doc declared Darnley dead, but I brought him back to life.  So far, pursuant to the assassination attempts on Darnley, I have brought him back to life 4 times (his count).  I use the  healer aspect the most in Renaissance because that is what my spiritual ancestresses did back then.  They used herbs to heal the sick, herbs to preserve the dead, and herbs and hot water to bring babies into the world.  

At least my knowledge won't be going to waste there.  Magick and witchcraft are what I really know.  I actually know the early Middle Ages better than I know the Renaissance.  Around the 16th century, my interest in the history starts to fade.  I actually prefer the Dark Ages because there was more room for magick there.    

My SO has an issue with mixing the communities he belongs to.  He says he doesn't want to mix his Paganism with Renaissance.  I made peace with the knowledge that my worlds were going to meet and I'd better deal with it.  The Masonic and the Renaissance has met.  A couple of couples from the Masonic community have seen us at Scottish Games, and indeed at the Pleasanton Games we go in search of one of them.  But he has trouble with the Pagan side of him intersecting with the Renaissance side.  I've already encountered this because some of the other members of our guild are beginning Pagans who want to learn more.  I think my SO's problem is that he keeps things all neatly compartmentalized, and he's very obsessive about it. When I was younger, I wondered what would happen if while at a Science Fiction and Fantasy convention it turned out that my parents were at a Christian convention at the same hotel, and I decided that they would just have to deal with it.  The point I'm trying to make is that as soon as you try to neatly compartmentalize everything, things or people will try to get out of their compartments.  We ran into a woman from his work at the Art and Wine Festival.  Things like that happen.  It's part of life, so deal with it.  It makes for a nice plot complication; a guy or gal thinks s/he has everything neatly compartmentalized, then things start getting very chaotic.  He's in one place and runs into someone who knows him from another of the lives he's living.  A woman who runs one of the groups I belong to is also a Druid.  Another woman who is a Druid also belongs to one of the other groups I'm in.  If I'd tried to keep my Paganism a secret from the Romance novelists I correspond with, it could be awkward.  But my Pagan spirituality is a big part of who I am, and is a big part of my writing.  I happen to think that non-Pagans, or Muggles as we like to call them, are curious about us Pagans, and might be curious about us enough to read my work.  I'm also trying to integrate my life.  To some extent, it is still compartmentalized.  The Masons don't know that I'm a Pagan.  But they'll find out someday.  I just hope it won't be too much of a shock when they do.  

Yeah, finally I became a published author three times just before turning 60.  I'd been writing off and on for the past 50 years.  Talk about late bloomers! Several times the stories became clogged in the pipes because they weren't getting out there.  My muse deserted me.  Then she came back, and started dictating, and I started writing.  My first story hasn't been published yet.  Well, I'm the first to admit that it needs work.  But the second, a tale about what happens when Aengus Og, the Celtic God of love turns up in present-day San Francisco went over big with the editors, and was released as an ebook on August 12th, 2006.  And since then the story ideas just keep coming.  I include my spirituality in these stories.  Two out of the three have heroines who are Wiccan.  The third is Asatruar. It's great being back in the saddle again, and this time, as long as my fingers can type, I'm not going to give up writing because it's what I was always meant to do.