On Sleep and Having Nothing to Say

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

It’s what you say when you have nothing to say, as we all know. There, I’ve said it.

The problem with maintaining a blog is that one really ought to post something on said blog. Well, I haven’t been able to think of anything to say. Yes, I know it’s Wednesday and that calls for a Wordless Wednesday post, but I don’t have any particular picture I wanted to post today, either.

But then, it’s been two years, really, since I’ve been doing much of any posting, quite aside from the year I “officially” took off. And in those two years I’ve accumulated a lot of pictures. So, how about, for the next while you’ll get some retro-pieces? Retro-thoughts, retro-pictures. And the thing is, when I first started blogging, more than ten years ago now, I did warn my esteemed readership that this wasn’t going to be a blog “about” anything in particular. Hence the tag line: “Life, the Universe, and a Few-Odd Other Things”.

It’s been two years… And we all know what those two years entailed. It’s sapped so much of my energy, of my ability to think and to create.

I’ve just re-hung my Burne-Jones “Sleeping Beauty” (“The Rose Bower”) on my wall – a piece that I got to see in real life at the Tate Britain in 2019.

As you’ll know, if you’ve followed this blog for a while (or know me in real life), “Sleeping Beauty” is one of my favourite fairy tales. I keep thinking about why that is, and why this story holds such fascination for us as a society that it’s one of the perennial favourites. I mean, it’s kind of boring, isn’t it? It’s literally about a girl who… sleeps. But I don’t find it boring, and neither do any of the other millions of people who keep enjoying this story.

Just to get something out of the way, no, it’s not because the story is about the prince’s heroic journey to rescue the girl. That’s a Disney addition. In the Grimms’ version, which is the one I love, the prince does nothing more exciting than walk up to the thorn-covered castle, which lets him in because he unwittingly happened to show up at the right time. No dragons, no sword fights, no baddies to battle. Only sleep, so powerful it even knocks out the flies on the wall and the cook in the middle of smacking the scullery boy.

It’s the sleep that’s the real antagonist in this tale – and its solution, the way it is defeated, is to let it run its course. Once the hundred years are up, a prince shows up and the princess wakes. The prince is nothing special (apart from being a prince, but in fairy tales, those are a dime a dozen); he’s not “the chosen one”, he’s not “destined to fall in love with the princess”, let alone her previous lover who actively seeks her out to rescue her (most film versions of the story go with the latter, but, sorry, that’s not actually in the folktale). The only thing he does, and does right, is to listen to the story an old man tells him about the enchanted princess in the thorn-covered castle that nobody can get to, and let his curiosity get the better of him.

And suddenly there are roses on the thorns, and they part to let the prince in just in time for the princess to wake up.

Maybe that’s what we need to hear today: The sleep will run its course. There is nothing to do but wait it out, but once it’s done, there are roses and kisses and, unfortunately for the scullery boy, a smack upside the head.

Perhaps I had something to say today, after all.

Life, the Universe, and Sleeping Beauty. The sleep ends when it’s run its course.

And Yet More Beginnings

Now that I think of it, even the stories started when I was thirteen.

“This is going to be the last piece of fiction you’re going to write in your school career,” our teacher said. It was Grade 7; creative writing classes did not exist in the academic type of school that I attended where we were trained for university. So this one last piece of narrative writing we got to do was an assignment to first create a “narrative core” – a fake newspaper account – and then turn it into a 2-page story.

I wrote a tale of a raccoon stolen from a circus who escapes his captors by sheer raccoonish cleverness (he chews his way out of the cage). That piece, too, I still have, in an extremely tattered blue binder. My teacher’s comment on the bottom of the second page says that it “flawlessly fulfils the requirements”. Not a single red mark on the whole two pages other than that comment.

The binder holds a number of other stories, some handwritten in my schoolgirl’s script and some typed on my mother’s typewriter, more or less hunt-and-peck style. On my own time, of course; the “writing for grades in school” train had, as mentioned, left the station.

I quit writing partway into a tale about a fifteen-year-old cowboy in the American West whose horse steps into a prairie dog hole and throws him; he gets picked up by a young man of twenty (which seemed quite old and grown-up at the time) whose fifteen-year-old sister nurses our hero back to health. The story fizzles out after some ten pages on account of lack of direction; I only had a vague idea of where I was going with it and nobody to tell me how to take that idea and turn it into a novel.

Life, the Universe, and the Beginnings of the Stories.

Speaking of Beginnings…

I was thirteen when I first fell in love – with pottery, that is. I can still visualize the pottery studio in my high school where I learned to handbuild a wide, shallow bowl. This bowl:

Yes, I still have it. My first pottery piece – or maybe it was my second? Regardless, it’s been my regular, everyday fruit bowl for the last forty years.

Life, the Universe, and Beginnings. This was where the pottery started.

New Beginnings

It’s a bit of a cliché, that. New Year’s Day, time for new beginnings! New goals, good intentions! If the calendar wasn’t already telling me that it’s that time of the year, a dead giveaway would be my social media feed, which is once again bristling with ads for exercise or weight loss programs (I ususally mark those ads as “inappropriate” or “offensive”). A friend of mine once stated that her goal for the new year was to stay fat and enjoy herself doing so – I can go with that, that sounds like an obtainable goal. (In other words, it’s a way of saying “My goal for the new year is to stop beating up on myself.” Alas, as with pretty much every other goal, it’s hard to stick to.)

However, having said that, I do have a liking for calendar markers. There’s something satisfying in having things happen at a specific day in the calendar. My nice DSLR camera decided yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, that its SD card had about as much as it could take – four years’ worth of photos filled it to the brim – and it quit just as I was trying to film a panorama shot of the last sun rays of 2021. So the next SD card and round of photos will start right at the beginning of 2022, and there’s something about it that tickles my fancy.

The sun going down on the Old Year
The last photo on the SD card

So all that to say, here we are, making a new start on the blog. I don’t think I need to say much about 2021 as a whole – it’s been pretty crazy all around the globe. Personally, I’d had all kinds of grand plans for what I was going to do during this year without blogging – finish books, publish books, build a big body of artwork for exhibitions, etc. Haha. Much like everything else during this year, that didn’t go according to plan.

But then, other things happened. I did a lot of knitting (aka thumb-twiddling with a purpose). I read a lot of books (most of them re-reads of old favourites – I’m almost finished with Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series, and it’s been interesting reading them in order, front to back. I have things to say about them… but that’s a topic for another day). I took a lot of pottery classes and workshops, a not inconsiderable number of them online. In fact, that’s one of the advantages that Covid has brought to the world, the proliferation of online offerings. Clouds and silver linings and all that jazz.

But I’ll stop boring you with the non-saga of our lives. I didn’t actually have all that much to say for this first post back in the saddle, so I’ll stop saying it. Just this for now:

This is Life, the Universe, and a Rebooted Blog. See you again soon!

Sunrise on a midwinter’s morning. (You can pretend it’s rising on the New Year.)

A Quick Notice

Hello everyone!

Yes, we’re still here, even though we’ve been quiet in cyberspace for nearly a year. This isn’t the startup of the blog again quite yet, but just a quick notice that we’re doing some very inexpert internet magic in the background, specifically moving the blog to a self-hosted site (I think that’s what it’s called). I’m hoping to port the email subscriptions as well, so hopefully you won’t notice anything at all, and when the blog bursts back onto the scene in its full and renewed glory you’ll never know anything ever happened. But just in case something goes weird, you’ve been warned.

Meanwhile, this is Life, the Universe and an Ongoing Construction Project, and we’ll see you all again soon!

Steve and Molly discussing the finer points of Stuffed Animal Poetry

Merry Christmas To All, And To All a Good Night

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. And I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s time: I need to go dark for a while. No, it doesn’t mean I’m going to The Dark Side (even though they have cookies). It means I’m going to turn off the light switch on this blog.

Closed for renovations, remodelling, rethinking.

In the words of Tara Leaver, a lovely artist I’ve been following and taking inspiration from for some time: “I need to go dark. To be in the dark with my work – the winter dark, the dark of not knowing, the dark of not showing.” (Tara Leaver’s ArtNote newsletter, 16/11/2020)

So that’s what I’m going to do. You’re not going to see me around here for a while. Don’t worry, all the current posts will stay up, so you can re-read them at your leisure, and I’ll still be available via email if you want to talk to me. Also, Steve says that any bears or other stuffed animals who want to come by our house for a chat are more than welcome (it’s been established that they’re immune to Covid-19; social distancing is not an issue for them).

So I’ll sign off for now. Thank you, everyone, for being along for the ride with us, and Steve and I wish you a wonderful Christmas and New Year 2021!

That’s Life, the Universe, and Turning Off the Light Switch. Merry Christmas to All, and to All a Good Night!

“The Forty-Dollar Christmas: A Canadian Holiday Story”

Drumroll please: Another Christmas short story is now available for your delectation from Yours Truly!

THE FORTY-DOLLAR CHRISTMAS: A CANADIAN HOLIDAY STORY

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas… unless you don’t have the cash to make it happen.
When Liz is stuck at home over the holidays, she finds out that her downstairs neighbour is too broke to celebrate Christmas with his little girl. Can she bring her ingenuity to bear to show Jonathan that it’s not the content of his wallet that counts?

Available now on Amazon for Kindle and print, and Smashwords (as well as other ebook retailers shortly) in any other format you’d like.

And here’s a little taste test:

Liz leaned back against the kitchen counter.
“Look, what do you mean you can’t afford Christmas? You can’t be that broke!”
“Yes, I’m that broke! I mean, just look around at this place—do I look like I’m made of money? Why do you think I’m looking for work? I don’t have the kind of cash to throw a Christmas shindig, or the room on my credit card, either. I can’t just pull a grand out of my back pocket!”
“A grand?!? Are you kidding me?”
“Why, you think that’s not enough? After all, she’s just a little girl, but… Yeah, I suppose; I think the last time Morgan and I had Christmas together it came to over two, and that was a few years ago. Prices have gone up since.”
“Over two thousand dollars?” Liz said. “That’s nuts! What did you spend all that on?”
Jonathan frowned. “Well, the usual stuff—Christmas trees, decorations, food, presents…”
“Wow, those must have been some kind of presents! What did you get? Diamonds and rubies and fancy new cars?”
“Yes, pretty much. Well, not the cars, but some jewellery, and I think there was an iPhone involved somewhere, or an iPad, or another i-something. I just can’t do that this year.”
“No, of course not! That’s crazy anyway. But that doesn’t mean you have to scrap Christmas altogether! Just keep it simple,” Liz said.
Jonathan reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a handful of carrots.
“Look,” he said gruffly, “can we please just drop it? I can’t even afford a simple Christmas. God knows I’d let Katie have a Christmas, but I just haven’t got the money.”
“Okay, I know this is totally intrusive—sorry—but are you so totally broke you can’t even afford groceries?”
He gave her a look. “No,” he said, “but just about. There’s barely anything extra.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. “Okay, here, that’s as far as it goes. I can spare a twenty.” He took out a green bill and tossed it on the counter, Queen Elizabeth landing upmost.
“Hah!” cried Liz. “See, that’s not nothing!”
Jonathan scoffed. “Oh, sure, you can make a Christmas on twenty dollars!”
“Well, maybe not on just twenty. You know what, I think I can toss in a twenty, as well. And that we can do something with.”
“Forty dollars? That’ll get you, what, one branch of a Christmas tree! Or maybe one turkey drumstick. Come off it, lady.”
Liz’s eyes sparkled. “What’ll you bet?” she said.
“Bet on what?”
“That we can have Christmas, with tree and trimmings and turkey and presents, on forty dollars or less.”
…

Go to Amazon or Smashwords to find out if Liz wins her bet. Bonus: includes some recipes and a knitting pattern!

Happy reading, and happy Winter Solstice 2020!