You mean there's more?

adamson | Deposit Photos

I saw a theory earlier this week (on Facebook, of course -- where else do old farts spend all of their time?) that this coming week is still part of that liminal, time-out-of-time period at the end of every year. This person maintained that if you count twelve days forward from the winter solstice, you arrive at January 6th -- and that period is the true 12 Days of Christmas about which we've heard so much, in which up is down and the Lord of Misrule takes charge and so on. 

The math doesn't work; actually, twelve days from December 21st is today, January 1st. But the solstice is a floating holiday -- next year, the moment of the winter solstice occurs early on December 23rd UTC, which will be sometime on the 22nd for the continental US. Still, that only gets us to January 3rd. 

But I'm embracing the theory anyway. It gives me an excuse to keep to my family-of-origin tradition of leaving the Yule tree up 'til the 6th. We're still in sacred time, people!

Anyway. I know a lot of folks are exhausted by this point in the festive season and are ready to box everything up and shove it back in the closet. And that's fine. You do you. 

For me, today, it's about taking a breath and looking toward the year to come.

Earlier today, while texting with a friend, we talked about how life after retirement seems like a gift. I mentioned that for the first several months after getting out here to Santa Fe, I felt a vague sense of panic that time was continuing on. I had spent so many years straining to get to the point where I could retire and leave DC, and then I did it. I left the job, I made the big move, I reached the goal. Go me!

And then a week went by, and another, and the calendar pages kept flipping, and time just kept going. It's not that I wanted the world to grind to a halt for me or anything -- I'm not that impressed with myself -- but I'd reached the Big Finality, and it wasn't final at all. If I could have voiced my feelings at that point, I would have said, "Wait. You mean there's more?"

So here we are, having just reached our big collective goal: surviving the holidays and ushering the old year out. And the calendar page has turned. Here we are, at the start of a new year. 

You'll get no pep talk from me about making 2023 your year! I have no goals for myself for this coming year, and I'm not about to hector anybody else into planning how to get ahead at work or lose those last ten pounds or whatever. (Sometimes I see headlines for well-meaning articles on these topics and forget for a second that I don't care anymore. Particularly the career advice. What a joy it is to skip right over that stuff.)

That's right -- I have no goals for this year. I mean, there are things I'm looking forward to, as well as skills I'm interested in improving, and I don't intend to ever stop learning. But tonight, I'm looking at the calendar and saying to myself, not with fear or panic, but with joy and wonder: "You mean there's more?"

***

These moments of bloggy joy and wonder have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy New Year!

We're at a crossroads. Which way will we go?

 

I think you all know by now that I'm taken with the idea of liminality -- the place or point at which things meet. Dawn and dusk are liminal times. Beltane, in early May, and Samhain, in late October, are also liminal times, when the veil between this world and the Otherworld is at its thinnest.

This period we're in now -- the days between Christmas and the New Year -- has traditionally been another liminal time. I've heard it has to do with the calendar; in an early version, each month was assigned the same number of days, leaving a period of several days between the final month of one year and the first month of the new year. However these extra days came about, they became a sort of time out of time, given over to feasting, merrymaking, and all sorts of mischief, encouraged by a Lord of Misrule. 

Then, of course, the Catholic Church got hold of things and turned the party into the twelve days of Christmas.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. 

I saw a striking image on Facebook a few days ago. It showed a crossroads in a desert: a road crossing over an arroyo or a seasonal stream. The caption suggested that 2020 -- the whole year -- has been a crossroads. And in many ways, I think, it's true. Modern life as we know it came to a screeching halt in mid-March, once we had an inkling of how bad things were going to get. A lot of what transpired afterwards was pretty awful. I don't have to enumerate the bad stuff -- all of us were there. 

But good things happened this year, too. People got married. Babies were born. Some folks discovered they liked working from home. Others recovered from cancer or some other terrible but non-COVID-19 illness.

For me, on the whole, 2020 has been a good year. I was able to retire from my day job on schedule, and I moved from the East Coast to New Mexico when I'd planned to do so. I'm a homebody anyway, so not being able to see people in person hasn't bothered me much. Some things have been inconvenient, to be sure, but overall, life unfolded for me pretty much as I expected it would. And yes, I know how lucky -- how privileged -- I am to be able to say that.

Regardless of how 2020 treated each of us, we are all standing, now, at a crossroads. The New Year stretches before us, bright with promise for some of us, shrouded in mystery for others. That's not metaphorical. Once or twice in my lifetime, I have stood on the threshold of a new year and could not -- could not -- make out where I would be at the end of it. In each case, those years have been marred by some personal upheaval.

That's not the case this year. When I look ahead to the end of 2021, I see myself settling in here in Santa Fe. I see the vaccines taking hold, allowing the rhythms of life -- of all our lives -- to resume beating normally. 

Or rather, beating to our new normal. Because maybe, just maybe, good things will come from having hit pause this year. The caption for that crossroads image I saw on Facebook said, in part, "Coming together and creating compassion and support will shape the future of how the planet and humanity will move forward." Those seem like worthy goals to me. 

Happy New Year, everyone.

***

These moments at the bloggy crossroads have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. We're so close to the finish line! Keep washing your hands and wearing your mask!

Wrapping up the decade.

What are we calling this decade, anyway? The '10s? The Teens? I'm partial to the Aughts for years 2000-2009, and the '20s sounds just right for the upcoming decade, although whether we'll have a recurrence of the Roaring '20s remains to be seen. But this decade -- the one we're bringing to a close at midnight Tuesday -- I dunno. I guess I'll refer to it as the Teens for this post and see how it feels.

I hear the pedants out there: "There was no Year Zero! The first decade started with year 1 and ended with year 10! We won't be done with this decade for another year!"

I hear you, I say, but I don't care. For me, 2019 marks the end of several cycles. I turned 62 this year, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, which means I'm eligible for Social Security. This year was also my 20th year at the day job, which means I've worked as a legal secretary for 20 years. And more to the point for this blog, The Maidens' War was published in 2010 -- which means I'm in my tenth year as an honest-to-goodness published author. (This blog, hearth/myth, won't be ten years old 'til August 2021. Mark your calendars now...)

2019 is also going to be my last full year in the DC area, as I'm planning to retire and move away in July. But now that the calendar is actually kicking over to 2020, my long, long period of anticipation is nearly over and some anxiety is setting in. Where will I live? How will I live? I'm pretty sure I'll need a part-time job for a few years -- where will I get one? What kind of work will I be doing? How do I tailor my resume for job hunting in the 21st century?

I spoke with someone this week about the job hunting stuff. I told her I might want to go back to journalism, but it's been -- all together now -- 20 years. "How do you feel about networking?" she asked. With people I haven't talked to in 20 years, and in a market I've never worked in? I'm not even sure where to start.

Then there's the topic of decluttering to move. Our last move was less than two years ago, so I shouldn't have to dump too much stuff. But with this move, there's also a sense of turning a new corner -- of starting a new chapter. So some old habits need to go.

For years, I've had a habit of picking up crow feathers. I'd amassed quite a collection, and many of them were looking tatty. So I decided today was a good time to get rid of them, and that Great Falls Park would be a good place to do it since I wanted to go out there and pick up a National Parks Senior Lifetime Pass anyway. I set aside the nicest one and counted the rest: 20 feathers to return to nature to kick off 2020.

Today was rainy but not cold, with a high in the low 50s. I layered up and headed out to see the falls. I'd intended to drop the feathers in the Potomac, but I never got that close. Anyway, it's done. And I got some cool atmospheric photos, too. (I mentioned in Rivers Run that kayakers sometimes run the rapids at Great Falls. I wasn't surprised to see none out there today.)

All photos copyright Lynne Cantwell 2019

Happy New Year! Here's hoping 2020 will bring you nothing but good things.

***
These moments of atmospheric blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell (10 years, 24 books published -- whew!).

That New Year's baby had better be smiling.

I thought I had a topic all set for this week's blog post. I mean, here we are, in the liminal days between Christmas and New Year's, when the Lord of Misrule is in charge, and...yeah. Turns out I wrote about that last year. 

Which is too bad, because 2018 was quite the dumpster fire in a lot of ways -- worse than 2017, which was pretty terrible, and way worse than 2016, which only got super sucky toward the end. Remember our 2016 dumpster fire ornament? Boy, did we ever jump the gun.

Now 2019 is looming around the corner, and Baby New Year doesn't exactly look like he's ready to give us a joyous smile.

For me personally, I'm pretty sure this coming year will be better than the last few. We're in a much calmer living situation, for one thing, having fled the continuously-under-construction apartment building this past spring. (It's still undergoing renovation. Unbelievable.) And we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the denouement of the decade-long saga of my mother's house and estate. (For more information on that, go here.) I thought publishing the memoir would be the end of it, but old family stuff never dies. I've spent the better part of this past year processing that, along with a bunch of other stuff.

But I'm ready to start writing again. I won NaNo last month, after all. And by the way, I want to thank y'all for your kind words the short-short story I posted last week. I'm going to dive into editing Rivers Run and writing the sequel as soon as I finish posting this. No, really. 

And for those of you following the #escapevelocity countdown, today's magic number is 341. 

Have a terrific New Year's celebration. See ya in 2019!

***

These moments of anticipatory blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy New Year!

Living in liminal time.

Happy almost 2018! We're a few hours short of midnight here as I write this. Hoping to get it online before the world goes mad...

Alert hearth/myth readers know that I talk a lot about liminal spaces. This time at the holidays is such a space -- perhaps the only one that still gets a nod of recognition from modern society. I don't know about you guys, but I've had the sense multiple times over the past week that this time between Christmas and New Year's is sort of a throwaway week, that we're in a sort of holding pattern while we wait for life to start up again. Admittedly, my sense of "what's the point of this week?" might have been exacerbated by the fact that I went in to work at the day job every day -- one of the few at my workplace who did.

But these weeks between the solstice and the turn of the year have long been considered a time out of time. Early calendar calculations left a short stretch of days that didn't fit evenly into a month. The Romans used these days for their Saturnalia celebration -- which included the appointment of a mock king who ruled over the drinking and debauchery.

Christmas celebrations in medieval England included a similar figure, popularly known as the Lord of Misrule -- often a peasant who was elevated to the lofty position to oversee the drunken mayhem. There's some evidence that the idea of a Lord of Misrule began as a pagan custom and was later tolerated by the church to varying degrees.

In any case, nowadays the holidays pretty much end with New Year's Day. It's the last hurrah for the season of big parties (unless you count the Super Bowl, which used to be in January, but I digress), and the last chance, too, to take a breath and think about how things went for us in the past year and where we'd like for them to go in the year to come.

I read a blog post earlier today that suggests spending part of this evening meditating, envisioning how you'd like for the next year to look and what you'd like to see happen, both personally and in the world around you. The idea is that imagining a thing in detail is the first step in making it manifest. Personally, I think dreams require some work on the part of the dreamer before they are made manifest. The Universe sometimes operates on chance, it's true, but typically your overnight success has toiled in obscurity for years.

On the other hand, it can't hurt to have a vision of where you want to go. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sit in a quiet spot for a few minutes, just as soon as I post this.

Happy 2018, everyone. May you manifest everything you desire, and may the new year be better to you and yours than the old year was.

***
These moments of manifest blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Come on, 2014.

Magickal Graphics
Is it just me, or does it feel like I take stock a lot?

Between the blogoversary and New Year's and various Pagan holidays, it seems like I'm always setting goals, looking forward, looking back, evaluating, reevaluating....

I guess it's a useful exercise to keep looking at where I'm going and where I've been. It does get frustrating, though, when I see goals carried over from list to list, from year to year, with little or no progress on them. I'm sure I'm not the only person who does it. "Lose weight" and its corollaries ("get fit," "start exercising," "eat healthier food," etc.) are a perennial for me, as I'm sure they are for others. Financial resolutions/goals/what-have-you are ever-popular, too.

Jim Devitt posted a goal development checklist at Indies Unlimited about a week ago (between his own manic cookie baking and manic gift-wrapping, I guess) that puts a slightly different spin on the project. I finally had time to catch my breath the other day and write down my answers. Number 4 on his list -- three things you need to stop doing in 2014 -- seemed to be an eye-opener for many of those who commented on his post. It's not that it's difficult to list the things you need to quit doing; that's the easy part. The hard part is to actually quit doing them. One of my three things in this category is to quit reading books on marketing without actually following the advice. It's so easy to let those pearls of wisdom just slide past my eyes and then keep doing the same dumb things I've been doing all along. If I'm going to take the time to read the books, I ought to be taking notes, at least. We'll see how that goes. Tune in here again this time next year.

When it comes to writing and publication, my goals for 2014 look very similar to my 2013 goals. I want to finish Undertow and get it ready for publication around the spring equinox, and then I want to write Scorched Earth and get that out the door before the summer solstice. And then I need to figure out what to do in the back half of the year. I'm planning one more series in the Pipe Woman Chronicles universe -- another trilogy, probably, with a grown-up Sage as the main character -- although I don't know whether I'll be ready to start it this year. I may write another stand-alone novel instead. I've been thinking of trying my hand at magic realism. Or I may try Susanna Lakin's strategy and write a book in a hot-selling genre. I don't know about you, but pulling down $3,000 a month from one book sounds like decent money to me.

I would definitely like to tweak my yearly writing-and-publication schedule so that I'm not trying to sell a new release in the same month that I'm writing the first draft of another book. Last month was just too stressful for me. If it means I have to skip NaNoWriMo from here on out, so be it. I can do Camp NaNo in April instead. Or make my own NoWriMo in whatever month I choose, which is what I've been doing for one book a year anyway.

Overall, I'm still on the seven-year retirement plan, and publishing three novels a year seems to be a reasonable pace for me. If I keep that up, and assuming the story ideas keep flowing as they have so far, I could have another 18 novels out there by the time I turn 62. That would bring me to 26 published novels -- a decent body of work. And just think of all the time I'll have on my hands after I retire to write more!

***
Speaking of marketing, I'm taking Crosswind on tour from January 8th through the 17th. Here's the tour schedule if you'd like to follow along; I'll also post it on the "Tour Dates" tab. Plans are afoot for a giveaway featuring signed Crosswind paperbacks and a Navajo-made dream pillow. More to come, as they say....

***
These moments of New Year blogginess were brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Happy New Year!

Scared everybody off with that New Agey post last week, huh?

Never mind.  2012 is almost over and 2013 is less than 36 hours away.  Soon I'll have a whole new year in which to post crazy stuff and make everybody wonder.

This year has been pretty spectacular, and my thanks go out to all of you for making it so.  As well you know, I've published three books, ramped up my participation at the Indie Exchange, and joined Indies Unlimited as a contributing author. More importantly, I've sold some some books and gained a few fans. I'm grateful to all of you for my success so far.

I've got a few tricks up my sleeve for 2013.  Gravid should be out in early spring, with Annealed to follow a few months later, assuming all goes well.  That will wrap up the Pipe Woman Chronicles, and force me to come up with an idea for a whole new series.  Aieee....  No idea what I'll do next, sorry.  Maybe some short stories.  Dunno yet.  I'll figure it out when the time comes.  I'm putting off thinking about it so that I don't get sidetracked from finishing Gravid and Annealed -- and nobody wants that, right?  Didn't think so.

Also, starting next week, I'm going to be instituting a new feature on the blog called "Rursday Reads."  I've been reading mostly indie books this year, but I haven't had time to post reviews around the web for months.  I figure if I review one book a week, I can whittle down my tottering pile of Books I Ought to Review within a few months -- and then we'll see where we are at that point.  I'll set up a separate tab for the reviews, and they'll go up on Thursdays.  Why the odd spelling, you ask?  Well, back when I was in junior high, Michigan City Area Schools turned our class scheduling over to a computer.  The schedule forms had a single-letter designation for each day of the week.  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday got the first letter of the word, but for some unknown reason, "R" was picked to designate Thursday.  Hence, Rursday.  And "Rursday Reads" has a nice alliterative thing going for it.  So there you go.

To be clear, I don't intend to turn this into a review blog, and I am NOT accepting books for review.  (Don't go looking for submission guidelines, guys -- there aren't any.)  I'm just trying to kick myself in the butt to get reviews of these books posted -- and, at the same time, give some love to my fellow indies who deserve it.

So those are my writing goals for 2013: finish the Pipe Woman Chronicles, write something else in the second half of the year, post some book reviews here on the blog, keep up with my regular posts all over the place and -- oh yeah, I'm starting another blog tour right after New Year's Day.  It's called the Orangeberry Big Bang Tour.  I don't have a complete schedule yet, but I'll post it on the Tour Dates tab once I get it.

Happy 2013!  Enjoy your celebrations, stay safe, and see you next year!