Finding magic in the real world.

There's a dragonfly hanging around the parking lot of my apartment building. I've been seeing it every afternoon when I come home from work. Usually it simply crosses my field of vision, but sometimes it zips past me to really make sure it gets my attention.

I tend to think of dragonflies as liminal creatures, right on the border between reality and the fantastic. Part of it is their appearance: their bulbous heads, long, slender tails, and iridescent wings make them look less of this world and more of some unaccountable one. Part of it is the way they zip through the air, ducking and hovering in ways that we think we might be able to understand, if only we could read them as well as (or better than!) we read other humans.

Dragonflies need to stay near water, because that's where they lay their eggs. The element of water is linked with the emotions, which might make dragonflies suspect to the rational-minded. And in fact, many cultures have superstitions, most of them unflattering, about dragonflies. I wrote a story about them once -- or rather, I wrote a story in which dragonflies play a significant role. I made the main character a news reporter partly so I had an excuse to do a brain-dump of all the fascinating things I learned about them. (The story's called "Lulie." You can buy it for 99 cents at Amazon.)

But my story was strictly fantasy; the dragonflies in it were real, but they carried a magical message that my main character, Artie, resisted all the way. If "Lulie" had been magic realism, Artie would have been a very different character, and the dragonflies' message would have been less overt than Come down to the family farm and meet your cousin by the light of the moon. It would have been less insistent, more intriguing, and more of an answer to a deeper dilemma Artie himself was wrestling with.

Because magic realism works best, I think, with characters who are on the verge of something: a difficult transition from childhood to adolescence; an insistent need to escape an intolerable situation, whether domestic (physical or emotional abuse) or on a wider scale (war, racial hatred, etc.); or a cognitive dissonance that may be close to manifesting as mental illness (the movie Birdman comes to mind). The characters have to be open enough to magic to not shy away from it. They need to be in a liminal frame of mind.

I've been sufficiently intrigued by my dragonfly friend to investigate why he or she has been trying to get my attention (other than as a subject for this blog post, I mean). In Animal Speak, Ted Andrews says Dragonfly, as a totem, is about the power of light:

Dragonflies remind us that we are light and can reflect the light in powerful ways if we choose to do so. "Let there be light" is the divine prompting to use the creative imagination as a force within your life.

Tomorrow is Lughnasadh, the Pagan first harvest. For those of us in North America, the celebration comes at the height of summer. On this Lughnasadh eve, I'm going to try to remember to let my light shine. I hope you do the same.

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This post is part of the 2016 Magic Realism Blog Hop. In fact, it may be the final post, time-wise, in this year's hop -- which means you can click through the list below and catch them all at once! Big thanks again to Zoe Brooks for organizing another intriguing hop.






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

Kindle Unlimited: What's in it for readers?

Summer is typically a slow time in the news business, but this summer's news has been anything but slow: undocumented kids showing up by the thousands at the US border, renewed fighting in Gaza, and somebody in Ukraine blowing a civilian jetliner out of the sky.

But the news that sent the indie author blogosphere into a tizzy this week hit a bit closer to home: Amazon's announcement about Kindle Unlimited.

This new program (offered only in the U.S. so far) is an ebook subscription service. As a reader, you pay Amazon $9.99 a month to join KU; in return, you can download an unlimited number of books from the KU store, although you can only have ten books out at a time. This is in addition to the Kindle Owner Lending Library program Amazon already offers to its Prime members; that feature allows you to borrow one book a month.

Before you ask, I don't know whether Prime members who also join KU will be able to borrow eleven books at a time. Maybe I'll check that out -- in the interest of research, you understand -- and let you know next week.

Anyway, readers who are mulling over the idea of joining KU have a few things to consider. First, of course, is the cost, especially if you're already a Prime member. Prime costs $99 a year, but it's totally worth it if you buy a lot of stuff from Amazon; it gets you free two-day shipping on a lot of items, as well as a boatload of streaming movies and TV shows for free, as well as entry into the KOLL program. By contrast, the $9.99 a month for KU adds up to nearly $120 a year. That can be worth it if you read a lot (we do love voracious readers here at hearth/myth), and if you buy a lot of the books you read from Amazon. If you shell out $10 a month or more for books, then KU might be a great deal for you.

But not every book at Amazon is available through KU -- not by a long shot. For one thing, you won't find a ton of bestsellers in the KU store; some traditional publishers are participating, but not (at least right now) the Big 5. So if your reading tastes run to newly-published books reviewed by the New York Times, you'll probably be disappointed.

Still, in a storefront that features 600,000-plus titles, you ought to be able to find something to read. And if you like books by indies (we do love readers of indie books here at hearth/myth), you're in luck -- Amazon thoughtfully included every book enrolled in KDP Select in the KU store.

Which is the long way around to mention that a few of my books are available at the KU store: the Pipe Woman Chronicles Omnibus and The Maidens' War; two great anthologies that I'm honored to have stories in, Summer Dreams and 13 Bites Vol. 1; and a short story, "Lulie", which has a spiffy new cover in honor of the event.

You can try KU for free this month. Even if you don't end up joining for good, it's a way to pick up some free summer reads without having to make a trip to the library. What's not to like about that?

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