The spirit of a place.

I still buy paper wall calendars every year. And nearly every year, I think about picking up a Spirit of Place calendar, but I never do. The photos of striking landscapes are lovely -- don't get me wrong. But despite the name of the calendar, they don't really convey the spirit of the place -- at least, not to me. For that, I think, you have to be there. 

pegasustudio | Deposit Photos

Have you ever walked into a place that felt totally welcoming -- as if the place itself was glad you had come? Or maybe there was a time when a place you entered didn't welcome you at all. Both have happened to me a lot over the years.

Here's an example: Many years ago, I had a job interview in Chicago. I'd been to the Loop plenty of times, but rarely for a job search. As I walked from the train station to the interview, I felt a coldness and heaviness that I'd never felt there before. I did the interview, and as I left the building, I decided I might as well spend the rest of the day doing tourist stuff. Immediately, the feeling of coldness lifted. Now the city welcomed me! 

I didn't get that job, nor did I ever get a job in Chicago. Of course I was anxious on this occasion, as one is before a job interview, but I don't think the feeling of coldness was due to interview-related nerves. I think the city's spirit of place was telling me I wasn't ever going to make a home there.

Some time later, I walked into a different radio station for an interview, and right away it felt like I'd come home. The energy in that space felt comfortable to me. That job, I got.

Then there was the time when a realtor was showing me homes in Alexandria, VA. We saw a bunch of houses that day, but there was one that I couldn't leave fast enough. The vibe was just awful -- foreboding, even. I wondered whether the owners had had a huge fight (or worse) before leaving that day, and the bad energy still lingered.

I've learned to trust these feelings, both the "come on in!" and the "get out!" variety. And I relied on it when I was looking for a place to retire. Not totally, of course -- I had a list of more practical requirements, as well. But of all the places I visited in Colorado, none felt totally like home. Then I came back to Santa Fe and realized this city had been slyly courting me for years.

I've also incorporated the idea into my writing. In Maggie in the Dark, the first book of the Transcendence trilogy, Maggie Brandt is practically yanked off the highway as she drives past the Great Circle Earthworks in Ohio. The spirits of that place whack her upside the head, and the experience sets the story in motion.

A photo of a stunning landscape can stun and even enthrall. But to really feel the spirit of the place, I think, you need to be there.

What about you? Have you ever gotten a strong vibe from a place, either good or bad?

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These moments of spirited blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

The Great Transcendence giveaway.

I promised last week that there would be a giveaway this week. So here we go.

It's hard for me to believe that so much time has passed since the idea for the Transcendence trilogy germinated in my mind. It started with a random stop at the Great Circle Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, in the summer of 2016, and ended at my desk in our old apartment in October of last year. During that period, the events I wrote about in Mom's House came to a head. You could say the Transcendence books were as transformative for me as they were for Maggie.

But enough about me. Here's the scoop on the contest:

I'm giving away two -- count 'em, two -- sets, signed (naturally), of the trilogy, which is comprised of:

Maggie in the Dark
Maggie on the Cusp
Maggie at Moonrise

Down below is the Rafflecopter thingy, which you all know how to operate by now. The contest is live as we speak; you have until midnight Saturday, July 7th, to enter. I'll announce the winners next Sunday, July 8th, at the usual time. Anybody anywhere can enter -- I'm pretty sure I can front postage to wherever in the world you are.

The question I want everyone to answer is a sort of preview of the next series, which is on my mind because I wrote the first words of the first draft of the first book today. Alert hearth/myth readers know this series will have something to do with river gods. But my initial idea is expanding as we speak, and may end up involving more than just the element of Water. So please let me know in the comments what your favorite element is -- Earth, Air, Fire, or Water -- and maybe a little bit about why, and I'll see whether I can work any of that into this next series of books.

Oh! The prizes!

One each of these can be yours! Enter below!

As always, the usual and customary rules apply:

1. Friends and family may definitely enter.
2. Winners of previous contests may win again.
3. There will be a winner. I am getting these books out of my house, one way or another.
4. As always, the judge's decision is arbitrary, capricious, and final.

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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

We have winners! and a knitting post.

First off, thanks to everybody who participated in the giveaway for the launch of Maggie on the Cusp. I've emailed all the winners, so check your inbox -- and don't forget to send me your street address if I don't have it yet (you know who you are).

I got a ton of good ideas for Maggie's road trip. In case you were curious (because I was), here's how the vote broke down:

Serpent Mound, Ohio: 3 votes
California: 2 votes
Cahokia: 1 vote
Mexico City: 1 vote

And for the "tell me where to send her" option, I received votes for the following destinations:

Bear's Ears National Monument, Utah
Canyon de Chelly, Arizona (Spider Rock)
Witch Mountain (see below)
Mackinac Island, Michigan (a.k.a. Turtle Island by the Ojibwe Indians)
Sedona, Arizona
Pacific Northwest

Witch Mountain sounds intriguing, but I'm going to need more info. I found a reference on this page to a Witch of Cedar Mountain, in Georgia. Maybe that's what the contestant was thinking of.

In any case, the suggestions are all awesome and much appreciated. And the timing couldn't be better -- I'm about 7,500 words into Maggie in Moonlight and she'll be hitting the road pretty soon. I may not get Maggie to all of these spots, but I'll definitely keep them in mind when I'm location scouting for future books. Thanks again, everyone!

And I keep forgetting to mention that Maggie on the Cusp is just 99 cents right now at Amazon -- as is the first book in the series, Maggie in the Dark. I'm going to leave the first book at a buck, but the price for book 2 will go up on Tuesday -- so if you don't have a copy yet, now's the time.

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And now to the knitting portion of this post.

You may recall that I was working on a very cool shawl called a Fire Dragon Wing, but I was running out of yarn. Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the maker of Lemonade Shop yarn did send me another skein -- yay! And the project is finished -- yay!

The bad news is that the colors aren't a very good match. Here's a shot of the part of the shawl with yarn from both skeins. The red from the new skein is pink and the orange is MIA.

But hey, it's done, and I'll wear it, and it's all good.

And I have moved on to another project. This one is called the Main Street Shawl. It's constructed very much like the Eden Prairie, which is still my favorite thing I've knitted. Here's what I have done so far. The lighting is bad in the top left corner of the photo, so I'll tell you that the square that looks maroon is a deep rose, and the triangle that looks black is actually purple.

My next step is to pick up stitches along the inside edges of the big V where the white yarn is sitting, knit a few rows of black for a border, and then fill in the empty space with the white yarn. Then I'll pick up stitches along the left side of the rainbow strip, do a black border, and knit a big chunk using the lavender yarn. Then I'll pick up and knit a black border around the whole shebang and it'll be done.

This one, I have plenty of yarn for. As long as I don't run out of black...

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

The Big Maggie Giveaway.

First, let me say that here at hearth/myth, our hearts go out to the folks in the path of Hurricane Harvey. For those of us who are too far away to help in person, the Red Cross is taking donations of both money and units of blood. You can give online, and look up the location of a blood drive near you, at redcross.org.

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Seems like a bad day for frivolity, but Maggie Muir Brandt -- the main character in the Transcendence trilogy -- has had experiences that are anything but frivolous over the course of the first two books. In Maggie in the Dark, her ex-mother-in-law practically ordered her to Rockville, Maryland, to help her recover from cancer surgery because the woman was so horrible that no one else would come. In Maggie on the Cusp, our heroine is back home in Indiana, but her mother seems to be losing her grip on reality and her brother wants Mom's house. To make things right for everyone involved, Maggie has to expose family secrets and navigate her own emotional minefield. And as a reward, she gets to renew the Earth. Which, to be honest, doesn't sound like much of a prize.

So in the final book of the trilogy, Maggie in Moonlight, she gets to hit the road.

I haven't started writing Book 3 yet, but I have a rough outline, and there are a few places Maggie is going to have to visit in order to move the plot along. But other than that, her itinerary is up for grabs. So I'm appealing to you guys: What should Maggie not miss on her road trip? She's going to be in an RV, so let's keep it to continental North America. Click the road trip question in the Rafflecopter below, and leave your suggestions in the comments.

Of course, contests offer prizes, and we have a few (photos in the Rafflecopter below):

• A commemorative Canadian quarter featuring Mishepeshu, the Underwater Panther, in its original packaging. (The Mishepeshu on this coin seems much nicer than the one in the Transcendence books.)
• A turtle hand puppet from IKEA for your favorite kid. Or for you. No judging here, no sir.
• Five lucky people will win a deluxe Maggie in the Dark bookmark, each adorned with a festive ribbon and a removable turtle charm hand-beaded by Yrs Trly.

So that's seven prizes total. Which means I need at least seven entrants. So step up, y'all.

The contest will run for a week, until 6pm Eastern Daylight Time next Sunday, September 3rd. But don't wait to enter. The prizes aren't going to get any better (trust me -- this is all I got).

The standard hearth/myth contest rules apply, and they are as obnoxious as always:

1. Friends and family may definitely enter.
2. Winners of previous contests may win again.
3. There will be a winner. I am getting this stuff out of my house, one way or the other.
4. As always, the judge's decision is arbitrary, capricious, and final.

Thanks for playing, and good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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

Maggie's on the cusp at last.

Yes, that's right -- Maggie on the Cusp: Transcendence Book 2 is out at long last.

I strive to publish three novels a year: the first in March or April; the second in May or June; and the third around the middle to the end of November. As you know, the first book in the Transcendence trilogy, Maggie in the Dark, came out in March. This one should have been out in late May or early June -- but it wasn't.

For starters, the themes in this book are tough. Maggie's mother is losing her memory, and it's happening very fast. And then, too, Maggie is being forced to deal with her brother Sandy, who has verbally abused her for as long as she can remember.

We hear a lot about physical abuse -- primarily, I think, because it's so obvious. If someone regularly roughs you up, you're going to have bruises and broken bones. The damage from sexual abuse may be less obvious. Psychological -- verbal and emotional -- abuse often accompanies these physical acts. But it can stand alone, too. Gaslighting is one form of psychological abuse; bullying is another. And the wounds from any sort of abuse run deep.

Here's how Maggie describes her relationship with her brother:

I know a lot of people are rotten to their siblings when they’re all kids, but as they mature, they grow closer. Well, Sandy never grew out of it. I was always the dumb kid sister. His greatest joy, when we were kids, was to tease me until I cried; among his greatest joys as an adult was to find something to needle me about until I exploded. When I was a teenager, it was my hair or my weight; then, later, it was my marriage. “Why did you marry a guy named Eugene?” he would ask, laughing derisively. “What a stupid name. And he’s such a poser. For God’s sake, Maggie, couldn’t you find somebody normal to screw around with? And what the hell were you thinking, letting him knock you up? Don’t you know anything?” 

Given Sandy’s opinion of my husband – which, it galled me to admit later, wasn’t far wrong – but anyway, you would think my brother would have been thrilled to learn that I was divorcing Gene. But no, that was my fault, too. “So you’re just gonna give up? Marriage is supposed to be ‘til death do you part, Maggie. Did you miss that part when you said your vows? Or maybe Jews don’t believe in that sort of thing. Is that it?”

I’d grown up enough by then that I refused to let him see me cry when his barbs sunk to the bone. I would sit there and take it, poker-faced, with my nails digging into my palms, until eventually he would give up and go away. But I internalized the abuse. His comments became the nagging soundtrack in my head – the voice that told me it wasn’t worth going back to finish college, that I might as well work at the casino with the other high school graduates who’d never made it out of our little town, because after all the things I’d screwed up in my life, that was all I deserved. 

Abuse doesn’t always leave a visible mark.

Maggie needs to get on with the business of renewing the earth, the task Granny -- who's the human avatar of the Shawnee creator spirit Kokumthena -- handed her in Maggie in the Dark. But she needs to settle her personal relationships first. And that means resolving her conflict with Sandy -- and with their mother, too.

Anyway, you can click here for the Kindle version. The paperback was just approved; if you absolutely can't wait to order one, it's available from CreateSpace here. Otherwise, it'll be available from Amazon and other major online booksellers in a few days.

I hope I haven't put you off from reading the book -- it's not all grimdark. And I'm planning to inject a little fun with a contest here next week. Stay tuned...

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

Why you should write what you know - with a caveat.

One of my fellow minions at Indies Unlimited, Gordon Long, posted an article this week about how, in his opinion, scientists shouldn't write science fiction. You've heard the saying, I trust, that you should write what you know. Gordon's argument stands that saying on its head.

His premise is that scientists tend to geek out over their subject matter and include way too much detail -- which, while accurate, will bore the reader to tears. He does allow for the fact that sci-fi readers expect infodumps of technical information about the way things work in the story's universe. That's pretty much a given in sci-fi. But he says it's too easy for overly enthusiastic new authors to include too much information in an infodump, or too many infodumps in a story, or appendices (in a novel!) with an excruciating level of detail.

Gordon's got a point, and it doesn't happen only in sci-fi. Years ago, I wrote a horror story that was set in a TV studio. I spent a lot of time in that story describing the layout of the studio, down to the position of the lights hooked up on the racks above the set. It was way, way, way too much detail -- so much detail that on a re-read years later, I was embarrassed I'd written it. (No, you can't read it. I think I lost it in a move -- and good riddance.)

The thing is that there are good reasons for scientists to write sci-fi. Regular readers of the genre do expect infodumps -- but they also expect the science behind the whiz-bang special effects to be plausible. The fiction part can't violate the rules of the science part; if it does, readers will call you on it. Or they'll call you an idiot. Or both.

What Gordon is arguing for, I think, is moderation -- authors should include only as much description and background information as is necessary to tell the story. Some authors resist the temptation to include too much detail by not inventing an extensive backstory at all, although that can get you into trouble in other ways (say, in book two).

Perhaps the best way for an author to avoid tedious infodumps is to enlist a layman or two (or more) as beta readers. You're looking for the holy grail here -- somebody who not only knows just enough to realize when the author is heading off into the weeds, but who is also willing to tell the author that those weedy bits need to be excised. An author could also trust their editor to tell where to cut, but editors cost money. Beta readers can help with the rough polishing before an author sends the book to the editor.

At the end of the day, I don't think Gordon's view is far from mine. Feel free to write what you know -- with the understanding that all those details that are so fascinating to you may bog down your story for your readers.

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Good news on the Transcendence front: Today is the last day of the first session of Camp NaNoWriMo this year, and I was able to "win" last night by topping 45,000 words on Maggie on the Cusp. While camp is over, the book is not; I have a handful of scenes yet to write. But I expect I will wrap that up here in the next week or so.

Also, and speaking of sci-fi: Plan 559 from Outer Space Mk. III is out! I had a little fun with the characters in my story, "Shreeg." See if you can tell who Captain Lodestone is based on. First person with the correct answer wins an autographed paperback of Maggie in the Dark. Good luck!

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

Maggie's crazy old ladies.

Alert hearth/myth readers will recall that last week, I mentioned that all the older women in the Transcendence trilogy have memory problems. And I promised that this week, I would talk about why that is.

So here we are -- and here I sit, wishing I'd left myself a few notes about the topic. Ironic, right?

Pixabay | CC0

I could try to jog my memory by talking about what a growing problem dementia is. In 2015, the World Health Organization said more than 47 million people worldwide live with dementia -- and Dr. Margaret Chan, the WHO's Director-General, said that number is expected to triple by 2051. "There's a tidal wave of dementia coming our way" as the world's population continues to age, she said. The WHO is advocating for a worldwide plan for dealing with dementia, treatment for which is projected to cost upwards of $1.2 trillion by 2030.

I could also mention that Alzheimer's Disease, which gets most of the press, isn't the only type of dementia. There's also vascular dementia, which can occur following a stroke; Lewy body dementia, which happens when abnormal proteins appear in nerve cells for reasons as yet unknown; and frontotemporal dementia, which happens when certain regions of the brain shrink, causing behavior and emotional changes as opposed to memory problems. In fact, any disease or condition that damages brain or nerve cells can cause dementia.

And some other things cause memory issues, too. Stress is a big one; drug interactions, particularly in older people, are another. The good news is that those conditions can be reversed. Others can't yet, though. So the trick is figuring out what's causing the memory loss -- and in the case of Alzheimer's, where the cause is a buildup of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain, you can't know for sure without an autopsy.

But I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking of all that last week. So let's talk about Maggie's crazy old ladies for a minute. (Hey, I made them up. I can call them crazy if I want.)

I mentioned Granny last week. She is a kindly but mysterious figure in a pastel track suit. She travels around the country with Zed, her assistant, in an ancient VW bus. She keeps calling Maggie by the wrong name, which she says doesn't matter because "it's not your real name anyway." She claims to be channeling a Shawnee Indian creator spirit, and she believes she's supposed to rescue or renew or reach 1,054 people before the next major lunar standstill in April 2025. (I talked briefly about lunar standstills last week.) Granny seems to have made peace with her occasional lapses of memory, maybe because Kokumthena is filling in the gaps for her in Her own way.

Ruth Brandt, Maggie's former mother-in-law, is a pill. She believes she knows best how to live everyone else's lives, especially those of family -- and she still considers Maggie family, even though Maggie's been divorced from her son for ten years. Ruth is stressed out because of her cancer treatments, but that's only part of her problem. She's been keeping a big secret for decades, and the stress of that is also wearing on her. In Maggie in the Dark, it falls to Maggie to bring that secret out into the open.

The third old lady in Maggie's life is her mother, Shirley Muir. Maggie talks about her at the beginning of Maggie in the Dark; then we meet her at the end of the book, when Maggie returns home after a couple of months at Ruth's. Shirley's memory issues are a crucial element of the plot of the second book, Maggie on the Cusp, which I'm writing now, so I won't say much more.

Maggie herself is no spring chicken, and the stress she undergoes while she achieves her transcendence is bound to have an effect on her. I don't think it will make her crazy. But then, I'm only partway into Maggie on the Cusp. Our heroine still has a long way to go.

By the way, if you haven't yet picked up a copy of Maggie in the Dark, here's where to go to get one. And thank you!

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Camp NaNo progress: I had a great writing day yesterday -- Maggie on the Cusp now stands at about 15,000 words. I hope to add to that tonight, as I'll be out of pocket for a good chunk of the next two weekends, and I won't be able to employ my usual strategy of slacking off during the week and catching up in a marathon weekend session. The advantage to Camp NaNo is that in case I fall really far behind, I can adjust my goal so that I still "win". But that would mean finishing the first draft in May, and I'd really like to have it out of the way by the end of this month. Time will tell...

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

What is Maggie transcending?

Big publishing news this week: Maggie in the Dark is out!

Big hugs to those of you who have already picked up a copy. I know the book is a bit of an unknown quantity; I haven't talked much about it, other than mentioning that it has something to do with the giant earthworks that the Hopewell and other ancient Native American civilizations built in the Eastern and Midwestern part of the United States.

As it happens, the series doesn't have a whole lot to do with the earthworks themselves. But archaeologists have speculated that the Newark Earthworks in Ohio were built to mark the passage of time -- not just of seasons or years, but of the moon's transit across the heavens on its 18.6-year cycle -- and they've further speculated that ceremonies were held when the moon appeared to stand still, at the northernmost and southernmost points in its cycle. Presumably, the thinking goes, the ceremony or ceremonies may have involved an effort to renew both the moon and the earth. So the idea of renewing the Earth was one of the jumping-off points for me, when I began planning the series last year. As Transcendence is the series title, it makes some sense that someone may have to transcend something in order to accomplish Earth's renewal.

Renewal was a theme in the Pipe Woman Chronicles, too. The whole thing was put in motion by White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman, who believed monotheistic religion was preventing humanity from becoming all it could be. Her solution was to send all the gods and goddesses back down to Earth to knock heads and persuade everyone to behave. But that turned out to be harder than it looked. The peace that Naomi and Joseph fought so hard to attain in the first five books was almost constantly under attack. In the end, the gods couldn't solve every problem. Humans still had to save themselves.

Pixabay

Where the Pipe Woman Chronicles went for a global renewal, the Transcendence trilogy is much more personal. Here, the gods don't show up on anyone's doorstep; they send messages by way of mysterious strangers, gut feelings, and dreams. The main character, Maggie Brandt, meets an elderly woman named Granny at the Great Circle Earthworks. Granny charges Maggie with -- you guessed it -- Earth's renewal. Maggie's journey is a personal one, done face-to-face: she must revisit turning points in her life by visiting the people who were involved in them, and she must then repair the damage she did back then. Her reparations are sometimes more painful to others than the original wounds, but like surgery, they're necessary for healing. It's not easy. To make matters worse, she's going largely by gut instinct; her only road map is the copper turtle effigy she found when she was a child.

Another aspect of the series is that several of the characters are elderly women with memory problems. That's no accident. I'll talk about that next week.

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For the next few days, the Kindle edition of Maggie in the Dark is available at Amazon for just 99 cents. Please feel free to stop by and pick up a copy, if you haven't done so already. And thanks in advance!

Oh, and one more thing: If you know of anyone who might enjoy the Pipe Woman Chronicles, please let them know that they can get a copy of Seized for free at Instafreebie. Thank you! And I hope your friend will thank you, too...

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

Being paid for being there.

Kevin Phillips | PublicDomainPictures.net | CC0

I guess last week's post about the hawk was a little too woo-woo for some folks. It happens.

Anyway, this week, let's talk about something less esoteric: money. Specifically, a universal basic income -- a guaranteed income for everybody.

The idea has been around for a long time -- since at least the late 18th century, according to the authors of Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. This book by Phillippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght was originally published ten years ago, but the authors have recently released an updated version.

Anyway, back to this radical far-left idea of giving money to people who haven't worked for it -- you know, like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute have suggested in recent years. (Hint: these two outfits are conservative think-tanks.)

As I said earlier, the idea has been kicking around for about 250 years, but it's come into focus lately because of the continuing problem of income inequality in the West. Futurists -- and I don't just mean people who write science fiction -- believe the disparity in income between rich and poor will only get worse in coming years, largely because of automation. We're already seeing the effects of automation on jobs here in the US, even if we're reluctant to admit it. Robotic machines are already commonplace in automobile factories and slaughterhouses, to name just two places that used to hire a lot of people for dangerous, repetitive work.

In another telling sign, online ordering and in-store kiosks are beginning to invade fast-food and fast-casual restaurants. There's a Panera Bread outpost down the block from my day job that has positioned ordering stations armed with tablets so that you have to dodge them to get to the counter. You can still place an order with a real, live person, but it's clear they'd rather you didn't.

In short, it's estimated that one-third of current US and UK jobs are liable to go away due to automation. Granted, those people won't all be out of work, necessarily; during the Industrial Revolution, people left farming to go to work in newfangled factory jobs. But not everyone did; some folks were left out, just as is happening today. And we're already seeing the effects of our economic paradigm shift. Middle-aged whites without college degrees -- the demographic most deeply affected by our shift away from heavy industry to a service economy -- are dying younger now, often from drugs, alcohol, or suicide. Some researchers are calling them "deaths of despair."

And here's another problem with widespread automation: If too many people are chronically out of work, fewer people will have enough money to buy the things our businesses sell. Shopping 'til you drop requires disposable income. The rich have it, but they tend to hoard their cash, as we saw during the Great Recession. Lower demand for goods and services means lower production, which means more layoffs -- and that's when the service economy will begin to circle the drain.

In this context, researchers like van Parijs and Vanderborght think it wouldn't be a bad idea to give everybody a little cash -- just enough to keep them out of poverty. Before you think this is a "free money" scam that would encourage people to sit home and be lazy, let me tell you that the authors are suggesting these payments equal one-quarter of the country's average personal income. Here in the US, that amounts to about $12,000 a year. I don't know of many people who could live rich on that kind of money. But it would keep people from worrying about paying their basic bills: rent, utilities, food.

I mentioned laziness a minute ago. Yes, Americans tend to be suspicious about giving people something for nothing. But van Parijz and Vanderborght suggest thinking of it not as welfare, but as a payment for our "social capital" -- the riches in natural resources and institutional know-how that has built up over centuries, and in which we all share without ever contributing to it. And the payment would go to every adult, not just those who are out of work.

I can see an advantage for artists and writers. I can't tell you how many indie authors I know who launched their writing careers after they retired. I haven't taken a poll, but I suspect many of them waited until they had an income stream they could count on -- from Social Security or a pension -- and were then free to pursue a career they would have embarked on sooner if money weren't an issue.

I expect we'll be hearing more about this idea in the months and years to come. Finland is beginning a multi-year experiment with a universal basic income this year. It will be interesting to see their results. I'll let you know what I hear.

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Writing news: I'm just about ready to pull the trigger on Maggie in the Dark. Look for a newsletter about it this week. What's that you say? You're not subscribed? Then you should use the QR link below to sign up. I'd do it now. Just sayin'.

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

Happy red-tailed spring!

Tomorrow is the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, and it's also the day many Pagans observe Ostara.

I don't plan to be awake at 6:28 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time to welcome in spring on the dot. But we will be coloring eggs (I bought a set of dyes with glitter this year -- it'll be a glorious mess!) and munching on chocolate bunnies. (Eggs and bunnies are ancient symbols of fertility that the early Christian church co-opted to encourage pagans to convert, but I digress.)

Usually, here in DC, we welcome spring with daffodils and blooming trees -- pink magnolias and cherry blossoms. This year, however, we had a ridiculously warm February that sped up the blooming schedule, followed last week by a winter storm that featured snow, sleet, and freezing rain. That storm, together with too many nights in the 20s, put paid to the pink magnolias, as well as about half of the blossoms on the celebrated cherry trees that ring the Tidal Basin. We'll still have trees with flowers this year, but it won't be as pretty as usual.

skeeze | Pixabay

So I'm pinning my hopes for this spring on a different herald: the red-tailed hawk that I saw from our dining room window this morning. He (or she -- there's not much difference in their coloring) looked a lot like the one in this photo.

Our apartment is on the sixth floor, so we see a lot of birds. There's a flock of crows in the neighborhood, and some of them fly past our windows (even after dark! I think of them as juvenile delinquents with nothing better to do than cruise Shirlington in packs, looking for the tastiest offerings from the local restaurant dumpsters). And we have blue jays, robins, sparrows -- the usual feathered crowd. But I don't see a lot of hawks here. So this one caught my eye, with his typical raptor flight style -- soaring slowly with wings outstretched, eyeing the ground below for a little something for brunch. "That's a hawk," I said. And when he obligingly circled away from our building, I amended my statement: "That's a red-tailed hawk!"

Ted Andrews, who died in 2009, knew a thing or two about animals and their magical connections. He devoted four pages to hawks in his book Animal Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small, and two of those pages cover the red-tailed variety. It's fitting that I saw my new friend when I did; Andrews wrote that hawks' power is greatest at the spring and fall equinoxes. Like other high-flying birds such as crows and eagles, hawks are considered carriers of spiritual messages. But Andrews said the red-tail "has ties to the kundalini, the seat of the primal life force... It may pop up as a totem at that point in your life where you begin to move toward your soul purpose more dynamically."

Red-tailed hawks are fearless -- and deadly. Andrews said he once saw a red-tail attack a snake and carry it off, the snake's head hanging by only a shred of skin. He suggested those with a relationship to the red-tail should be careful in expressing themselves: "There will unfold within you the ability to tear off the heads of any snakes in your life, or anyone or anything seen as an enemy." (As some of you know, I've been in a lengthy struggle to sort out issues related to my mother's estate. In light of that whole mess, I found this part of red-tail's message very interesting.)

In any case, my new friend seems to be saying that delays and wheel-spinning are coming to an end for me. That's a much more positive message than dead cherry blossoms. I'll take it.

***
Speaking of progress: I'll be putting the finishing touches on Maggie in the Dark this week; look for publishing news next weekend. Which is good, because I'm hoping to draft book 2, Maggie on the Cusp, during CampNaNoWriMo in April. And I'm already thinking about writing some spin-off stories featuring two characters who only get a couple of scenes in this book.

In addition to that, I'm working on a sci-fi story for the next Five59 anthology, which should be published in mid-April.

Why, it's almost like a dam is breaking...

Happy spring!

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

STEEEEEEEK!

You may recall, in my last knitting-related post, I made mention of a project called the Wrought Iron shawl, a.k.a. the Endless Colorwork Shawl of WTF Was I Thinking. I started working on it in October and had set it aside for NaNoWriMo and the holidays and pussy hats and, well, you get the idea. I knew it was going to take me a long time to finish. I even said so in that post in January.

Well, it's done.

To goad myself into finishing it, I signed up for a how-to-steek class with Ann Weaver at fibre space, our closest local yarn shop. Steeking is a technique that's used in colorwork -- i.e., knitting that incorporates two or more colors of yarn in the same row. Rather than cut the yarn every time you change colors, you carry the yarn you're not using on the back of the work, so it's right there when you're ready to start using it again. Now when you're making a regular old flat knitted fabric with just one color of yarn per row, you turn the work when you get to the end of a row and knit back with the wrong side facing you. But when you're doing colorwork, it's difficult to knit back -- the floats make it hard to see which color you're supposed to use next. So knitters devised a way to join the sides of the work with a panel of extra stitches, so you can knit the project in the round, with the right side always facing you. That panel is called a steek. And when you're done knitting the thing, you take a pair of scissors and cut down the center of the steek.

I am not even kidding.

The class I took was designed to introduce knitters to steeking by using it to remodel old sweaters. Ann brought in a bunch of sweaters she'd picked up at thrift stores, and most people practiced their steeking on these recycled sweaters. But I brought the ECSofWTFWIT.

The trick is to stabilize the steek on either side of where you're going to cut. In class, we learned how to stabilize the edges with both hand-sewing (backstitch, if you know embroidery stitches) and crochet. You can also use a sewing machine, which sounds like it would be quick, but it can be awkward -- bits of yarn will get hung up in the feed dogs or on the presser foot.

Anyway, I decided I liked hand-sewing best. In the first photo (which Ann took), you can see the ends of the light gray yarn I used to stabilize the edges. I took the second one after cutting the steek. You can see the ragged edge on the side at the front edge of the chair.

Ann is a terrific instructor and I learned a great deal in the class. I also met my goal -- I cut the steek on my shawl. Yay!

But I wasn't done yet. I still had to finish the edges by knitting a border -- and that meant picking up stitches all the way around all four sides of the shawl. It, um, took a while. The next photo shows what it looks like when you've got 800 stitches, give or take, on a 60-inch circular needle. They were packed on pretty tightly. As I knitted the border, I had to keep stopping to manually shove the stitches around the cable. Binding off all those stitches wasn't a boatload of fun, either.

But at long last, the ECSofWTFWIT is done. Here's what it looks like, border and all. It's beautiful. And I am never, ever doing one of these again.

***
I heard that: "But what about your writing, Lynne?" Yes, yes, I'm getting to that. Maggie in the Dark
is back from my editors, and with any luck, I'll have publishing news for you in the next week or so. Stay tuned...

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

New Year, same old clickbait arguments.

Envy by Josse le Court - National Museum, Krakow |
CC 1.0

Welcome to 2017, which a whole lot of us hope won't be as bad as we think it will.

The Huffington Post must have had a slow week last week -- wait. Of course they did. It was the week between Christmas and New Year's; barring some huge breaking news story, everybody's on vacation. So anyway, somebody at HuffPo reached into the blogger slush pile last week and decided to run this submission that retreads all the old complaints about indie publishing: indies are hacks, and self-publishing is only fit for the elderly who want to pass along their life histories to their kids and don't want to take the trouble to learn how to write properly, and so on. You know, the usual stuff.

Predictably, the comments section lit up with indies taking umbrage. The author of the piece, Laurie Gough, had the grace in her responses to retreat a little, and admit maybe she spoke a little hastily. Still, some folks felt compelled to mention that Gough's comments might have been spurred by sales envy, as many indie books sell better than hers. The responses included this blog post, which advanced the usual arguments against attitudes like Gough's with a supersized side of insults.

Maybe it's because I'm getting over the flu (thanks, 2016, for that parting shot), but the whole thing is making me tired.

Look, we've been fighting this stigma since -- what, 2009? 2010? And you know what? We don't hear much about it anymore. That's partly because the complaints are starting to sound like sour grapes, like Gough's does. But it's also partly because trad-pubbed midlist authors are pulling their backlists from their publishers and self-pubbing those older books, and making more money now than they did before.

To recap: yes, many indies employ professional-level editorial staffs (including beta readers) and cover artists, as well as more dedicated marketing managers than your average overworked PR person at name-a-trad-publisher; yes, many indies have more education and experience as writers and editors -- paid experience, even! -- than the politicians and starlets who get the big-ticket contracts these days; yes, some indie books are terrible, but then so are some trad-pubbed books; and yes, in today's publishing world, getting a contract is mostly about luck -- unless you're an indie who works your butt off to maneuver your way onto a bestseller list, at which point agents who know a golden ticket when they see one will begin pestering you to let them sell your work to a "real" publisher.

Can we just stipulate all that?

And then, the next time somebody decides to publish one of these tired, disproven rants, can we all just not react? Because I suspect that if articles like these stop getting clicks, publications like HuffPo will stop running them -- and then we can put this pointless conversation to bed, once and for all.

***
I'm actually feeling much better today. Thanks for asking.

***
Writing news: Editing will commence shortly on Maggie in the Dark. In addition, just today, I finished a short story (epic fantasy!) for the next Five59 anthology. I'll let you know how that goes.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

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

The 2016 dumpster fire.

It all started a few days ago, when I saw a photo on Facebook of a festive felt dumpster, with felt flames filling the interior of the dumpster, and "2016" embroidered in gold on the front.

I laughed in empathy, because this year really has been a dumpster fire. From the multitude of musicians and actors we've lost (Florence Henderson of "The Brady Bunch" and Ron Glass of "Firefly" being the most recent), to this month's election results (I mentioned I'm a progressive, right?), to the standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota (#waterislife), this year has been miserable and disheartening in ways too numerous to count.

It might not be the sort of year you want to commemorate on a Christmas tree. But if you were going to do it, this is the ornament that would sum things up.

I showed the photo to my daughter Amy and said, "Do you have any felt?" Not only did she have felt, but she had more fabric paint than any normal person should own. And a hot glue gun. And a red jingle bell. And my daughter Kat came up with sparkly ribbon.

In short: It was on.

The creator of the original dumpster fire ornament, Jennifer Brooks, published her step-by-step directions in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune today. Hers are way funnier than ours, so please go and read them. (Besides, I'm indebted to her for checking the AP style manual to see whether "dumpster" still needs to be capitalized. It doesn't.) But I think ours is prettier, if you can say a dumpster fire is pretty. Here's how we made it.

Materials:
1 Sheet of copy paper or notebook paper
5 sheets of felt -- 1 each of red, orange, yellow, and white (ours is white with sparkles), plus 1 color of your choice for the dumpster
Needle and thread
Fabric paint (we used red, gold, and blue, but whatever strikes your fancy) or embroidery floss
Hot glue gun
Jingle bell (optional)
Something to hang it on the tree with (we used 1/8-inch-wide metallic gold ribbon)

Directions:
1. Draw pattern pieces for the dumpster, the snow, and the flames on the copy paper and cut them out. I made the front of the dumpster 3" x 2" -- the size of a standard business card -- and attached a parallelogram to the left side. Amy drew patterns for the snow, and cut out the flames freehand (which is why I got her involved -- I knew I would be topping out my drawing skills with the parallelogram). She cut enough for 7 flames total, but feel free to go crazy and stuff in as much fire as you think the year deserves.
2. Cut 2 pieces of felt using the dumpster pattern piece. Pick 1 to be the front of the dumpster. Use fabric paint, or backstitch with embroidery floss, to outline the dumpster panels. Draw 2016 on the right-hand panel with a pen or pencil, and go over the numbers with fabric paint or backstitch. If you used fabric paint, let it dry for several hours or overnight.
3. Sew the front dumpster piece to the back dumpster piece. I used buttonhole stitch, but use whatever you can do that will hold the thing together. Don't sew the top shut -- that's where the flames go.
4. Sew or hot glue the snow to the top and bottom edges of the dumpster.
5. Stack your flame pieces (never mind what Jennifer did -- yellow is the hottest part of the flame, so it goes closest to the wick) and tack or glue them together.
6. Glue a row of flames to the back side of the front dumpster piece. Then glue the next row of flames to the back of the first row, and so on, 'til you run out of fire.
7. Affix your hanging loop. I cut a length of ribbon that was about 13" long, doubled it, and tied the cut ends together to make the loop. Then I cut a tiny slit near the top of the back dumpster piece and threaded the loop through, so the knot was hidden inside the dumpster. Amy then glued the dumpster back to the last row of flames, and also glued the loop to the middle flame in the back row.
8. Thread your jingle bell, if you're using one, onto the hanging loop. Then hang the whole shebang on your tree.

***
The other thing I've been doing, when I'm not helping to create dumpster fires, is working on the NaNo novel -- and I'm pleased to report that I finished it tonight. Maggie in the Dark, the first book in the Transcendence trilogy, is 50,670 words (according to NaNo's official validator). It's another urban fantasy, and it's kind of a dumpster fire right now (for one thing, I'm pretty sure I've named two characters Aaron). Editing will commence in January. But the first draft is in the can, and normal life can now resume.

Rest assured that I'll have more to say about this novel later. For now, happy writing, happy crafting, and come on, 2017.

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