The Summer Reading Challenge is wrapping up.

 

copyright Lynne Cantwell 2021

This is it, y'all. The final week of the hearth/myth 2021 Summer Reading Challenge has begun. And I have a confession to make. 

See the books in the photo? Well, the three books plus a Kindle. Anyway, they represent two things: The hardback copy of The Payoff is the grand prize for the person who has read the most books on our list; the others are books I fully intended to read this summer and never got around to.

I don't know about you, but ever since all this business with the pandemic started, I've had a really hard time concentrating for long enough to get much reading done. But when I compiled the the list of books that's the basis for the contest, I had such great plans. I'd already read a ton of the books on the list, and so many of the others looked really good. Surely I'd be able to dive in and knock off a bunch of them in short order. Right?

Yeah. Not so much. 

I started one and bailed. Then I read a couple of books that aren't on the list at all (what was I thinking?). I picked up one from the list that took me way too long to get through (I blame packing and moving for that), but I did finish it at last. Then I spent way too much time on Facebook. Then finally, last week, I knocked off one. Today, I started another, and I can tell I'll have that one done by the end of the week, no problem. But the books in the pile in the photo? I'll get to 'em. Just not by Saturday.

All of which is to say that if you, too, had good intentions to make headway on our list, but got sidetracked for some reason, don't feel bad. I'm right there with ya.

When you're toting up the books you've read, if you're pretty sure you'll finish the one you're working on by Saturday, go ahead and count it. You have my permission. I mean, I intend to do the same thing.

And if you're certain that you're not going to finish any more books by next weekend, that's okay, too. Go ahead and send me your tally now -- no shame, no blame. We've all had a rough year, after all.

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If it's not clear from the foregoing: I'm accepting contest entries as of now. 

There are several ways to get your final tally to me: email me at lynne.cantwell@hearth-myth.com; leave a comment below; or I'll even take your total in a comment on Twitter or in a Woo-Woo Team post on Facebook. (Those last two weren't in the official rules to start with, but they are now.)

One more time, here's the list. Send me your totals by Saturday! I'll post the winners (and my own total) here on the blog next Sunday. Thanks! 

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A couple of housekeeping issues: The final episode of The Atherton Vampire dropped on Kindle Vella on Friday, so if you're the sort of person who puts off reading a book 'til it's finished, go for it. In addition, the first three episodes of The Atherton Vampire II: Out of the Coffin will be released tomorrow. Sales of the first book haven't exactly beensmokin' hot. So while I intend to write a third book in the series, it won't be released on Vella; instead, all three will be available in Kindle editions before the end of October. Stay tuned for more on that.

bejotrus | Deposit Photos

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this month marks the tenth bloggiversary of hearth/myth. Yes, that's right -- I published my first post in this space on August 16, 2011. "I'm going to aim for a post a week," I said back then. "Let's see how long it lasts." Well, now we know: ten years and counting. Good job, me! This calls for balloons, and maybe even a cake!

Should I shoot for fifteen years next? How about twenty? Let's just see how long it lasts!

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These moments of celebratory blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Submit your contest entries by Saturday, September 4th! And of course: Get vaxxed!

 

We have a winner and Webb has a birthday!

First things first: Congrats to Chelsea Lawson, who won my bloggiversary contest! I let Rafflecopter pick the winning entry -- which is a good thing, because they were all so awesome that I would have had to give each of you a prize.

Chelsea picked July 18th because, she says, Webb was conceived on Halloween, thereby giving him the connection to spiders. My astrological resources say this would make his sun sign Cancer -- sensitive and emotional, and very attached to home and family.

In addition, Taurus and Cancer are compatible as friends -- which bodes well for Sage and Webb to continue being friends all their lives, once they get past the annoying-sibling stage.

This certainly takes a load off my mind. Thanks to everyone who entered. Webb and I really appreciate it.

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Now I'm going go and get all philosophical on you. Sorry in advance.

This graphic came across my Facebook newsfeed this week. It looks to me like the PostSecret page shared it originally, but as with many things social-media-related, who can tell for sure? In the same vein, the quote in the graphic is attributed to Buddha -- but like Abraham Lincoln says, just because you saw it on the intarwebz doesn't make it true.

According to Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist monk who blogs at fakebuddhaquotes.com, the quote is actually from Jack Kornfield's Buddha's Little Instruction Book -- which, according to Bodhipaksa, is not so much quotes from Buddha as it is Kornfield's re-interpretation of some Buddhist teachings.

He goes on to say that the same sentiment turns up in one of Carlos Castaneda's books, Journey to Ixtlan -- which might be why it rang a bell with me, as I read a bunch of Castaneda's books, once upon a time.

In any case, Bodhipaksa says the quote strikes him as a "deepity" -- something that sounds profound but, when you look deeper, ends up being trivial to nonsensical.

I dunno about that. If you read the sentence as saying we don't have as much time as we think we do, well, yeah, okay. That's a big duh. We often find that we don't have enough time to catch the bus, or to do the laundry, or to pursue our dreams -- big stuff and small stuff, we never seem to have enough time to get it all done.

But the quote seemed to me to be tweaking a mindset that a lot of us have, that someday, one of these days, we'll get around to all those big plans. We have a tendency to put off certain things that are important to us because we're sure we'll have time later. Right? Life is long, after all. We'll do it after the kids go off to college, or after we retire.

As I get closer to retirement age myself, I've been noticing a disturbing pattern: women who have worked in office jobs for decades are dying just a few years after they retire. Maybe two or three years after. Relatively few make it to a ripe, old age, and the ones who are living longest seem to be those who go into retirement with a reason to get up in the morning. I've read research fairly recently that seems to bear this out.

I'm not about to argue with a Buddhist monk about the profundity of a misquote I found on Facebook. But I figure it's not a bad idea to be reminded occasionally not to put off the important stuff.

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

Happy birthday, hearth/myth!

I had a little time on my hands before we left for West Virginia. Can you tell?

Well, the blog is four years old as of today. I thought it was time to spiff things up a little. So I gave hearth/myth a makeover for a bloggiversary present.

But of course, the best birthday parties involve gifts -- and not just for the birthday boy girl blog, but for the guests, too. You know, like a door prize. Or if we're going to be truly classy, a schwag bag.

I'm fresh out of fancy totes and million-dollar watches, but I did manage to put aside $10 for an Amazon gift card, as well as a set of paperbacks of the Pipe Woman's Legacy duology, which of course I will sign for the lucky winner. All you have to do is help me figure out when Webb's birthday is.

See, when I was plotting Annealed, the final book in the Pipe Woman Chronicles, I had to know when Sage would make her appearance. She had to be born at pretty much the same time as Naomi was brokering the power-sharing agreement between Jehovah and the pagan pantheons. That put her birth in the general vicinity of May 2013. I also knew that I wanted Sage to be born on the Taurus/Gemini cusp. Gemini would make her creative and adaptable, while Taurus would make her grounded, but stubborn. After looking at the calendar and what I needed to accomplish between the end of Tapped and the mediation, I settled on May 15, 2013, as the date of Sage's arrival. And it fits her, doesn't it? Sage is creative, forthright, pretty well grounded for somebody who's been told since birth that she's slated to save the world -- and stubborn as the day is long.

Then, when I was planning Scorched Earth and realized Tess would need a lawyer, I decided to bring Naomi and her family to Washington for a visit. And I didn't want Sage to be an only child; a kid with a pedigree like hers needed a younger brother to annoy her. Hence, Webb.

The events in the Pipe Woman's Legacy books occur primarily in the fall of Sage's junior year of college, which makes her 20 years old. Webb is a senior in high school, which makes him 18. There's no discussion of a birthday celebration for him in either book, so his natal day cannot be any time from late August through early December. He's crafty in multiple ways -- he's a Trickster, allied with Iktomi, and of course his superpower is knitting and other types of fiber art. He knows the future. And he's extremely loyal.

So your task, should you choose to accept it (and I hope you will!), is to assign Webb a birthday. Post your suggestion someplace where I can see it -- in the comments below, ideally, but I'll accept suggestions at Facebook and Twitter, too, as long as you also enter the Rafflecopter.

Now, I know y'all will be tempted to give Webb your own birthday, or your brother's or whoever, but that's not going to cut it unless you can back it up with a reason. So: not just "it's my birthday!" but "Webb reminds me of So-and-so because (s)he knits/loves spiders/is very loyal, and So-and-so's birthday is this date." Or you could do some astrological-type research. Or whatever.

I know that's a lot of parameters, but you've got a week to work on it. Contest closes next Sunday, August 23rd. Good luck!

The usual and customary hearth/myth giveaway rules apply, to wit:

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 the other.
4. As always, the judge's decision is arbitrary, capricious, and final.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


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These happy bloggiversary moments have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The button stash.

This is only about half the stash.

The other day, I began thinking about knitting a new jacket for myself. I have the pattern picked out, and I bought the yarn last spring. (It's Jean Frost's Boyfriend Jacket and Glenfiddich Wool worsted weight in a purplish blue, if you care.) But I hadn't yet looked in the button stash to see if I had anything suitable. So I pulled out the drawer and went spelunking.

The vast majority of buttons in my stash came from my mother. She was an inveterate sewer and crocheter, but an indifferent knitter. When I sorted through her things after she died five years ago, I found several storage boxes full of fabric, zippers and bias tape in a range of colors and lengths, a couple of shoeboxes full of thread, and buttons out the wazoo. (I also found half-worked projects, including crocheted doilies using hooks so small that I'd go blind trying to complete them, and a knitted cable cardigan that she'd abandoned in the midst of the boring torso. I sympathized. Then I tossed the whole thing -- for a number of reasons, not least of which was that the pattern was missing. I might have been able to puzzle it out, but it just wasn't worth it.)

The state of Mom's button stash, when I found it, speaks volumes about who she was. For one thing, all of the stuff in this picture was dumped into a drawer in her sewing machine cabinet. She had strung together some of those that matched (sometimes on thread, sometimes on twist-ties), but there are plenty more sets that she didn't match up. Maybe she gave up.

You might notice that some of the buttons in the picture above (particularly the big brown one in the center at the very bottom) look as if they'd been used. That's because they had. Both of my parents grew up during the Great Depression, and when money was scarce, they learned to reuse. Mom was not above pulling the buttons off of a worn-out piece of clothing before throwing it away.  The thing is, she collected them way faster than she reused them -- hence the massive stash.

Sometimes, too, I think Mom had a bit of magpie in her. Even with this collection at home, she would buy cards of new buttons if the price was right, or if she liked them. Also in the stash are five or six cards, three buttons to a card, of 1/2" brown buttons with a sort of candy-striped brown-and-white rim. They're cute -- I used some of them on a baby sweater awhile back -- but what would have possessed her to buy fifteen of them? An adult-sized shirt only takes six or seven.

There's history in here, too, of various kinds. I've found mother-of-pearl buttons still on their cards, Bakelite plastic buttons, cards of buttons from the '60s priced at 29 cents (those days are long gone....). And too, sometimes I'll come across a lone button left over from an outfit Mom made for me (and wish she had scavenged them when I outgrew the outfit because they were cute!).

I should sort through the whole stash at some point and get rid of the stuff I know I'll never use: the basic white dress shirt buttons, the gray ones from my father's work uniforms, and the random other fasteners that got mixed in over the years. I should do that. I should.

But for now, I'll keep spelunking. I did come up with candidates for this jacket in several different styles, but I decided to wait on a final choice until the project is done. Who knows? Maybe none of them will work, and I'll have to go to the fabric store. I suspect I may have a little magpie in me, too.

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In case you missed my Facebook post, I'm pretty excited that I'll have two pieces in the upcoming BookGoodies fiction anthology. One is a Pipe Woman Chronicles prequel starring Joseph and George. The name of the book is 13 Bites and it should hit Amazon next Sunday, October 13th. I'll have more info (including, with any luck, a buy link) next week.

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Oh! And happy second blogiversary to Indies Unlimited, and many happy returns of the day! To mark the toddlerhood of our li'l nuclear-powered deathstar superblog, I saved the cake from the hearth/myth blogiversary in August. It's only a little stale.

Seriously, I am honored to be a part of such a talented and knowledgeable group of authors and bloggers. That they're also a lot of fun to hang out with is...well, it's icing on the cake. Happy anniversary to Stephen Hise, K.S. Brooks, and the rest of the gang.

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This moment of button-spelunking blogginess has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

hearth/myth is two!

~Magickal Graphics~

 

 Happy bloggiversary to me,

Happy bloggiversary to me!

Is it "bloggiversary" or "bloggoversary"? Hmm...pretty sure the Oxford Dictionary hasn't picked this one up yet.

Regardless, hearth/myth turned two on Friday.  The photo seems appropriate for a two-year-old, don't you think?

It is customary (as in: this is what I did last year) to take stock of where we are today, compared to where we were a year ago.  So: this week last year, I was about to unleash Fissured upon an unsuspecting public, and I hadn't even begun writing Tapped yet.

Today, of course, all five books of the Pipe Women Chronicles have been released, and I'm starting work on the next series in Naomi's universe -- Land, Sea, Sky. Here's a fun fact about the Pipe Woman Chronicles: During the free promotions I ran for the books this summer, Tapped blew all the others out of the water with 4,249 downloads worldwide. Next was Seized with 1,936 downloads; then Annealed (1,685), Fissured (1,453)  and Gravid (1,372).  If you assume the download numbers are based in large part on cover appeal, you can extrapolate that glowy wolves beat out flaming birds, and white buffalo are the least appealing.

 

I'm still on the staff at Indies Unlimited, and my work has been featured in a couple of their publications this year -- including the terrific First Chapters, which, if you haven't picked up a copy yet, you should.  I've also started doing LynneQuisitions, my interviews of big and biggish names in indie publishing, which is a lot of fun and lets me pretend to be a reporter again.

Alas, the Indie Exchange has morphed yet again, and I have lost track of it.  But I've been kicking up my involvement with BookGoodies. Look for more on that over the next few months.

In the awards department, Seized got a little attention from both Big Al's Books and Pals Reader's Choice Awards and the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.  And I picked up a couple of wins in the weekly flash fiction contests at Indies Unlimited.  I'm planning to devote a page at the new website to my flash fiction entries, so that they don't get lost in the shuffle.

 

And -- how could I forget? -- I started Rursday Reads in January.  I've had at least one author get excited to be a Rursday -- go figure!

For the coming year: Look for a Pipe Woman Chronicles omnibus e-book by Yule, as well as (fingers crossed!) the first book in the Land, Sea, Sky series. Past that, who knows? I guess we'll all find out together, won't we?

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This bloggiversary moment is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.