notes & things | 8/01/2022

When I was younger, my mom had a hibiscus tree that sat in our living room for years. She would haul it outside in the summer, but it was too delicate to leave out in winter, so it claimed its spot near the front window where it was bathed in sun every morning and daily dropped large blooms and leaves all over floor. The past couple of years, there have been a profusion of hibiscus bushes near my dad's garage.  They are a different color than my mom's and that tree is long dead, but these get bigger, both in girth and bloom size every year and I am surprised they survive the winter to reappear. No one really seems to know how they got there, and yet, there they are.

I am back from the weekend away, dodging covid at every turn in a mostly maskless world. on the news, warnings of polio and monkeypox and we seem to be heading full-on into four horseman territory this year. These days, being in public feels like a big contagious mess and it probably is, given the amount of sickness I see in my social feeds. I am happy to be mostly away from it if I can help it. At times, I feel like people are impatient with my reticence( to go out for dinner, to parties, to anything that doesn't work with a mask, or even if masked, seems kind of crowded and risky.) I was never a germophobic person in the least, but I refuse to be caught off guard if things get really dangerous again. 

This week I will be finishing up a batch of new releases, reading some submissions, and working on some new paper goods designs for the shop for fall. Becuase yes, it's August 1st, which turns my mind immediately to back-to-school thoughts.I will also be starting the final edits phase for AUTOMAGIC, which needs clean-up for typos and such before I begin laying it out. I've been avoiding looking at it for the past few months hoping to have fresh eyes.  This helps, especially since that book came together at a weird time (but then all time feels weird.)

I think I solved my p-o-v issues on the Persephone poems I was struggling with--every epic needs a chorus to make sense of things and I may have found mine in Persephone's maidens--aka, the girls Demeter turned into sirens--either to help find her daughter or to punish them for not looking out for her depending on who you ask. The original sirens of course, were not necessarily the fish-tailed beauties, but more like harpies with wings.  The medieval era gave them fins, but then again, it all comes down to birds and mermaids to me, so maybe this is the perfect blend. A new strand wound through the project that til now has mostly focused on Demeter/Persephone and Hades/Persephone might be a good infusion. It will also give me some forward momentum and something to write toward as I round into the second part of the manuscript.