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Showing posts from December, 2016

Monday Musings: Quiet Joy and New Year's (Reading) Resolutions

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... being a post in two parts Part 1: Quiet Joy Last week I wrote  about my surprising disconnect from the Christmas season this year. Turns out I just had to wait a bit longer. The joy came — unexpectedly —in a quiet way. First, my friend Stephen shared his article from last January where he quoted from C.S. Lewis' chapter in Mere Christianity  on Christian marriage: This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. At the time, I only took this passage to mind in the way Stephen originally used it —in regard to fandoms and not killing the joy of partaking in stories by always demanding the first and strongest thrill f

Monday Musings: Confessions of a (Surprise) Christmas Curmudgeon

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Before you start telling me about how wonderful the Christmas season is, believe me – I know. It's my favorite holiday season, just as autumn is my favorite season of the year. But this year, it seems a bit more distant than usual. Autumn felt the same. My two favorite times of the year seemed to take forever to arrive this year, yet they have come and (in the case of Christmas, nearly) gone without much more than a whisper of my usual joy. In autumn's case, the dissonance between this year and previous autumns lies in the delayed cooling of the weather (and our cold snap coming before Halloween). I also didn't have as much of a boost in my creative drive as I usually do. I made one cross stitch sampler and a pair of fingerless gloves this year (the former for Samwise's room, the latter out of necessity).  Normally, I'm bouncing from project to project in the fall, both craft and writing. This year, not so much. Part of that probably come

The End of One Year, The Beginning of Another

It's been a crazy couple of months since I last posted. Our little Samwise joined us, and our lives haven't been the same since. I haven't been idle with my writing in those two months, though I'm still learning the balance of having a writing life with an infant in the house. I've been making a lot of progress with Albion Academy 's publication. We have a cover, which I'll officially reveal in an upcoming post, and I'm a few chapters away from the end of the galley proofing, which means the official manuscript will be finished before long! Some of you may remember the Almost an Inkling flash fiction contest I participated in last September and October. The winning entries in that contest have finally been released in an ebook from Oloris Publishing. You can pick that up in EPUB or MOBI format here . In anticipation of Albion Academy's forthcoming publication, I'm going to be overhauling Inexhaustible Inspiration. This change will come in t