Author: Jonathon

Well we’ve almost survived another season. A season of frantic shopping. We bought months ahead for Trinity because at that time she was very into Barbie Fairytopia. So we bought the dolls ahead of time. Finished, pretty much. Right? Wrong. All you parents out there see this coming, don’t you? She’s ten, you’d think I’d not do this again, but . . . By early December she wasn’t into the Fairytopia, she wanted Groovy girls. But Gary, my ex, took her to Breakfast with Santa this year, so he was the one that knew what she wanted. But he had no idea that Jon and I had already bought stuff. In fairness, how could he have known. It’s certainly not typical of me when I was married to him to be ahead of the game plan for Christmas. I’ve been a last minute shopper for years. I’m trying to get over that, but this year, Winter Solstice came, and Jon and I went, what, when, how? Just once I’d like to be done with my book deadline before the holidays get really serious.
So, we, including Grandma Mary, have frantically searched for Groovy girl stuff. Even on line there are no more Groovy unicorns to go with the carriage and princess. We have the throne. Trinity asked Santa for two new Groovy girls and a bunk bed. We have one bunk bed, and when Mary found it, purchased it, the man that came in seconds later for the same item, looked at the bed in her bag, and she told him, “It’s mine.” Groovy girls are cool. I like them. They don’t wear thong underwear like some of the Bratz dolls. I’m sorry, my daughter is ten, I do not want her asking for clothes to match her doll, that includes lingerie. The Groovy girl stuff is really neat, but why on God’s green earth, are they this popular this year. Last year I was able to buy stuff up until the last minute for my friend’s child. But not this year. Sigh.
And may I complain that most of the dolls out there look like they ran away from a Nazi pre-school. You know, most of us aren’t blond and blue-eyed. Honest. So why are most of the dolls? It has gotten better in the last ten years. The first year that Trinity was old enough for a doll, really old-enough, there was almost nothing in the local Toys-R-Us but blue-eyed blonds. It’s much better now. We have some brunettes, some red-heads, some brown eyes, and some dolls that look like pale is not their natural color. Progress. And please don’t think I’m picking on Toys-R-Us, they are far ahead of the curve here in the mid-west. I’m told it’s a little more even on the coasts. But I don’t live there, so I don’t get to see it. Toys-R-Us are one of the few places where you can get good-quality toys all year long. A lot of the department stores, or big stores, stock stuff closer to Christmas, but their selection sucks compared to Toys-R-Us. My hats off to anyone working any toy store right now. Oh, heck, anyone who works retail should be up for a medal. Maybe the candy cane cross just for surviving this joyful time of year.
If you detect a note of Scrooge in me, well, yeah. Anyone who got the Christmas card from the fan club will know that I anticipated this mood. I’m wearing my new favorite shirt, black with red lettering that says, “If I wanted your opinion I’d read your entrails.” My cup for the day is one I bought around Halloween. It’s black with white letter that says, “Eat, Drink, and be Scary.” I’m finally come to the point in the book where I’m listening to Christmas music. It’s bad when I’m listening to Christmas music while I work. Even on Christmas Eve, it is not a good sign. What am I listening to? Dean Martin, MAKING SPIRITS BRIGHT.
Yeah, it’s pretty sad when I’ve got Deano crooning on the player.
Keep your spirits bright, your anger down, and may you enjoy your holiday as much as you’re able. No fist fights over toys, okay. You think I’m joking? I worked in a mall the year that Cabbage Patch dolls were at their hottest. I’ve worked retail. I’ve been in the trenches. Remember as you buy your stuff that the person across the counter, the person helping answer your questions has answered this question a million times already. They’ve checked out people who threw things at them. My assistant manager got hit in the face by a customer, and it wasn’t even about Cabbage Patch dolls. So, everybody play nice, and remember that a smile and a kind word can go a long way this time of year, especially to those that are trying so hard to help us find that perfect Christmas gift. Ho, ho, ho.

Today’s the day; winter solstice. It’s the first official day of winter. It is also the longest night of the year. The night when darkness reigns and the light seems faraway. For thousands of years, long before Christ was born in Bethlehem, people have huddled around their fires and prayed for the return of the light. There is this sense that if we do not pray it into being, that night will last forever, and winter will never end. Once the return of the light was called Mithras, or Apollo, now he is Christ. For all you Christians out there that didn’t realize how old this celebration is, I hope it wasn’t too big a shock. Some people use the idea that Christ is only the latest in a long list of children of promise to come to us, to sort of make fun of the fact that a lot of Christians do not seem to understand that Christ is not a new idea. The light has been reborn at this time of year for so very long. But I find that Christ being celebrated, the return of the son, or sun, no matter how you spell, the return of the light, after so many thousands of years to be comforting. Think how very much we human beings must need this idea. For us to keep repeating this concept again and again, for so long, must mean that we need this little baby. We need him to be reborn every year.
We need that journey in the cold winter’s night, to seek a star, to seek a child, to seek joy in the dark. We need to find that hope is alive and well, and newly born and laid in swaddling clothes in a manger. We need the child to be born of a loving Mother of Heaven. We need for her to give birth to the light, and bring god into the world.
There is a longing in most of us to know that goodness is powerful, too. That evil may dress better, but the darkness cannot withstand the light, for the light comes and the darkness fades. Light does triumph. Good is powerful.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep believing that. Just watching the news of an evening can make you feel overburdened with the pettiness, and the cruelty of the world. It is hard to hold onto the thought that God and Goddess love us. (Feel free to put Allah, or Buddha, or whatever face god shows to you, in that last sentence.)
The light will be reborn, and hope will come with it. Charity is something we do every day for those around us, and for strangers we will never meet, because that age old question, am I my brother’s, sister’s, keeper? Yes. I believe sincerely that Diety wants us to be happy, and one of the ways they do that is by putting kind and generous thoughts into the minds and hearts of us. We humans. We hands and heart of flesh, can be filled with spirit, and moved to make things better for those around us. It’s one of the reasons we’re here. So hope is reborn with the light. Charity is something we should keep all the year, what of faith. Faith is when you believe, but have no proof. Faith is what makes us believe that the darkness will not last, and the light will come. Faith is what helps us keep the fear and the cynicism at bay. Faith is what we hang onto like a well-worn rope, when all else has gone wrong. Faith is what makes us light that candle, and put that small flame up against the immensity of the dark. Faith is knowing that all over the world other people are lighting a candle, and that each small flame is part of a larger whole. We light the candle in the dark and know we are not alone.
The light is coming. The dark cannot stay. And that is not something we must take on faith, for tomorrow the night will literally be a little shorter. The nights will grow shorter and shorter until Summer Solstice, when the cycle will repeat itself. But it is a cycle, and the dark cannot hold. Solstice blessings on all of you, no matter what holiday you celebrate this time of year. Happy Yule, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah, and if I’ve missed anyone, my apologies. Happy Holidays folks, keep the faith, whatever flavor that maybe.

more things we like:
PS238 One of the Funniest indy comics around. #9 is in stores now, as is the 1st collection.

Nodwick The other comic by Aaron Williams. Funny if you’ve ever played any of Fantasy RPG.

City of Heros An OMRPG where you get to be a superhero. How cool is that. This is more me than Laurell, but I had to plug a third item….
more later

Three days of only three pages a day. Three days of wondering what the hell was wrong. Had I lost my way again? Was I just getting tired, again? Actually, no. My subconscious was busy working and hadn’t gotten around to telling my conscious mind about it, not yet. Last night it hit me.
Galen almost died on Merry. She truly thought she’d lost him. I don’t know if he’s the love of her life, or not, but he has been her favorite sidhe warrior since she was about fourteen. He loved her when none of the others cared about her at all. I’d set up a scene where we were sharing ourselves around, and Merry wanted it to just be her and Galen. If this is the last time they ever have sex on paper, then she didn’t want to share. Sometimes I think that I, personally, am just too monogamous for this series. There are times when sharing just doesn’t seem the way to go, yet we’ve got so many men in Merry’s life, and so much plot still to cover that I find myself trying to consolidate scenes. But some scenes are just not meant to be consolidated. Sometimes, one on one really is the best way to go. Two or more together has it’s place, but not always. Though when you read the scene you, the readers, may argue that we shared afterall. But as long as Merry and Galen see it as not sharing that’s really all that counts.

The Dogs pages were not working all the well, recently due to a error in case in some of the code.

its fixed now.

Enjoy!

Our friend Richard has gone to Italy. We dropped him at the airport. We, and his mom, hugged him good-bye and sent him on his way. It’s going to be really weird to not have him around for a few months. I don’t think Jonathon, or I, realized how much we were going to miss him until the moment came to let him go off, off, and away.
Jonathon is the first of his close male friends to marry, and as often happens, that means that the ones that can make the adjustment to his being married, hang around a lot. The ones that still act as if he can drop everything and go off to a concert on a school night, or that being married means you don’t still date your wife, well, those friends we’ve had to ‘talk’ to. But Richard wasn’t one of them. Richard got it. He moved into our lives and quickly became as a good a friend to me, as he was to Jonathon. That’s rare. I wish him well, but we miss him. I don’t think it will really sink in until a couple of weeks are passed and he hasn’t come over for dinner, or gone to a movie with us, or helped us explain Trinity’s homework to her. There are nights when Richard, or Jonathon did dinner, I was still up writing, and whichever of one of them wasn’t cooking helped Trinity with her homework. I think almost every couple I know that has school age children, and has both adults working outside the house, needs like a third adult some nights. We all seem so busy lately. I know families where the parents are so busy taking the kids from one event to another in the evening that they never really see eachother. The kids barely have time for homework. You know, I really don’t believe that the kids are better off for being in soccer, field hockey, dance, and scouts, oh, and don’t forget basketball, or baseball, or football, or sometimes almost all of it per child. That’s insane. No adult would want that schedule. Sometimes I think we keep ourselves busy so we don’t have time to decide whether we’re really happy, or just spinning our wheels. We seem afraid of silence, and good conversation.
I add the silence for all you men out there, because I’ll tell you what most men value more than good conversation. They value the ability to be in a room with people they care about, and are so comfortable with, that they don’t have to talk. Jonathon and I do that some nights, either when Trinity is with her father, or after she’s gone to bed. We sit in the livingroom and read, or just sit in companionable silence. One of our male friends, who is actually the husband of one of my best girlfriends, said a very profound thing once. His saying it was what gave me the clue to how much men value silence. My girlfriend and I were talking, of course, about how nice it was to get together with good friends, and talk. Her husband said, “Or not have to talk.” I asked Jonathon about it later, and he confirmed that sometimes the highest compliment for a man is that he wants to sit with you in total silence, and feels comfortable doing it.
I know, I know, hard for most women. It’s only this year that I realized just how much of our communicating is hardwired. Literally, as I’ve tried to cultivate silence, I find myself having to fight the urge to fill the silence. Fight the urge to talk. Sometimes I can’t help myself, but more and more, I’m finding that the handful of friends that I can not only talk to, but also sit in silence with, are becoming more and more valued.
I’d had this idea before a saw a show called, DEFENDING THE CAVEMAN, it is traveling the country now. I urge any couple to see it. It talks, hilariously, about many of the differences between men and women. One part of the show talks about how women always want men to talk to them, and how men just don’t get it. We’ve been forcing men to talk to us for decades, let’s try to give them companionable silence sometimes. Not angry silence, not why won’t you talk to me silence, but genuine happy to be in the same room with you silence. Try it, I know that Jonathon and I have found it lovely.
It is an interesting experience to be in a room with three adults, and having all of us reading, or making notes, in silence, but all of us being terribly content with that silence. Of the many things I learned from Joanthon’s and Richard’s friendship, that is one of the lessons I value most; the joy of shared silence. The other thing that I had to learn just to survive around Richard was being better at clever repartee. He is the master of the intelligent double entendre. Even our friend Greg has gotten better at it, out of sheer self-defense.
It’s strange, I grew up in a house with no men. But married to Jonathon, we seem to have so many single male friends, that I’ve gotten sort of a crash course in the culture of maleness. And any woman who reads this and thinks, men, they have no culture . . . well, that woman just hasn’t taken the time to pay attention to the men in her life.
It works both ways, of course, but I get tired of hearing women male bash, and say things that if a man said the exact same thing about a woman, they’d be painted as the blackest of villains. I strike a blow here for true sexual equality. Let us visit eachother’s best qualities, not our worst.
Try a little silence. It may feel better than you think.

House. Quirky Medical Drama show that we really like.

Cadfael. AKA CSI: Mideavil Shrewesbury. C’mon, its Derek Jacobi.

Coupling. The British Version. Not that horrible travisty that NBC did.
Enough for now.

I did 21 pages yesterday, which is great, but I also did eight pages today. That’s, in some ways, a better sign, because sometimes when you do some marathon page number the next day or two you’re dried out. But I was eager to work once I sat down to it, again late in the day. But the eight pages has tired me out. I’m done for the day, but that’s okay, because I’ve exceeded the five page goal. So I’m done, and I’m over quota. Very cool.
Yesterday I listened to the musical JEKYLL AND HYDE, original Broadway cast. Today it’s been Breaking Benjamin’s WE ARE NOT ALONE. I find that I’m changing music sometime half-way through the work day, but at the very least everyday, I change out. I’ve stopped fighting it, and complaining that with Anita I do the same music for days at a time. I’ve stopped complaining that this isn’t the way I work, and accepting that, yea, actually, it is the way I work, when I’m working with Merry. Different isn’t bad, it’s just different.

The muse is still with me. I got a very late start today, it being Saturday and a Trinity weekend. So I expected to get the five page count and nothing more today. At first, every page dragged out, then somewhere around page six or so, it just started flowing. Gotta love it when the writing flows like water from the proverbial cleft rock. By around seven-thirty tonight I had twenty-one pages. Twenty-one pages! Cool.
I’m going to bed now. Good-night.

Ok, I’ve made some minor changes to the format of the blog. Minor to you, major for me.
I hope you all like the new look as well as I do.