Author: LKH

2020, a decade, and a new bird

It’s that time of year again, time for the first bird of the year. It’s a tradition among birders, bird watchers that the first bird you see on New Year’s day will be a theme for the year to come. It can be the first animal you see if you’ve been up for hours and seen no birds, which happened to me two years in a row with squirrels. The moment I owned squirrel as my power animal for the year, birds appeared. It was like magic. Those two years were about trying to balance work and play. The last two years it’s been dove, and I was really hoping, praying that it wouldn’t be a third year in a row. Why, you might ask, because dove is about matters of the heart and coming to terms with Goddess energy, feminine energy for me. Learning lessons of the heart is never easy, always worthwhile, but never easy. I was ready to get a message from the universe that I’d done my heart and love work to a point where I could move on. My husband, Jonathon, and I are closer than ever and have hit that deep abiding, contentment where the fire burns low and high, but never goes out, and we know how to throw more wood on our fire and get sparks. Eighteen years of marriage and we’ve never been happier as a couple and as individuals; yay, working your shit!

I’ll mention it here before someone else asks, our other halves, Genevieve and Spike, requested to not be part of my public persona a couple of years ago. They found the “fame” part of things uncomfortable. They are private people and deserve to have their personal life be as private as they wish, yes it was a bone of contention for awhile, but if you love someone you honor their wishes, so I have. It has been difficult, because I blog from my heart, and write from heart in many ways, though I write fiction. It’s made blogging about my life very difficult and is one reason I almost stopped doing it. I don’t know how to edit my real life the way I edit my fiction. This has been some of the heart and love work of the last two years.

I’m happy to say that this year’s bird is, Dark-eyed Junco. It’s a type of sparrow, though you’d never know it to see the charcoal gray and white body, or the black upper body with a white stomach, or a mostly charcoal body, or – they are incredibly varied in their plumage. There are even different colors for different regions of the country that look nothing like the birds we see here. They are winter birds here, arriving between October to November, or even as early as late September. You know the term, snowbirds for people who travel to warmer climates for winter and then return in the spring that’s exactly what Juncos do here. We’re their winter vacation spot.

Jonathon and I saw a small flock of Juncos at the same time this morning as we made coffee and wrangled breakfast. He called out, “Junco!” I actually turned away as if he’d called it and so it couldn’t be my bird of the year. I even walked to another window and everything was hiding from me, just movements in the trees, until I realized that there was no rule, no calling dibs on a bird. Once I owned that we had the same bird of the year for 2020 then suddenly I saw the downy woodpecker and the white-breasted nuthatch on the trees and bird feeders. It’s been like that every year, until I own the first bird/animal the rest of the world is quiet, then boom – birds and other animals everywhere.

If you think that sounds too mystical, all I can tell you is that it works that way for me. Also, we’re Wiccan, as in yes modern day Witches, which is a nature based religion, so paying attention to birds and other wildlife is a part of our faith. God and Goddess speak through nature all the time if you know how to listen.

If squirrel’s lesson for me was balancing work and play, and dove was about love and the divine feminine, what does Junco mean? My husband and I aren’t entirely certain yet. We’ll be meditating and paying attention as time goes by, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with travel, maybe even moving. The Juncos were in a flock, so it could also be about group communications. Interpreting the lessons of nature isn’t always an exact science, but then most faith isn’t that simple, add magic and it can get a lot more complicated. So here’s to 2020, a new decade, and the year of the Junco!

A Ginger Cat for Christmas

This is Magnus, and he’s the wrong cat. We adopted him this summer, but we meant to adopt a different cat. We wanted another black cat to go with the reigning dark empress of our home, Grizelda, Grizzy. I’ve never seen my husband so taken with any pet we’ve ever had. Grizzy has chosen him as her “hooman” and she has us all wrapped her dainty black paw. She was at least six years old when we adopted her and she has totally won us over to adopting older cats. They come litter box trained, they aren’t the wrecking crew that kittens can be, and they’re just mellower energy. We are big fans of adopting an older cat, because that is the cat you’re getting, with kittens you have to wait two to three years to see what the true personality is going to be. So, we wanted a cat that was at least two years old, and six to eight on the high end, though for the right cat we were willing to go for ten, since Grizzy could be that old. We thought two older cats would have matching energy levels. We preferred black, because cat or dog, it’s one of the last animals to be adopted. An older black cat, or dog is almost doomed at a shelter. If we could find a cat that had FIV, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus , then that would be the full sweep of hard to place cat.

We had our list and our reasons for it, so we set out to adopt a second cat. We went back to the wonderful rescue that we got Grizzy from, St. Louis Pet Rescue, Stlpetrescue. But a weird thing kept happening, all the cats we were attracted to were young ones. They looked like grown cats and were about the size of our dainty Grizzy, but they weren’t. Seven months, eight, nine, always under a year, so we kept saying, no. Also, most of them were not black. We tried, and there was one very handsome black cat, with long curls, named, Sabbath. Black Sabbath, I mean how could we not love the name? He was a gorgeous cat and he knew it, very confident when we interacted with him in one of the small rooms. He had Grizzy’s confidence when she first walked into our home. Grizelda and Sabbath, nicely witchy and two black cats! My inner twelve-year-old who had wanted a black cat more than anything, was thrilled.

Sabbath bit us, not hard, not to bleed, but it hurt. He’d be rubbing up against us and purring, and then nip. We’d be petting and he’d love it, and he’d nip. The foster mom couldn’t understand it, he’d never done anything like that before. He was only seven months old so he might mellow, but he wasn’t going to mellow at our house. We passed on the handsome rogue.

She had one other cat with her that was male, two years old, sweet and laid back. His name was Sweetpea, and we’d walked right by him in his cage, when we spotted Sabbath. Sweetpea had been everything the other cat wasn’t, quiet, nervous, and not coping well with the chaos of the adoption event. We hadn’t given him a second look. He was a yellow tabby cat, but not dark gold, more pale, dilute tabby I think it’s called, so even for a tabby he didn’t stand out. His gold eyes blended with his face unlike the brilliant contrast of Sabbath’s yellow set in black. His foster even said, “He’s not very pretty,” as she got him out of the cage. But the moment the light him, his stripes showed more, and I instantly disagreed. And he was almost twice the size of the first cat, so double Grizzy’s size. He was a big, Tom cat. We took him back to the same small room where we’d just had the first cat. Sweetpea did not stroll around the room scent marking and owning the space. He sat in our laps, and I mean he sat from my thighs to my husband’s, like I said he was a big cat. He huddled there, startling anytime one of the dogs barked out in the adoption event. He shivered and was so scared. He just seemed to be saying, take me home, take me somewhere safe and quiet, get me out of here. We actually went home and discussed it, before saying, yes, because he was the wrong cat except for his age, he was nothing on our list, but in the end we said, yes.

We changed his name to Magnus Maximus, and within a few days he knew Magnus was his name. He was better with our two dogs than Grizzy, cuddling up with them in big piles. But it wasn’t a perfect fit between him and Grizzy, even though we did everything the rescue sites say to do about keeping them separate and a slow introduction. He was as social a cat as she was anti-social. She loves her humans, but she’d be our only pet if she could manage it. The fights that most cats do to establish territory inside a new place were scary because of his size. He just overwhelmed her. Even when she started it, she was just out of her weight class. We thought seriously about not keeping him, but we loved him. We started cycling them through parts of the house, Grizzy is still the only one allowed in my husband’s office. We still have to use the squirt bottles from time to time, but Magnus has worked hard for Grizzy to let him lay close to him, and she’s even let him groom her head a few times, until she bitch slaps him. He’s been very patient with her, and they can sniff noses without her growling. She even sniffed his tail the other day and when he swished it in her face she put her paw on his butt, like she does my husband when she’s grooming his hair and he moves too much, a tiny prick of claws that says, clearly stop moving. Magnus let her do it, just like my husband does, she really is our dark, bossy empress.

Did I mention that the trip to get Magnus checked by our vet came with a surprise? Vet said Magnus wasn’t two, he was between eight months and a year, so just a really big kitten. His size had made the rescue up his age, and when you have twenty fosters in the same house, who could blame anyone for the mistake? The vet said, he’d easily reach twenty pounds when he matured, so not what we bargained for, but by then, he was ours. There were doubts after that, see above, but we’re so glad we worked through it all and didn’t give up because once a cat goes back into rescue it can be harder to place them a second time, people wonder why they got returned, and usually blame the animal, when it’s usually just normal pet things that people give up on.

I woke up this Christmas morning with Magnus curled next to me purring like a motor under my arm. He sleeps most nights in the bedroom with us. Grizzy shares the bed usually on the other side of my husband away from Magnus, but for her, well, she likes Magnus in a cranky, non social cat way. She’s the house panther to his social lion. I keep threatening that we’ll get another lion for him to play with if she doesn’t start playing more with him, but she gives me that look, the one that says, I’m being ridiculous. I suppose I am, cats do not change unless they wish to, and Grizzy is very cat.

When I was six I wanted a white kitten, by age twelve I wanted a black one, but over the years the cats that have come the closest to being mine have all been ginger cats. One, my grandmother relented on and it fell ill and died before I could even get it a collar. The second belonged to a neighbor and I was still deathly allergic to cats, and we had parrots in our tiny apartment. That Ginger cat was a mighty hunter leaving bunnies and birds and other bits on my doorstep all spring and summer to try and bribe his way into the house. He’d have made short work of our parrots. I grew allergic to them, too, and so in the divorce my first husband got the parrot and I got the dogs. Twenty years of allergy shots and I can have cats! So Grizzy for my inner twelve-year-old, and the ginger cats can stop stalking me, because I have one of my own, at last. Magnus Maximus, Max, Magnus the Magnificent, Mags, Mag wheel, our house lion, our Magnus.

This is his first Christmas as a house cat. He was a stray last winter, a kitten in the snow, picked up in March of 2019 by a kill shelter. He was a big, adult looking Tom cat not flashy, scared and didn’t show well in his cage, if Stlpetrescue hadn’t pulled him in that same month and put him in foster care, he’d have been euthanized and that’s one of the reasons they rescued him, because his time was running out. I’m so thankful that they saved him. Thanks to Barb who fostered both our cats, and thanks to Sabbath for blowing his “coffee date” date with us, so we’d look behind the scared, quiet cat in the other cage and find the friendly, chatty, cat he has grown to be. I finally have a ginger cat for Christmas, now if I can just add that white cat for my inner six-year-old … husband says, no. Grizzy says, never! Dogs don’t care. Our daughter says, yes, please! Magnus says, a playmate, bring it on!

What if the Sky is not Falling.

What if the sky was not falling? What if all the hysterical calls for the end of everything was a bid for ratings, views, clicks, likes … Well, it is, because most news media has to fight the most popular shows to get ratings and add revenue. It’s not the fault of the news media that more of us will click, or pause, or tune in for an alarmist, negative headline than for something positive. It started there with journalists having to fight for ratings, but then the internet happened. A place where every rumor can be repeated and become fact, even if the initial post was meant to be a joke, or sarcasm. Anything repeated often enough and loud enough must be true, right? But the internet is fighting for attention, too, and we are all more likely to tune in, click through, read a story that is dramatic and frightening, or sad. I do it, too. In fact I’ve started feeling so overwhelmed by all the ecological disasters that it felt like why bother to try and save anything the world is dying and we’re dying with it. But is it and are we?

What if things aren’t as bad as our internet feed makes it seem? What if there is a lot more Hope than most news sources can share without their ratings taking a hit?

Let’s start with the Amazon and the fires. First, most of the pictures online aren’t even of those fires? Why? Because the actual fire pictures weren’t dramatic enough to catch our attention, so someone grabbed a picture of the California forest fires, or fires in other parts the world. I don’t believe it was done maliciously, but one forest fire is like another, right? And it’s the kind of image that makes people pay attention. They were right about that, but here’s an article explaining why the picture that’s being shared most is one that’s already put out and in a different part of the world. Let a leading expert on the rain forests share some hope with you, because I know I needed some.

Listening to the Silence

   It’s 11:00 in the morning and I have no writing done. I’m on deadline and I have no writing done. This is usually my cue to beat myself up emotionally which feeds all sorts of issues which if fed enough will trigger the chorus line of personal demons that I think most of us have in our heads. Once that chorus begins to chant their negative messages and dance their little dance not only is writing unlikely to happen today, but my day will be wrecked. I will be wrecked emotionally and it just goes downhill from there.
   Often when I’m behind in my morning routine for work I try to hit the writing hard and make up for lost time, sometimes that works, but not when my head has already started going dark. On days like that I’ve learned that I need to do one of two things, maybe both, get on the treadmill and walk off the black mood, and/or mediate. I light a candle and try to focus not on the stressful morning, or all the things that are feeding the bad day, but on listening to that still, small voice that we all have inside us. The voice of our good angels, our totems, our spirit guides, that little slice of God/Goddess that is there to help us if we take the time to listen. It’s hard when most days are so rushed, but I’ve learned that if I can take even a few moments to stand outside in the sun, or hug a tree, or do anything that helps me be still and truly listen, that there will be comfort, or wisdom, or I’ll think of something I didn’t think of before that helps. Think about how powerful that is, that inside each of us is a spark of the Divine that will guide us, teach us, steady us, and it is always there, if we enter the silence and listen for it. (For all you atheists out there, you have it too, maybe you call it consciences, or inner knowing, but it’s there.)
   I came away from meditation with this thought, “That there has to be chaos before there can be order. Sometimes you need that bad relationship in order to learn the lessons needed to have that wonderful relationship next time. Sometimes you lose an opportunity, because a better one is waiting for you. You make a mistake that turns out to be exactly what you needed to solve a major problem in your life/job/family/romance. A frustrating morning can lead to a life lesson that helps you find your way to a better afternoon, and to happier days in general.”
If I can hold onto this lesson, I’ve already put it in my journal, and I’m typing it here, then perhaps I won’t let the negative things drowned out the positive things, which I have a tendency to do.
   I meditated and then I allowed myself to sit in the big, comfy leather chair in my office, cuddle with one of my dogs, sip tea and read from the book I’d almost finished. It reminded me that life isn’t all about the rushing around and accomplishing goals, it’s also about working hard so you can have the time to enjoy the things that make you happy. Now, I feel ready to start on that second bottle of water of the day, and get back to working on the story that is due. I have hope that I’ll get through the majority of it today, which is a lot better attitude than I had before I took a few minutes to be still and listen.

A Cultural Tragedy

The View form the Crypts

These news articles crossed my feed yesterday.

 

800-year-old ‘Crusader’ at Dublin church decapitated

Search underway for missing head of 800-year-old Crusader after vandals broke into church

 

This is the church I visited while touring Ireland while researching Crimson Death.  I’m still sad I wasn’t able to use St. Michan’s on stage in the book. I’ve got story notes and always planned to revisit the Church, its crypt, and its mummies, yes, mummies in Ireland. I had no idea until we found the church and all its history by accident. We were lucky to be given a tour of the crypts by the historic preservation coordinator (I can’t find my notes, so if the title is incorrect, I apologize. Nor his name, deepest apologies, I will find it all later.) To be given a tour by the person who knew the most about all of it was amazing. He also shared that this was Bram Stoker’s family church while he was growing up in Dublin and the family had a crypt at the church. Walking down into the crypt I kept picturing Stoker as a little boy with only a candle to light the way. The crypt was dark with electricity, it must have been terrifying by lamp or candle, especially to a child. It was impossible for me to not think that the seed for certain scenes in Dracula were planted here. And then there were naturally occurring mummies in the crypts under the church.

Naturally occurring mummies in Ireland! One of the few places in the world where this has happened, and we still don’t know why or how! No, seriously, no one knows exactly why these bodies have mummified underneath this church. Our friend who works with the British Museum, and is an expert in her own right on Mummies, had no idea that she could find some naturally occurring ones just a day trip away.  The Crusader and his crypt mates are artifacts of global significance, both to the historic record, and to origins of horror as a genre of fiction. I was hoping that some serious science would happen and we would learn the secrets of these amazing remains, and instead they have been desecrated, destroyed, and even parts of them stolen. The people who did this didn’t just take a head off a body, which is bad enough, they stole the history of Ireland. They stole the history of Bram Stoker and his family and of all the families that have relatives down in this crypt. They have stolen part of the story that created Dracula which was one of the very first modern horror novels. Without Dracula I might never have created my own vampire stories, perhaps no one would have, yes Dracula really is that important to the genre. I am hoping that someone will read this and help us bring this piece of history back. Help us reclaim this story, this inspiration.

 

Please, if you know anything, contact the Gardai.

Looking up the Bell tower

For a more detailed write up on the church and its mummies, visit

ST. MICHAN’S Official Webpage

St. Michan’s Mummies at Atlas Obscura

 

 

The next Anita Blake novel…

A lot of you have asked me what the next Anita Blake novel is about, so I came up with a way for you to guess and me to answer without me giving away too much. I’m usually terrible at oversharing when I try to give hints, so let’s try this – the last few weeks the quotes that go up on Monday on my social media have been from one of the books that I reread as research for the latest novel.
Guess why I reread that book and if you’re right it will reveal some of the characters or plot of the novel I’m currently writing. This would have been much more challenging if you had to read the books to find the quotes. I even thought about asking people not to use electronic search for them, but it seemed unfair to make you read over all twenty-six books for this game. Also, you know someone will use an electronic copy and search for the quote, so it’s not fair to those who would play by the rule, so no rule. Find the quotes the way you want to find them. Once you know the book I used for research then let the guessing begin as to why. Why this book? Is it character, plot, world building point that I wanted to double check, or something completely different? There will be several quotes from each of the books I reread as research for the one I’m writing now.
Correct guesses as to why I needed to refresh myself with the novel/s that we quoted from may get a signed book, though not necessarily a copy of the book in question. I say, may, because if a lot of you guess correctly then we may have to pick random winners from all you excellent guessers. Or maybe we’ll ask your reason for the guess, and the best logic trail wins a book? I’m not entirely sure, because we’ve never tried to do anything quite like this before, so like writing a novel, we’re making it up as we go.

Shutdown, Again


I wrote the story, Shutdown, an original Anita Blake story during a very different government shutdown under President Obama. I wanted to give my fans something positive during a very negative event, and here we are again just it’s President Trump now. I’m tired of all the politics and how they seem to care more about being right, then about doing what is right. To all the government employees and the contract workers that are being so deeply impacted by this shutdown my heart goes out. I know you guys are missing bill payments by now. It seems like there are no more grownups left in Washington D. C. to take care of business, or to take care of the people of this country. I don’t even know what else to say, except here for free it is as an ePub or a mobi file for Kindle, while this current and far too lengthy government shutdown continues is a story for you all to read. If this keeps up I might have to write you another story, maybe Shutdown 2, or something brand new.

EDIT: Jan 30 2019: As The shutdown is over, we’ve removed Shutdown once again.

 

for those of you having troubl adding the file to your devices, here is a link to basic tutorial on adding an eBook to your device.

First bird of the year & New Year’s Resolutions

Sorry it’s taken me this long to blog about my first bird of the year, but I’ve managed to get a sinus infection for the first time in years and the worst migraine I’ve had in years. This is also my first winter in cold weather in years. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Apparently I’ve become acclimated to the tropics. My younger self raised in Northern Indiana would call me a weather wimp.
Of course, maybe I angered the gods of wine and frolic with my last blog, because after saying I didn’t want to drink or party, I spent the rest of New Year’s Eve with a migraine. So, ironically without drinking a drop of alcohol I got the headache, nausea, and the next day had a migraine hangover. Probably worse than many of you that had a much more raucous party night. 
New Year’s Eve will probably never be my favorite holiday, but I promise to keep the spirit of the evening in my heart and mind year round if I just never have another migraine. So in the spirit of this time of year I will make New Year’s resolutions, but first, the bird of 2019 for me.
When I finally woke on New Year’s Day 2019, which was close to noon I was feeling so rough I almost forgot it was the first day of the year. What was my first bird of the year? European Starling. Yep, a Starling. The pests that had just found our bird feeders and emptied them, and have emptied them faster than we can fill them ever since January 1. Did you know that all the Starlings in this country descend from two hundred birds released on the east coast? A Shakespeare society released the birds, because they thought it would be a good idea to have every bird mentioned in Shakespeare in America. My understanding is that they had to release Starlings more than once for them to survive. If I could go back in time I’d tell them the damage the birds have done to our native cavity nesting birds like the bluebird. 
According to birder tradition, Starling will be my theme of the year. My bird of the year in 2018 was dove, matters of the heart, romance, Goddess, and certainly that was a theme for last year. I’ll blog more about that at some point, but let’s just say that I’ll take a year of the Starling over another year of the dove. Starling can mean communication, group issues, or maybe I need to reread Shakespeare? I’ll be mediating on the bird to figure out what lessons I’m supposed to learn from it. Oddly, the first animal I saw this year other than our house pets was a neighbor’s Australian Shepard. I did have a couple of years where squirrel was my message of the year, and the year that we got our first rescue cats it was a cat staring at me on our front stoop. So Starling and Australian Shepard, maybe? I’ll look up the history of the breed and see if there’s any cross over between them and Starling. Or maybe it’s my year of the Aussie? 🙂
Okay, in the spirit of truly celebrating New Year’s Eve here are my resolutions: 
  1. Walk and socialize the dogs more.
  2. Add more cardio in the gym.
  3. Add two more training sessions of FMA (Filipino Martial Arts) per week, to the two I’m already doing.
  4. Use my new training gloves so much that they need replaced by next January 1. 
  5. See and socialize with my friends more often.
  6. One vacation trip to somewhere I’ve never been. 
  7. More gun range time per month.