Tag Archives: Writing

2011: the lights and shadows

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I always start with the negative and move to the positive, although I did learn through recent reading that people are inclined to remember the negative even when the positive is the more important message. So this year, let’s start with the highlights. I’ll put those negatives behind a tag, so you only have to look if you want.

Light

  •  I got a book contract! Yes, in 2012 (or 2013, depending on the polishing it takes) Divorcing a Real Witch will see print. There’s a lot more to it that has my stomach turning in knots – marketing, workshop planning, showing up at bookstores if they’ll let me – and for that, I will be asking for help. There is stuff you yourself can do; if you want to help, comment here or join the mailing list posted in the sidebar. Most of what I will ask will involve you, say, posting a link to your Facebook wall and saying “I know who wrote this!” (or I read her blog, etc. etc.) If you yourself are a published Pagan author, let me know if you’d be open to doing an endorsement – I will of course have you read a copy first to ensure it’s something you would in fact endorse. It helps is you’re NOT opposed to divorce.
  • I went to Paris! It was awesome, and most of the French wait staff were lovely.
  • I self-published a book to get a feel for the new publishing industry. It proved informative on many levels, and has sold about 50 copies. It’s one of those things that gets no in-between reactions – it’s either “brilliant” or “heinous.” Reactions reveal far more about the viewer than it does about the book. I broke the taboo that things must be “good” and “perfect” and went with “real” and “flawed” instead. Some people are eager to break that taboo, while others responded as though threatened, or as though I were a naughty school child for daring to produce such a document. Somewhere creativity and academia need to come together; in the process we really need to clear out both the willful ignorance and the condescending elitist pedantry that have both prevented intellectual growth in Paganism. I have no illusions that I am any good as an artist or illustrator – this was more of a “yes, I have this limitation to, but do it anyway for the goal that lies beyond it and beyond the pettiness of complaining about crooked lines.”
  • My Facebook fan page has grown from 50 something to 80 something. I really would like to see it hit 100 by the end of this year.
  • Fat Chic got a mention in People Style Watch, which has led to not only a readership boom, but has helped renew my enthusiasm for the project. I have a good sense of what’s possible with the blog, how to make it unique, and how I can make it kick ass.
  • I got in a retreat at Spring Green, Wisconsin. For some bizarre reason this town has always been a source of spiritual renewal for me.
  • I finished a complete novel, now left to age in my “drawer” for at least six months. I now know what it takes to get a book written at a reasonable rate, and this has made me feel confident that I can get other works done while doing the marketing and promotion for the Divorcing a Real Witch (tentatively titled) book.
  • I successfully established a 4 hour a week minimum gym habit. Mostly I do treadmill, water aerobics and Pilates. In the summer I try to squeeze in a yoga class, too. I have to consider what’s best for mind/body/spirit all together – on the one hand, I’d like to go back to bellydance classes. On the other hand, it’s an added expense, and there’s always a costumery and “special workshop” push that’s beyond my sewing ability and far beyond what my wallet can handle. I just like to DANCE, yo.
  • I learned crochet. I hope to keep learning more, as long as my friends are willing to teach me.
  • I also learned origami. I can do owls and a few other things that require a bird base, and make cootie catchers and crowns. I’m on the market for a decent paper cutter – I’ve been slicing down old magazines for practice paper.
  • I think at this point I may have the healthiest/most conscious (self-aware) group of friends that I have had in the course of my life. Related both directly and indirectly, I’m wondering if I would benefit from getting more involved with some of the feminist organizations in town.
  • I’m moving into year 4 of working through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way book series. Really and truly, it has made a difference. An interesting side note is that, just as it mentioned in occult practice manuals, some people have found the changes in my attitude about art and creativity offensive despite these changes offering no threat to themselves.  What’s interesting are those that are the most threatened are the ones that talk the most about goals and projects they have – and that they never move forward on (or take a step and then self-sabotage.)  Other acquaintances, however, have taken note of the changes the work has brought about in me and have elected to come a bit closer: notably these people are all producing creative work, but not saying much about it until they’re done – or are talking about doing it, because that’s how they spend the bulk of their time, even when in day jobs they don’t like.

Middle ground

  • I’m neglecting Magickal Realism and for the time being letting it close/expire by attrition. As some of you will know or even see, I’m still making things, but between the vagaries of Etsy, an upsurge in customer entitlement behavior and my writing career growth, I am relegating it back to hobby/private service. People keep comparing it to Black Phoenix Alchemy, and since I have no interest in doing what they’re doing, it’s annoying that I have to expend energy fighting that perception. I love perfume and bath product design, but my creative impulses in that area are leading me more towards studying hoodoo, learning to sew and lots of interesting upcycled/trashion applications that are occult practice friendly. The business never really recovered after the time I had to take off when my father died, and it seems like all paths are leading me to writing now, anyway.
  • I’m having to bend on my rules about science fiction conventions and the like. It’s really about my dislike of crowds, and my impulse to get combative when someone assumes I think/perceive the same way they do (happens more at conventions, for some reason. I like Tenant – NOT A FANGIRL!) With the five year anniversary for the Doctor Who meetup coming up, I’m going to have to work hard on improving my tolerance for people inside my space.

Continue reading →




About winning #nanowrimo

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I won Nanowrimo. My prizes? A victory lap, a funky digital badge, and a manuscript I need to leave I in a drawer for six months. It’s a good thing I have lots of other projects on deck, so much that I’m feeling all kinds of pressure lately. I’m OK with that, too – really.

The big lesson I learned from doing this work is as follows:

  • I can totally write 1700 words a day.
  • The principles of nanowrimo is true of all creative commitment: just keep showing up. You don’t need to feel it every day, you just need to be there. Needing the mood, inspiration, or ambience really is just an excuse to avoid doing the work part of true creative work. Creativity shows up on its own schedule, but by setting patterns you can get it to show up when you’re there, too.
  • Thank heavens for the rewrite process.

I do want to say that a year ago, I probably could not do 1700 words a day on a single piece that large. Now I easily can. I believe that sticking to the Artist’s Way series really did help me build those skills, by rearranging and removing those mental blocks and by showing me how to go about establishing the discipline I needed to do the work. This did not happen overnight. Just as building a 4 day a week gym habit has taken time, practice, and perseverance, writing 1700 words a day has taken practice, repetition, and making sure I gave myself absolutely no shit whatsoever when I “only” managed to write 500 words a day.

My experience writing this novel was brain-breaking, in part because I typically do take days off from writing on the weekends, and this time I had to skip that. The 50K goal in 30 days is a tough one. I don’t know if I will do this to myself next year, it all depends on what story speaks to me at that time. I’m not sure I would regularly do 50K words in a month – but I would totally do 1700 words per day. That I can do.




For #nanowrimo and #amwriting: the draft dimensions

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032311 091

I’m 30K into nanowrimo as I write this – I take days off here and there, and I did come down with a cold that mostly sucked my energy. I’m one of those writers that can’t write when I’m sick, or can only write minimally. That creative energy needs to go to healing work, after all.

The process has been enlightening. I can totally do 1700 words a day; it’s taken me a few years to build up to that, but now in terms of writing-fitness that many “reps” on a single project  is pretty reasonable. I’ve also come to deeply appreciate that the “writing 24/7″ idea is impossible – I need to feed my head. By that I does not mean acid-rock style head feeding. It means I need to get out and interact with humanity from time to time, and go see the artistic creations of others, and the creations of nature. It builds the place within that leaves me free to write. It fills a well. It matters, a lot.

So, in coming to understand the true value of #nanowrimo, I have also come to this epiphany about writing, and redrafts. It’s helping me understand my entire process.

Draft 1: I write for myself, and myself only.
Draft 2: I write for my intended audience.
Draft 3: I write for any editors, publishers, or beta readers/workshop feedback givers.
Draft 4: I write for my audience again.
Draft 5: I write for myself again.

Ideally, the end product packages and expresses my core vision in a way that people are able to well-receive it. That first draft is crucial, and it is also crucial that I not share it with anyone until I’m done. It’s about my time, and what I want to say. I will worry about what other people can receive in later drafts.




Permission-free delight

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Minneapolis Indie Expo 2011

The entire concept of permission in the creation of art brings out some … controversy. It also is a litmus test for who is a good person to work with, and who is not. The people that believe they should give you permission to create what you do are really about preventing creativity as much as possible – usually out of the incorrect belief that by quelling the work of others they can give themselves a competitive edge. While the creative arts is highly competitive, stunting others pretty much never does a damn thing for you. Yet when you encourage others, and point out not what a person does “wrong” but what you believe will make a work strong- you actually give yourself a competitive edge. How? By building allies, and by making yourself an ally. If you set aside the belief that your aesthetic is a stick by which to judge the work of others (it’s not, ever) you can suddenly find your world opening wide to a broad variety of delights. It’s OK to take pleasure in crude drawings, photocopied sheets and handcrafted stories. It’s OK that it’s not “professional.” The low-brow movement is how art in North America keeps its soul; without it, art would be as trapped and disastrous as the Vatican.

drawings and water color by RK Milholland of Something Positive

 

print from Paul Taylor of Wapsi Square

Today, I went to the Minneapolis Indie Expo and I absolutely loved it. It consisted of web comic artists and zine makers, all of whom work independently. Some make a living at it, some don’t. It became clear to me that quite a few people had traveled some ways to participate in the expo. I went because the artist for my favorite web comic – Something Positive – went. I got some drawings (squee!) including a robot watercolor that made Mike squeal with happy. I also got a kick-ass Dia de los Muertos print from Wapsi Square and got to thank Paul in person for the Fat Chic shout out he gave me yesterday.

Goodies obtained at the indie expo

While there, I discovered the danger and the wonder of such events: lots of super-affordable and accessible art and zines, leading to spending lots of money without really intending to. It was kind of awesome, and I came back with some awesome stuff.

The entire concept of indie art and comics is that you do NOT need to wait for approval. Nobody gave anyone present at the expo permission; each person just went ahead and did what they do. It allowed such wonders into the world as a crocheted UFO complete with a ladder it could let down, a deck of cards with surreal designs printed on each one (I proposed a few meanings, to the amusement of the creator) and some really badass plus-positive art.

It was cool. I would have stayed longer, but I was freezing my tuckus off. I did find myself tweaked that while it was roughly 50/50 in terms of the gender of the artists present, on the panels I attended each had one token female. On one of them, said female openly admitted she elbowed her way onto the panel. That was uncool – not that she had to use chutzpah, that’s normal, but that it was necessary to draw upon it at all. Then again, it was a perfect example of an artist not needing or seeking permission.




Limitations #nanowrimo #amwriting #artistsway

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Limitations #nanowrimo #amwriting #artistsway

The coffee shop had writers in it. Perhaps not wall-to-wall writers, but enough that it became clear that something literary lay in the unpolished wood floor, reaching upwards, calling out to those that create while questioning creation. At one table, a group of women discussed Nanowrimo, and talked about what it meant to be a “real writer.” It sounded like a couple of them had it wrong, what it meant, but it was obvious they were writing and not stopping each other from writing, so I turned my attention to my laptop. This was the second location that day where my tiny Lenovo refused to play nice with the wireless. At this point, I’d even veered off from Minneapolis into Saint Paul, down into one of the deeper byways beyond Harriet Island. I liked this place. I wanted to work here. While never married to atmosphere – I’ve written in moving cars and airplanes, on park benches, in grocery lines – I liked this place. It had the same seeding quality of Hard Times Café in Seward, minus the people in obvious drug withdrawal common to the place late at night. I had gone far out of my way to find this place, and I wanted to make a second home here. I wanted it to work.

I became chatty with the barista as she did her best to reset the router for me; I rarely speak so much to strangers on the first meeting, but I’d had a lot of coffee already, and I could already tell that this atmosphere influenced me. Something within the building, in its 19th century yellow ceiling and radiator-heated walls wanted me to come back, too. So it was urging me to talk, urging me to show the chit-chatty Diana some people never see in a decade.

“I’m just really frustrated,” I shared. “I’ve been tooling along on this nonfiction book, and so now I’m trying my hand at fiction, and it seems like one thing after another has gotten in its way.”

The barista looked back at me. “Maybe you’re only meant to write nonfiction.” It hangs in the air; she believes this, but I can see the lie of it, whispered in her ear. Writers frequent this place, and yes, so do their demons and bullshit.

“No, that’s not it,” I tell her. “This is just the crap and bugs that fly out whenever you make a change.”

She nods, and I discover that miraculously, my Dropbox program synced up before I left the house that day. While I did waste time trying to hop online, I could still work, and I made the most of what I could, closing my manuscript on Day 2 of Nanowrimo with a solid 4020 words, and a sense that yes, I am hearing this story more than I am telling it.

I could have taken the excuse she gave me, but instead I stayed true to my truth. I did not absorb the limitation she offered, although five years ago I would have gripped onto it tight.

Writers do this. Artists do this. People do this.

There’s a tendency to propose limitations for others; this differs from pointing them out. This is the idea of creating and instilling limits – it is artificial, a creativity blocking behavior, and is harm under the guise of support. We all have limits, and it’s part of our lives to discover them, test them, experiment with our ability to overcome them – or to incorporate them and make them boundaries that help structure the work we do. It is not our job to propose limits to one another, and yet this is what we do all too often.

We have this “there can be only one” mentality that has spread from religious outlook to this idea that every person has one identity, one ability, one true role in life. We face  aging with bitterness, under the assumptions that the roles fade, and then so do we, into nothingness at all. So many assume that there’s nothing that comes after, no new avenue to try, and there’s no use exploring the world again as we’ve seen what we’re going to see of it.

This is absolute crap.

 

photo by Diana Rajchel

 

I was asked once, when participating in a writer’s panel, “which one I would choose,” when I explained the multiple projects I had only recently seeded at the time. I countered, “Why do I have to choose one?”

No real answer came. There is no positive argument for monogamy when it comes to creative endeavors.

 

The show Boardwalk Empire, directed by Martin Scorcese and produced by Mark Wahlberg thrills me. It shows me my favorite era in history – the 1920s – with gritty realism and brilliance, made all the better by the presence of Steve Buscemi.  I share this show with friends eagerly; I consider it the best period drama on television right now, and I want to share in the delight and awe that the characters bring forth from within me.

One man I shared this with balked at the appearance of Mark Wahlberg in the production credits. “Marky Mark?” he spluttered. “The guy with the underwear?”

“He’s got some good production credits and is a decent actor,” I answered.

“But he’s Marky Mark!”

“So what, he can do only one thing with his life?”

“Yes!” he snapped back.

He ignored me when I asked, “Why?”

It seemed obvious to me that Mark Wahlberg’s lack of limits triggered some upset concerning this young man and the limits he had chosen for himself.

 

Authentic limits are boundaries that shape us. They give us guidelines, a framework to work within. They help us get things down. Deadlines are limits. Personal dislikes and disinterests are limits. Those things that we just don’t want to do are limits. We find them as we progress, as we write, as we explore. Those limits come from us, and only ourselves. Those limits are only true if discovered in discourse between our inner selves and our creative drive.

Anything coming from outside – other writers, teachers, baristas – those are manufactured limits. Certainly you can agree to cooperate with them. I for one wholeheartedly agree with the social process that establishes traffic safety. But they are not within me, and they do not define my capabilities or yours.




#nanowrimo – What story shall I tell first?

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I’ve decided I am doing Nanowrimo this year. Yes, this will be in addition to blogging and all the other stuff I do. I’m going to train myself to get up at 5 am again, even if it means taking melatonin at 6 pm. If anyone has a symbiotic kink that involves sleeping on my living room floor and making me coffee for around thirty days – awesome. I’ll have to clear it with my partner, of course, but I’m sure he could be persuaded if you threw in laundry duty.

The point of Nanowrimo is to get you writing a first draft – the idea being that 50,000 words gives you something you can then shape into a novel. The work happens in the rewriting, at least, it does for me.

I certainly have ideas piled up, and now, I need to pick one. Here are some possible novels I’m looking at:

1. (Most recently) A semi-shamanic tale involving animals in a zoo; I’m leaning away from this because the story in my head reads like an American Indian folktale, and while I don’t judge what I receive, I can’t completely escape how that would be received. I “heard” it so I’ll write it, sure, but that story may be a private circulation only deal.

2. The Scorpio Jones detective series – I’m thinking paranormal mystery/romance, with all kinds of fringe people. I think I mentioned the character Rawr and the 17 boyfriends, and Mike responds with enough chagrin that I almost have to write it.

3. Fuck it, let’s be jewel thieves! In college I tried following a soap opera to see what the hype was about, and got rather annoyed when the “reformed” thief led his girlfriend on a thief-style adventure. She gushed about how hard it must have been to reform, and I was completely disgusted that the writers did not see a great opportunity for her to say “Let’s do this together!”

4. Eminent Domain. Typical adult slacker, still lives at home with parents attached, and all of a sudden the home is going to be demolished. How much effort does he want to put into being lazy?

5. Zeus falls out of the sky, and it’s the job of the protagonist to get him back up there.

I have a start on #2 that doesn’t really grab me, and a start on #5 that reads like some of my moodier short fiction pieces.
I also have a novel I had socked back that’s about 25K words in, but I’m setting it aside because I’m still untangling it a bit. I know how I want it to end, but the trip there? I’m not sure what needs to happen along the way.




Spellcasting Picture Book – gettin’ some lovin!

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The Spellcasting Picture Book is available in print on Amazon, as well as on Kindle, and is also available at Barnes and Noble in print and for Nook.

The Spellcasting Picture Book has been getting some lovin’ this week –
PaganWriters.com gave it a blurb, and on the same day a book review for it came out on Online Pagans Magazine.

Did I mention the review on Magickal Media?
“They say the word “inspired” means God-Breathed and I think that’s what happened with Diana. She simply opened herself up to the universe and then drew the messages as they came to her.” …I think that means the reviewer liked it!




The Creativity Battery

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Inner dialogue often becomes cartoonish, or not pretty. How often are you not nice to yourself? How many times have you had an argument with yourself, only to get so irate that you don’t speak to yourself for weeks?

In my case, I tend to expect too much. I then get mad at myself for thinking “too much” and proceed to yell at myself for coddling. I then get mad at myself for yelling at myself.

This happens most often after I look over project piles that somehow amassed in every room of of my home.

I once attributed this series of “incompletes” to some moral or character failure, especially when my whole house wasn’t magically polished, and bursting forth with high profits, finished books and magically made homemade decor at the end of every day.

Then the Artist’s Way changed the situation. I started paying close attention to the experiences of others struggling with the emotional, physical, mental and situational blocks to creativity. I realized something:

our ability to create is absolutely infinite. But most of us are only able to access a limited amount of that energy at a time.

Suddenly the real dangers and temptation of methamphetamines have become very clear to me.

I read one author – if I remember who it was, I hope to come back and link properly – who, upon her pregnancy, expected to have 9 months of creative orgy, or perhaps six, once the morning sickness passed. She planned elaborate gardens, a decorated house, finished books. Instead she needed lots of sleep. She expressed guilt at how flesh did not follow spirit. Continue reading →




The myth of the shallow divorce

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People get married for shallow reasons. Not everyone, not all the time. Most of the time people get married for all the socially designated appropriate reasons, and for the most part, they mean it when they do. Sometimes, however, it’s just because someone wants to have a wedding or be acknowledged as an adult.1

The marriage rate has slowed as little girls break from the “plan your wedding for your entire life” programming and start looking at the relationship instead of the floor show. Boys are also being more conscious, up front, or not buying into it.

Still, marriages can indeed be shallow. Look at Britney Spears.

As to divorce – despite a selection of bitter and spiteful things I’ve heard over the years, I have to say… divorce ain’t shallow.

After talking to nearly 200 + individuals (with more to go) about divorce I know without a doubt that divorce is never requested on a whim, for a bad reason, or just because of boredom.

In the course of 200 authentic conversations, no one gave me what I would consider a frivolous reason for divorce. That 200 people have been so gracious as to answer my series of  questions on such an incredibly touchy subject has been to me a humbling miracle.

Yes, a few might be lying, but the Vegas odds on that are about 1%, which makes possibly to prevarications so far. While the reasons given are all very private (and that I will generalize to the point of non-identification later), I can tell you the common reasons the loud and bitter claim – and the reasons I am not hearing or seeing as I work on this book:

  • Boredom. No one left his/her spouse because s/he got bored.
  • Money. No one divorced anyone in order to get money. Pagans are not wealthy, and even amicable divorce gets expensive. When rearing children, forcing financial support outside the house decreases income – between alimony or the security of a present and accounted for spouse, staying married is the financially smarter option.2  If a married person with children wants a spouse out of the house now, it’s because there’s enough emotional (and in a third of cases physical) violence to endanger the children. No one divorces as a financial strategy. They do, however, divorce when marriage has failed them as a financial strategy. When spouses can’t hold jobs, refuse to discuss money, or can’t control spending or money hoarding behaviors, it can seriously damage a relationship.
  • Sexual incompatibility. Yay for premarital sex and Viagra, you can’t marry a person without knowing this stuff first. I do not count “changes” in sexual orientation in this, because that’s so far from shallow as to live in a different universe on a different shelf of self-help books.
  • Another man/woman. In less than 5 cases did someone marry the person that s/he committed infidelity with. In all cases of infidelity (polyamory being excluded) there was emotional abuse, and in half the cases, physical abuse preceding the infidelity.  I acknowledge that the emotional abuse is highly subjective and may need probing, as some personalities consider “No, this is what you agreed to,” as abuse. Right now, however, every respondent that has raised infidelity as a marriage-dissolving issue has reported it alongside an environment of emotional violence. Both the cheaters and the cheated on consistently report  these tensions. In cases of polyamorous infidelity, while so far there is less violence reported (admitted? understood? recognized as violence?) it literally has to be examined with each and every relationship contract established – it’s definitely possible to cheat/be unfaithful/do the dishonorable thing in polyamorous and polyfidelitious relationships, and from what I’m hearing and seeing as I ask these questions for my book is that there are more ways to do it.

I’m not here to judge “shallow!” or “not shallow!” I’m here simply to understand, to look for patterns, to answer the problems at hand from my own place as a Wiccan divorcee’. The big pattern I’m seeing behind marital failures so far all leads back to a)not understanding at the outset of a relationship that emotional violence is real, and therefore not having the tools to avoid commitment to people who do this and b)a sense of “marriage” as status that makes marriage itself an entity that has little or nothing to do with the actual relationship of the people married to each other.

Those of us with Christian backgrounds still think of marriages as somehow “belonging to God,” and especially as Pagans, that somehow short-circuits a spiritual connection between the two people that worked beautifully until marriage set in.

Marriage used to be mainly a financial and property arrangement including sex; it lingers as an impersonal social status that we mistake for a personal relationship. Marriage is a contract, and while unromantic to westerners, it is very much about compatibility beyond romantic response. Just as businesses dissolve when they no longer profit their owners, marriages similarly fall away.




  1. If you need such acknowledgment, you’re probably not there yet. [↩]
  2. It is not, however, what is better for the children. [↩]

Content and Control

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I wrote this post earlier this summer, during the hottest days of the year. The tsunami had not yet finished with its unpredictable backlash, and a few unexpected events happened at the height of festival season. One of those included a local Pagan festival getting caught in a flash flood. No one was hurt, little was lost, and I think for the most part, people might have been a touch embarrassed for camping in a flood plane, but in the long run the group handled the emergency really well.

The real problem was not what happened. It was how people thought what happened looked.  People get strangely territorial and competitive over conflicting local events, forgetting that a)no one can possibly serve EVERYONE and b)time is the most finite of all resources.

They also get really nervous around journalists. Like politicians, those of us who work as reporters have done a lot to earn mistrust. Also like politicians, journalists are often projection boards for the fears of those who see them. Fear has a loud voice. It can keep a person from hearing, reading, seeing or even smelling what you really want to communicate.

Because of the weird squabbling produced by competition-induced (and denial about being competitive) amnesia, it took some work to get people to talk to me. In the process, I had to acknowledge the feelings of others about the press and how they wished we would operate. Those wishes often violate the principles of journalism as it used to be, and the PNC is in my opinion a Reconstructionist movement. We’re using digital tools, but we’re trying to rebuild journalism from the old days.

Thankfully, the people that went on record willingly heard me out on how I saw the story and why I wanted to report it as I did. What happened was not the result of stupidity and poor planning. In fact, it demonstrated good planning. Being honest and open got me the story, although I’m sure I have more work to do to build long-term trust.

This was written before I was able to persuade everyone that did to go on record. It is a rumination on the important of self-honesty and transparency, and why we need to stop protecting ourselves from embarrassment. Embarrassment is a reaction of the ego, only. The highest self does not get embarrassed. It simply observes and learns from the experience. Continue reading →