Nine Beginnings, Margaret Atwood

On writing, & writers:

"As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, you're part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society."

Some more on that at Terri Windling's blog, which I highly recommend anyways.

holding the line

Spent most of today feeling yuchtastic; Dharma & I won't be making it to the event this weekend, alas. So today we mostly did a lot of not much, with occasional careful nibbling on foods.

But! We went through an entire box of Stuff that was in her office, got rid of more than half of it, & the rest is in a MUCH smaller box for her to go through at her leisure. In the process she was finally able to look at some stuff from when she was married to her abusive second husband, & burn it. (Woodstoves & catharsis, an overlooked technique.) So less Stuff, more space, & bonus emotional processing.

It was warm but wooshy most of the day, & partway through the evening the front started coming through. 43F to 35F in about ten minutes, & an hour or so later it's 22F. So I went outside before it got any colder, & hauled in enough wood for tonight, plus enough for most of tomorrow and small bits to restart the fire in the morning if it's necessary. Given it'll be around 15F in the morning & 4-8 inches of snow, I feel this was a good move.

I spent about an hour working on the less brain-intensive parts of my end-of-the-year stuff; I'll work on more of that tomorrow. _This_ is what I need to be doing in January, not shows that I'm not likely to be prepared for so soon after the Giftmas rush.

Figuring it out, little by little.

In the meantime, off to bed.