So crazy month came and went and I’ve been spending the final weeks of August completing various projects. I got my level one certification with Katrina, started working on BATS items and Fall Equinox, and completed writing and sending in more reviews for Witches & Pagans magazine. Also been hard at work in trying to get my tarot business up and running. So far things are slow but steady.
The big news? Well, I learned how to crochet a few months ago. There was a particular thing I wanted to learn how to make so two of my fiber friends muddled through and taught me how to do it. And the amazing thing is that it’s stuck. I’m making thing after thing after thing and actually enjoying it. So, go figure.
This month’s been crazy hectic for me. Everything just seemed to want to happen this month and I feel like I’m being marshalled through everything. Most if it is fun stuff but it’s the planning and coordinating and packing and making sure everything gets done in an orderly time that’s the stressful crazy bit. So, what IS going on, you might ask? Well…
I got interviewed in the June 2010 MuseCraft Museletter (the monthly eNewsletter of my friend and creativity coach, Kim Switzer). Anna asked me all sorts of thoughtful questions about writing, fire spinning, and having creative passions across the board. Click here to view the PDF of the full interview.
During my college years (back in the 90’s), I was big into zines. You know, those hand-made, hand distributed, mostly photocopied magazines that focused around a singular topic. I had two of my own. Mirror Imyaj, a personal zine that I filled with musings of my mind and daily life. The name was suggested by my friend Sanjay and from there I made maybe 4 issues. (Imyaj is my name spelled backwards… clever isn’t it?) Eventually it became the digital name of my online journal here at Shades of Maybe.
The other one, Twisted Realities, was a fiction zine. I scoured the internets and my college for short (flash) fiction, poemtry, and essays with an edge. I was huge into postmodern fiction and wanted to create an outlet for my voice, and to publish others who had similar ideas about weird writing to mine. Twisted Realities had a two-issue run, mostly because it was hard to scrape up stories from others. But I was fortunate enough to have works by friends, as well as Lance Olsen, in the collections.
A few weeks ago, my good friend Anna and I decided to “do something together.” We weren’t sure what we wanted to do, so we brainstormed ideas. We listed things that we wanted to do (writing, design, divination arts, creative arts, writing) and from that list we brainstormed a few workshop ideas.
I’d like to present the first of our collaborations: Wine Inspired Writing. This course was inspired by Michael Gelb’s Wine Drinking for Inspired Thinking. We explore the idea that wine can help inspire your muse and have designed some fun exercises to explore this connection! Click the read more link to learn more about what this workshop offers.
Songs and movies affect me in weird ways. We just finished watching Jackson’s version of The Lovely Bones. It was hauntingly beautiful and weirdly done. Towards the end of it, an all too familiar song (Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil) begins to play.
Images of my past scroll in my mind as they intertwine with the pictures dancing across the tv screen. Tears flow down my face as I wonder when my prose and the vivid worlds they create will touch the imaginations of others in this way.
The latest issue of New Renaissance’s newsletter features Shon Clark’s Fire from the Cauldron. I’m excited about this book because it’s the first book I edited for Megalithica Books/Immanion Press.
In this review, I gave some tidbits about what makes this book so important and special. Click here to go read it online. Thanks Erin Donley for allowing me to lend my voice to the review.
I performed several site updates today. I upgraded the photo gallery software to the latest and greatest. Added a nifty booking widget courtesy of Setster to the tarot site, so now clients can go there and book appointments. I also installed JournalPress, which allows all my posts here to export to my accounts at LiveJournal and at Dreamwidth. So welcome to any new readers.
In the process, my Twitter plugin died, so I just completed installing WP to Twitter and have tested that. It now works and here’s hoping I don’t have to make any more drastic mods for awhile. I have many other word-related and design projects that need my attention.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tarot and how to attract more seekers to my tarot practice. In the past, the tarot link at the top of my Shades of Maybe domain took site visitors to my Tarot Wiki. Well, as of Wednesday that’s no longer the case. I’ve installed yet another instance of WordPress and revamped tarot.shadesofmaybe.com so it functions more like a tarot business and blog, than a repository of my tarot related information.
I’ve added pages that tell seekers about my reading rates, ethics, reading events, as well as a page of testimonials from past seekers. I’m also slowly and steadily moving the bulk of the tarot-related posts from this area to there. In the future, I hope to post reviews, essays, readings and tarot-related tidbits from my life to that site. Of course, I also hope the area attracts more seekers who’d like me to read for them and help them achieve their dreams.
Last November I entered TOUCHED into the Gotham Writers’ Workshop YA Novel Discovery contest. They announced the winners today. I was not one of them.
However, they had about 1,700 submitted entries which is pretty impressive. I’m not bummed, I know that when the time is right TOUCHED will enter the scene with force. Which means, I need to get off my butt and work on revisions.
Congratulations to all the winners!
At the end of this week, I’ll be driving down to San Jose to attend PantheaCon. More specifically, I’ll be promoting my work in Women’s Voices in Magic and the writing/editing I do with Immanion Press/Megalithica. This is my first time attending this convention and I’m looking forward to meeting people and promoting my spirituality. If you’re attending PantheaCon, look me up. I’d love to chat and get together.
Click the Read More button to view the date/time/locations of the two panels I’m on.
