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 |   Reflections and ruminations from a modern day Alice - Life is Wonderland |
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Reflections and ruminations from a modern day Alice - Life is Wonderland  Welcome to the place were I chronicle my own falls down dark holes and adventures chasing white rabbits! Come on In, Take a Bite, You Never Know What You May Find... "Curiouser and curiouser." Alice in Wonderland    |
| 30 Day Blogging Challenge PROMPT May 3rd What was the best thing that happened in your life over the weekend? Looking at the week ahead, what are your goals and how will you motivate yourself to achieve them? This weekend my husband and I got our 2nd doses of the vaccine. Even though it knocked us both on our asses, it really felt like the best part of the weekend because it means we are 14 days closer to hugging my grandmother, to hosting our friends and family and planning vacations again. It has been a long, long time and there is much we have missed. Unfortunately, the slight fevers, headaches and body aches made finishing our weekend chores impossible. The week ahead will consist of catching up on those tasks and projects we could not get to. There is a levity in those chores though; the yard work, cleaning the deck, taking the summer clothes down from the attic...they all make life ready to absorb the summer months and all the promise and fun that season brings. I will be motivated by looking forward to enjoying the yard, of hearing the sounds of my neighborhood - alive and full of life. I look forward to bonfires with friends and grilling most of our meals, enjoying dinners on the deck. This summer seems so much sweeter, so much more full of promise after all the long months of isolation under the pandemic. There is tremendous motivation in reclaiming some normalcy. |
| 30 Day blogging Challenge PROMPT May 2nd What smells or sounds bring back great memories of your childhood? For me, it seems my childhood was spent in the basement of the tiny Raymond Hill Library. It was my happy place. They kept the Dorrie the Little Witch book in the children's stacks and it always smelled like moth balls and dust down there. I would curl up and read while my mother would attempt to corral my younger siblings into listening to story time or using the Lego tables. I moved quickly on from Dorrie to other more astute works but that musty combination of old books and dusty shelves always takes me back to the time when I first fell in love with books. MEK is another smell that connects me to my childhood. MEK is a noxious smelly lubricate that the aviation technicians use. I spent many hours at work with my Dad at the airport and the smell pervaded the hanger and has become part of my permanent olfactory landscape. Even to this day, walking through the hanger on the way to my office, it transports me back. It has been a smell that has been part of my earliest memories and it grounds me like no other. |
| 30-Day Blogging Challenge PROMPT May 1st Write about one (or more) of your creative idols. Who do you look up to? Whose work are you most inspired by? Why? Playing catch-up this morning after I was waylaid by my 2nd dose of the covid vaccine this weekend. Today I am kicking off the week, fever and chill free and hopeful. I am looking forward to reaching full immunity by mid-May, and of reconnecting with friends and family after a long isolation. So...my creative idols...I feel like I've done this one before but for the most part my creative idols are authors. Gabriel Garcia Marquez tops my list and has since I first read, Love in a Time of Cholera. I was impressed by the absolute beauty conveyed in prose, beauty that survived being translated into English from his native Spanish. To this day, I've not found passages in any other works that expressed the same loveliness of his phrasing. His writing has an amazing candor to it that crosses cultural divides and generations. “To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.” ― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera I could not be a writer of erotica and not pay homage to DH Lawrence or Anis Nin. I see them as a founders of the erotic genre, incredible talents who paved the way for an underrated genre, unfortunately represented today by lesser talents. Every reader that claims to have discovered erotic by reading "Fifty shades", came to the genre without the benefit of the tremendous literary power of these early pioneers. These were authors who challenged the brave new world, sometimes as great expense and disdain, to unapologetically write about the human condition, about female sexuality and the balance of instinct and social acceptance. “Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.” ― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.” ― D.H. Lawrence My list is a good deal longer and would read like a master class in the craft.. James Lee Burke for example, an absolute master in character creation. His characters breathe and live and die among the pages of his novels and then they haunt you like mad demons...like people you have actually physically known. Lewis Carroll gave lie to Alice in Wonderland and she is my ultimate favorite literary character and kindred spirit. Mo Hader, the British author who's work The Devil of Nanking taught me there is a kind of terrible beauty in the telling of the visceral darkness of human beings. Authors are some of my most favorite creators on the planet. I have learned something from each any every one on this list and countless more. |
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