Article RSS Feed

Change Is Highly Overrated

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:19:22 GMT

Change Is Highly Overrated

Yes, it’s ironic—I spend my days sitting here at my computer making changes as I edit work by my authors and my own writing. Edit, edit, edit, change, change, change. Please do not verbize nouns. Subjects and verbs need to agree, and so do nouns and the pronouns that go with them. Avoid clichés. How can you/how can I say this better? More clearly? How can we rephrase this sentence or paragraph to make it more accessible to our readers who don’t live in our heads with us?

Well, yeah, sometimes change is useful. I gotta admit it. I’m a sort of living changemaker. At the same time, though … I moved a month ago and I’m still looking at boxes. Not so many, thank Goddess. When I moved in, I had mountain ranges of big boxes filled with books, boxes piled three high in my living room. Heisenberg turned into a mountain goat. All though the night, I’d hear thump, thump, chirp, thump as he explored his new turf. (Schroedinger, by contrast, took up residence on my bed and hardly came out at all until she found her old familiar fuzzy blanket on the chair in the living room.) It took me a week to get down to the living room carpet. That was cause for celebration.

When I was writing Pagan Every Day, I developed a system: I did my usual editing every morning, wrote at least two days for the book every afternoon, and did my research every evening. During the past month, I’ve developed a similar system. From right after breakfast until about 1 p.m., I did my usual editing for those wonderfully patient authors I’m working with—Peter, Charlene, two Susans, and Don. After lunch (when I remembered to eat) I worked on boxes. My son and daughter-in-law came with tall help—I’m five-two, they’re both tall and can reach the top of the bookshelves that reach to the ceiling—as we pulled books out of boxes. Then I started pulling art out of boxes and hanging it on the walls. You know what? I may have more floor space in this apartment, but I’ve got less wall space. It’s all those windows. I’ve got most of the art up now, which makes me feel settled. I also started pulling witches and goddesses and Blessed Bees out of boxes. It’s said that nature abhors a vacuum; I seem to abhor any empty space. Of course 312 witches take up a lot of room. (My friend Ariadne, to whom I gave nearly all the empty boxes, gave me four more witches, including Miss Piggy as a white witch in a pointy white hat.)

But nothing is quite like it used to be. I had to make changes in arrangements, in designs, in where I set things. I had to buy a new bookcase. I also bought a new chair (thank you, Goodwill) upon which a Muppet-size witch now sits; I stuck my “Cherish Your Agent” pin on her blouse. Things are in different places now. But I think that’s change I can live with. At least my office is about the same. And I didn’t lose any files in the move.

Another change I can live with—when you’re just shoving books on shelves, they turn up reordered from the olden days. I write book reviews and keep the books I like, so I can honestly say that I’ve read every book I own (well, I haven’t read straight through the dictionaries), and I like to reread good books. I’m still finding books I haven’t read in several years. That’s good! Now that I know where they are, I’ll get to reread them.

Oh, yes, I edit in the morning, unpack and set up art and books and goddesses and witches and Bees in the afternoon … and what do I do in the evening? I fall asleep while I’m watching my favorite DVDs. I’ll catch up on my sleep eventually. And I’ll become accustomed to all these changes.

Maybe change is acceptable? I won’t vote on that this morning, but I can see the possibility. In another month.

Even Editors Have Lives

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:18:24 GMT

Even editors have lives away from the computer. As compulsive about my work as I am, sometimes I actually stand up and walk away. I even turn off the computer. That’s what I’ll be doing next week when I move from this apartment to a new one in a beautiful older building near downtown Long Beach. I like Long Beach. It has architecture. Beautiful old Craftsman cottages and stucco houses also dating from early in the 20th century.

As I’ve been telling my friends, though, I gotta get outta this building. Because of the work I do, I need quiet surroundings so I can concentrate on semicolons and subject-verb relationships. My neighbors are driving me nuts. There’s the New Age enthusiast next door who’s friendly but drinks too much. When she’s drinking, she preaches to the man in the apartment above me. He’s deaf. I get to hear those New Age sermons. Late at night. Then there’s the large, loud, rude woman with the large, loud, surly teenagers. There’s the old man who apparently has AIDS dementia. He likes to get into everybody’s business, and then he phones the manager. He once phoned her seventeen times in one day. And of course there’s Mr. Balls-for-Brains. About whom I will say no more.

A long-time friend who’s been through three or four of my moves keeps telling me I should write a novel about this apartment building where there is just way too much drama. Put the neighbors in it, she says. That, of course, is the writer’s revenge: Be careful or you’ll end up in my novel. Romans-de-clef are written all the time. Some days, though, I think this building and its inhabitants would make a better movie. Maybe written and directed by the Coen Brothers. Or Tim Burton. Or, on loud days, Quentin Tarantino. So I’m moving the week after the summer solstice.

Meanwhile, I need to keep editing. I’m fortunate to be working with some extraordinarily patient authors right now. One is an elderly man who is rewriting his memoir. He’s led a very interesting life, but at this point, he keeps forgetting things. But he’s found help—a seventeen-year-old computer geek named Lorenzo. Now that my author and I can more easily send his chapters back and forth, we’re making significant progress on his memoir. Another author lives in Ontario. She and I have been working together—two books, several articles—since 2007. While I’m moving, she told me, she’ll be having houseguests, so she won’t be sending any new chapters. Another author with whom I’ve been working since 2005—two or three nonfiction books and a splendid novel—is on vacation, so I won’t get another chapter from him till mid-July. One more author is writing as fast as she can, but she has to do a lot of rewriting, so we’ve decided to pace ourselves a bit more slowly so we can both attend to our “real lives.” A new author lives in Reno and just sent me an email saying he’d be happy to drive his pickup truck over here to help me. I thanked him for his generous offer, but that’s just too far to drive. And finally, there’s the author who had a life crisis followed by a major insight. We’d almost finished her book (two edits so far), but now she’s decided to rewrite most of it. When I said I’m moving, she said she’s still writing. I am indeed fortunate to be working with these authors, all of whom understand the stress of packing up and moving.

So this week I’m editing in the mornings and packing in the afternoons. When I moved in here in 2001, I had twenty-six boxes of books. I don’t know yet how many boxes I’ll have when I move out. I’m also packing all 307 witches, my whole office, and the art on the walls. I have a lot of art on the walls, not only the collage I described in my January blog, but also real art by real artists. The manager of the building I’m moving into says I can hang anything I want on my walls. Little does she know……….

Yesterday afternoon, I went to my new apartment with graph paper. I measured and drew the rooms, including where the coaxial cable comes in and where the electrical outlets are. Tonight, I’ll make little diagrams of my furniture and figure out where everything will go—my office, my computer, my reference books, my seven or eight bookcases. The bedroom. The kitchen stuff. I’m tired already!

While you’re here, please go to Womens Radio and listen to my summer solstice interview, in which I explain how the gold and silver bracelets I always wear make me a walking spell. You can also read my first revisionist fairy tale on Womens Radio. I hope you enjoy it. I’ve just packed my shoes and purses. And another box of books. And another box of goddesses. Ya know, I can’t help but wonder if I’ll still be surrounded by boxes when I write my sun-entering-Leo blog.

Domineditrix

Sun, 23 May 2010 12:34:38 GMT

The doctorate is called the terminal degree. I hold a Ph.D., so that makes me terminally educated. Right? It’s my degree in English that gives me the knowledge and skills to be a good editor for inexperienced authors. And it’s my punnish—drat, my spell checker keeps trying to change “punnish” to “punish”—sense of humor that endears me to my friends and authors. At least that’s what they tell me, and since they say it with a straight face, I gotta believe them. Right? About that “punnish.” It’s a pun, of course. Some people think puns are punishing, but you and I know that wordplay and punning are the highest and (not “roasting” people) kindest form of humor. You’ve got to be smart enough to “get” the pun or play or words.

My book, Finding New Goddesses, is filled with wordplay, puns, parodies, and nonsense. One of the Found goddesses in the book is Domineditrix, “the writer’s in-F-able friend.” Here’s what I had in mind when I “found” her, that is, when I made her up. Let’s deconstruct her name. It’s obviously a pun on dominatrix, with some editing thrown in. (No, I do not wear leather and, no, I do not punish my authors.) If a female aviator is an aviatrix, than a female editor is an editrix. And “in-F-able” is both a pun on “ineffable,” “incapable of being expressed in words,” says my dictionary, but I use words anyway because I Am A Writer. It’s also my way of keeping it clean but suggesting the dreaded F-word. In getting my seven published books out into the world, I’ve worked with some excellent editors. I’m especially grateful for the work of Georgia Hughes at New World Library. She made my writing better, which people who worked for a couple other publishers of my books did not do. I also keep telling the authors whose books I edit that I’m working for them, not against them. So a skillful editor is a writer’s best friend.

Domineditrix also brings me to another topic. Although I am terminally educated, I have learned that I am still educable. I can be taught. After all, Alexis Masters, my wonderful web designer, taught me how to use the content management system of this web site. She even said I learned faster than some of her other clients have. Good for me!

Well, now I am having learning adventures with Womens Radio. Pat Lynch, founder of Womens Radio has been interviewing me on pagan topics like the sabbats for the past three or four years. (We’ve lost track.) She’s also been asking me to become a contributing editor, and that’s what I’m working up to this week. I’m doing this because Womens Radio is active on social media sites and because it’s a place to post stories and blogs where more people will read them. Kat Barrett of Womens Radio has already taught me to post blogs, and a few days ago she led me through the sign-up process to becoming a contributing editor. Now we’re about up to the training to actually post my articles on the site.

I’m st arting with Domineditrix. From the Found goddess, I’ll go on to a series of revisionist fairy tales I wrote several years ago and have recently rewritten. Why “revisionist”? You’ll find out when you read them on the Womens Radio site next month. When I started talking to Kat, I told my friend Elizabeth Hazel about what I was doing. She’s is a terrific artist and a writer, so I asked her to draw Domineditrix for me. Here she is. Be sure to visit Liz’s web site and look at other examples of her work. Send her an email and ask her about her one-of-a-kind “wall jewelry.” You might even want to buy one. I think they're gorgeous.

Pause. Four days later. First Pat interviewed me, then two days ago, Kat trained me using a gotomeeting thingie and a long phone conversation. She taught me how to post Domineditrix, how to edit the piece and get all the indents right, and how to add the copyright notices. She led me through all the steps. That took an hour. Then we spent another hour on the phone. Talking about paintings she’s done. She showed me the photos of them hanging on her wall at home—gorgeous! Clothes. I’m a recovering shopper, she’s still hard at it. Shakespeare’s plays. Turns out, we both love Shakespeare. I reeled off a list of DVDs she needs to have. I sent her the list the next day—those she can rent from Netflix, others she simply must buy. My guess is that when I post my first revisionist fairy tale, I’ll be asking for help. Yes, I have a really good education—in gooder English and in Shakespeare—but my knowledge of technology really is kinda terminal. That’s why it’s good to have smart friends.

Breaking news. The morning the Womens Radio link went live, I sent an email to a bunch of my friends. Later that day, I received an email from Elysia Gallo, an acquisitions editor at Llewellyn whom I met and had a long conversation with at PantheaCon a few years ago. We've been friends ever since. Elysia had found a typo. In her email, the offending word was struck out. "Domineditrix made me do it," she wrote. She added that she was going to share the ritual with everyone in the office.

Holy Sechat! Holding my breath, I rushed across my living room, pulled Finding New Goddesses off the shelf and looked at page 91. No typo. Do you know what spontaneous generation is? That's where typos often come from when they're not finger errors or Word hasn't created them. My guess is that the typo Elysia found was generated by all the copying and pasting. I dunno. I sent a note to Kat, and she fixed it. She also said the article had had over a hundred hits already. That's lots more than the number of people I posted my note to.

Brava, Elysia! Many thanks for your fresh eyes! It's still good to have smart friends.

Blog 0410

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:00:30 GMT

I don’t spend all my time editing books for writers who don’t want to embarrass themselves in print. I’ve written books of my own. I write these blogs. I write a regular column for SageWoman magazine. I also write book reviews.

I can’t even remember when I started writing books reviews. I started (maybe 20 yeas ago) because it’s a nifty way to get free books, and that’s one reason I still write reviews. I used to have a lot of my reviews archived on a 5 ½ inch floppy disk. Well, technology happened, and I threw that floppy away. Then I copied a lot of my reviews on a 3 ½ disk. More technology happened, and I tossed that disk, too. I think I have a lot of reviews copied on a CD, but after my CD burner ate a book by one of my authors, I stopped burning CDs. (I bought a new computer, but I still don’t burn CDs. Call me paranoid.) So now I have my reviews on my hard drive (on my external hard drive, too). I’ve just counted them: 150 reviews printed in a dozen different magazines. That’s a lot of free books!

I don’t review every book I receive, of course. Sometimes, as when I receive books on astrology from Inner Traditions, I don’t review them because I don’t know enough about astrology to read or write intelligently on the subject. I used to get extremely mediocre novels from ForeWord; the editor and I had a long email conversation about how they require favorable reviews. I demurred and now I don’t write reviews for that splendid magazine anymore. Sometimes someone on a listserv I’m on will send me a book to review. But I tend not to review books by people I know anymore. I once made the mistake of saying something like “While this book is poorly written, the plot and characters are interesting, and the book is worth reading.” The author took umbrage at the introductory clause and the listserv practically imploded. I can’t help it. Why write a review at all if I can’t give my honest opinion? So I’ve decided to follow Sir John Falstaff’s advice and let discretion be the better part of valor. And some books I decline to review just aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. They have lousy production values, like the one where the illustrations were placed in the middle of a page, so the reader’s eye had to jump an inch and a half on every line across the illustration. I have also declined to review a book that printed whole lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II without permission (that’s called plagiarism), another book that opened with a Forward and closed with an Afterwards, or another book that had errors of English spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage on every single page.

But, oh, the splendid books I receive! After I’ve been editing from, say, 7:30 a.m. until lunchtime, I crave good prose. I read some beautiful writing in the afternoons, novels that take me, like Emily Dickinson’s frigate, to lands away. Just in the past week, I’ve wandered in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, among the French impressionists, and into the secret rooms of Vodou magic.

As my home page says, I live a wordy life. I’m buried in books. I sit at one end of my living room couch to watch TV and DVDs. On the middle cushion are a box of tissues, the TV listings from the local paper, the cat brush, and red Netflix envelope flaps that I use as bookmarks. At the other end of the couch—I just counted ’em—six books. An autobiography. A novel about the Holocaust. A book on ceremonial magic. A novel about Hildegard of Bingen. A novel about Shakespeare before he became famous. A novel about Abelard and Heloise. I’ve got bookmarks in three of them. These are books I’m reading just for the pleasure of reading. I don’t have to review any of them. Some days, yes, I want to read without having the plan the review in my head as I’m reading, without having to consider the context of the story or the permutations of the plot, or whether I can recommend the book to readers of the magazine or web site I’ll send the review to. And picture this: my Maine coon cat, Heisenberg, is obviously a very intelligent fellow. One of his favorite things is to paw the cover of a book open and curl up next to the book and sleep with his head on the title page. I sometimes wonder if he’s absorbing the book. (Right now, he’s sitting next to my keyboard in his library lion pose.)

There are few things as good as the wordy life. Few things as good as a good book to read in the afternoon. (BTW, you can see a couple of my newer reviews on the Feathered Quillweb site. I’ll also post reviews at Womens Radio as soon as I learn how.)

Back when I was earning my master’s degree in English

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:52:50 GMT

Back when I was earning my master’s degree in English at Southeast Missouri State University, I worked as a secretary to five psychologists. A joke in the Department of Education and Psychology at the time was that the (about to retire) president of the university had recently announced that he “believed in psychology.” As Dr. Greg Dickey (still my friend forty years later) kept saying to anyone who’d listen, “What’s to believe? Psychology is something that exists. It’s not something you believe in or don’t believe in."

I think it’s the same with astrology. Whether we believe in it or not, it still exists. Astrology is a psychic science (maybe call it an alternative science?) that has been around for a long, long time. As alchemy is the mother of modern chemistry, so is astrology the mother of astronomy. It was used in ancient days by the Egyptian engineers who built the pyramids, by the builders of Stonehenge and Newgrange, by the Chaldean mages who are said to have visited the baby Jesus. Maybe some people hold a naïve belief that the powers of our stars and planets run our daily lives as if they’re marionettes holding us by strings, but I think that if something has been used beneficially for such a long time, then there must be something to it. After all, we’re all made of star stuff. At the time of the Big Bang, when (so Kabbalists tell us) Ain Sopf pierced Kether for the first time and then flowed like a lightning bolt down the Tree of Life to Malkuth, everything in the universe was created. All the elements (chemical and alchemical) were present, all the seeds of mountains, mole hills, whales, flies, sequoias, tulips, and you and me. We’re all kin. We’re all made of star stuff. Maybe that’s one reason to understand that the stars and planets have some influence on us.

But whereas I know a lot about English grammar and usage, not to mention English literature (plus several other subjects), I’m a complete nincompoop where astrology is concerned. I just can’t remember the vocabulary. When people start talking about trines and nadirs and what’s in which house, well, my head just goes bye-bye. When I started writing Pagan Every Day and decided to write a page about each sun sign, I asked my friend Lilith for help. She gave me a thumbnail sketch of each sun sign. I expanded what she said and/or used what she told me to prime the pump of my daily essay. (But Lilith is not responsible for anything I wrote.) Another friend, Margaret, also gave me some interpretations; it was she who pointed out that maybe Sagittarius is the arrow itself, not just the person shooting the arrow. And my friend Liz regularly posts astrological essays to a listserv I’m on. She writes with verve and makes the occult astrological language more understandable to someone like me. I’m fortunate to have these three friends. When I ask questions, I get answers I usually pretty much understand. I don’t know, however, if they agree with my idea that because we’re made of star stuff maybe that’s why the stars have some influence in our lives. I haven’t asked them.

This week I’m suddenly curious about something. I’ve known for a long time that I’m a double Cancer (sun sign plus rising sign) with a moon in Gemini. Cancerians are nest-builders. Big time. (Just look at anywhere I’ve ever lived.) Gemini communicate. ( Duh.) I also have Mars in Aries, which someone once told me made me a pushy broad. ( Moi?) And I have Venus in Leo. (Which may explain why everything I ever wear is a costume and why I so thoroughly decorate my nests.) I’m also told that my sun has progressed to Libra and my ascendant has progressed to Virgo. What does this mean? Liz said it means I’ve gone through a process of honing and focusing. One example of this is that I redeveloped this web site and am writing blogs. Focus? That’s for sure. My moon has (I think I’m reading this right) progressed to Capricorn, which, Margaret says, “is self-discipline which balances [Cancer’s] feeling. Virgos and Capricorns are well organized.” Good list-makers. If I weren’t well organized, I’d never have earned a Ph.D. and I wouldn’t be sitting here right now writing this blog instead of living like a cat or reading a novel.

Here’s what I’m learning about my Cancer-progressed-to-Virgo-and-Libra self as it relates to the work I do. The Cancerian traits give me the ability to nurture my authors “in a kindly way, without crushing their egos.” I do indeed endeavor to be kind to my authors. I know how it feels to be edited and questioned. Used to be, when someone would dare to edit (read: change) any of my deathless prose, I’d sulk for three days. I’ve got it down to twenty-four hours now, but I know what it feels like to be insensitively edited. My authors are smart people, though maybe not where gooder English is concerned. I’m smart in a lot of subjects, but not always in what they’re writing about. If I think I may be changing the meaning of their sentence or paragraph, therefore, I’ll ask about it: As written, this says so-and-so. Is this what you mean? Only once or twice have I commented that what I’m reading is nonsense; more often, I’ll write another note: Do you really, truly believe this? Please clarify what you mean. Cancers are sometimes called "smother-mothers." I occasionally write a note on the proper use of points of ellipsis or semicolons or highly abstract (and therefore almost meaningless) prose and sign it, This is your mother speaking.

Liz told me that as a progressed Virgo I’m focusing my message (hopefully conveyed here in my web site) on my market “by sharing tidbits about [my] process." Process, she said, "is an extremely Virgo thing." And Libra signifies balance: I’ve stopped working twenty hours a day. I stop in the afternoon. Some days, I read with my eyes closed. Balance is good.

So that’s what I’m thinking about as we move into the spring equinox. Most people say that spring begins with the equinox, but I believe that it’s the midpoint, the hinge, of the season. But that may be a whole ’nother blog. For now, I’m glad for the sunshine and I hope all the people who have queried me lately will get over the hump and actually ask me to edit their books.

Right Brain, Left Brain, Write

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:17:30 GMT

Back in the Middle Ages—well, the 1980s and ’90s—when networking groups were being invented, I was a member of a southern California organization for professional women called Women In Management (WIM). WIM was founded in the late ’70s by Dr. Helen Diamond and had seven chapters around Los Angeles. I served as program chair for the Orange County chapter, then later became corporate VP for public relations. Being a member of WIM was enormous fun (and a lot of work). I met some exceptional people and once got to carry a genuine Olympic torch around the room for one of our speakers.

Many of WIM’s members were women moving into corporate management positions. Remember, those were the days when women earned 50 or 60 cents to a man’s dollar. Those were the days when the “girl” got coffee for the men and often ran errands for her boss, too. When executives never touched a keyboard because keyboards were only for secretaries. When computers were just beginning to replace typewriters and floppies were eight inches in diameter. (I wrote a user guide about that time in which I had to caution new owners of computers not to use magnets to stick their floppies to the fridge or push pins to stick them on the wall. Really!) When only men were considered to be supporting a family. Every woman I knew who saw the movie 9 to 5 exclaimed, “Yeah! That’s how it really is.” We all knew managers and middle managers who deserved to be harnessed and strung up just like Judy, Violet, and Doralee strung up Franklin M. Hart Jr. Like the guy who fired me from a technical writing job. He was younger than I was, had only a B.S. degree, and probably weighed less than I did. Ahhh, yes. Living well may be the best revenge, but writing about the one who done ya wrong is a pretty good revenge, too. Like there's this telemarketer in Quicksilver Moon. He's so offensive that the vampire leaves him in a gas station, pretty well drained. Hah!

WIM taught me networking skills and brought me friends that I have to this day. As a very active member, I started using those skills, nourishing those friendships. I went to meetings. I became a member of the board that planned a women’s conference (also a new phenomenon in those days). I started doing presentations to other Women-In networking groups—Women In Advertising, Women In Film, Women In Accounting, and so on. I am proud of the fact that I actually persuaded a room full of accountants to close their eyes (in public!) and go along with a brief guided visualization I was leading. (Accountants tend never to close their eyes.)

As I was becoming known in the Orange County business community as a speaker, I was also exploring new avenues in my own life. One of them became my favorite topic: creativity, which I wrote about here last month. As I recall, studies in brain hemisphere function were beginning to be released to the public, and I found that extraordinarily interesting. Pretty soon, I put two topics that interested me together and created a talk for networking organization that I called “Right Brain, Left Brain, Write.”

Thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and numerous scientific and medical studies, we know a fair amount today about how the brain works when we’re doing specific tasks or thinking specific thoughts. Twenty-five years ago, we knew that that left brain is in charge of words and logic, the right brain in charge of images and creativity. That’s very simplistic, of course, but it’s still useful. I often find myself pulling little bits of my old speech out of my head to help my authors organize the books they’re writing. I’ll be talking about some of those techniques for getting organized and jump-starting creativity in the blogs I write for Feathered Quill.

Put simply, therefore, what I told my audiences twenty-five years ago and what I tell the authors whose books I edit today is that it takes both sides of the brain to write successfully. We use our right brain to “brainstorm” for ideas and/or conjure up the characters. I see and hear my characters, and I think that happens in my right brain, though sometimes the characters seem to be standing right in front of me. We use our left brains to organize our ideas or the plot and to get the words right. When I’m editing, in fact, I got into what I call total left-brain-nerd mode. That’s when I’m paying attention to commas and semicolons, to details about characters, to historical accuracy. My guess is that I’m not much fun to be around when I’m in left-brain-nerd mode, but that’s what my authors pay me for. Making collages like the one I described last month is my anodyne. So is watching DVDs of movies in which people sing and dance.

Restarting Creativity with the New Year

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:01:22 GMT

I like to start the new year restarting my creativity. Not just in my work with the authors whose books I’m editing, not by making resolutions—stop eating junk food, be nicer to my neighbors, wash the kitchen floor … you know the drill—but by doing something creative. Since childhood, creativity has always been important to me. I was forever writing stories, drawing pictures, running around with my little Brownie camera (yes, I had a real Brownie), inventing games. It seems like half the events in my life turned into stories. When my brother joined the Boy Scouts, I had to write a story that I called “My Life as a Boy Scout.” I tried to sell it to Boys’ Life. Early rejection slip.

About twenty years ago, my friend Suzan inaugurated what she called Goal Board Sunday, usually the second weekend of January. She invited a dozen of her friends (most of them New Agers, plus me, the only witch in the room), hauled a ton of old magazines out of her garage, and prepared light refreshments. We guests were instructed to bring poster board, more magazines, pens, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue sticks, and refreshments. We then set about putting the law of attraction to work. We cut pictures of things we wanted to manifest during the year out of magazines and pasted them in nice even rows across their rectangles of poster board. One of my friends pasted a picture of a red car on her goal board; by the end of the year, she was driving a bright red Mustang. Another pasted down pictures of computers; come spring, she had upgraded. The law of attraction works. Of course, you can’t just sit around passively and wait for it to work … but that’s the subject of a whole ’nother blog.

By the second year I was bored with rectangles and images in rank and file like a parade. I craved color, design, harmony, balance. I wanted to put the stuff of dreams on my goal board. Well, maybe it wasn’t a proper goal board anymore. I was turning it into a collage. To me, it's a work of art. Now don’t get me wrong—although my mother and brother were artists, and I’ve know some truly fine artists, I don’t consider myself a real artist. I once took a right-brain drawing class and drew a spectacular contour drawing of a brussels sprout, but that doesn’t make me an artist. I have good eyes, though; I know that artistic principles apply not only to illustrative art but also to music, writing, design, and other avenues of artistic endeavor.

What did I do? First I went for colored poster board. As the years have passed, I notice that I’ve usually gone for green, purple, and blue, though I’ve also been to red and yellow. Next, I laid my round altar top on the poster board and drew around it. I was the only one in the room working in the round. Then I went for pictures of gardens. I like opening doors, paths of stone or brick, trees, lake and mountain scenes. And I didn’t just line these images up on my collage. I overlapped them, I trimmed them, I found ways to make one image lead to another above or below it or next to it. I cut pictures out of catalogs, too—headlines like Act Old Later (which I have used two years in a row) and Breathe and Relax. This year, I’ve got one that says Happiness Is an Inside Job. And goddesses. Sophia (whom you can see at the top of my home page), Dame Fortuna with her cornucopia and her wheel, Green Tara and White Tara, Athena, Sarasvati with her vina, Hera. You get the idea. Every year, I had at least seven goddesses on my goal board. And glittery paper and glittery stickers. If you go to my Facebook page, you can see part of last year’s goal board behind me in my headshot.

After ten years, Suzan’s friends got too busy for her Goal Board Sunday, so she discontinued. But I kept going. I like have my own, private work of art hanging on the wall above my computer. It’s nice to look at. It inspires me. It reminds me to be creative.

I made my 2010 goal board last weekend. In the bottom quarter are big wooden doors opening inward. On the doors are cartoon draws of cats; they don’t look like my cats, but they seem to express my cats’ personalities. To the right of doors is a big headline that says My home is a mess … but my homepage looks fantastic. Because 2010 is numerologically a 3 year, I made a photocopy of Card III, the Empress, from my favorite tarot deck and pasted her right above the 2010. There’s a little photo of me on the collage, also a little photo of Michael Ball. Every year I hope and wish that I’ll have the time and money to go to England again and see him on stage or in concert. This year’s goddesses are the Winged Nike, Green and White Taras, Sophia, Sarasvati, Dame Fortuna, and Lakshmi. And—for the first time in twenty years—there’s a god there, too. Mars was not originally a war god; he was a Latin agricultural god who defended his people and his turf, which is why he was conflated with Ares. Over the past two or three years I have prayed to him to help protect my apartment and the building I live in. Also to encourage my upstairs neighbors to be quieter. My work with Mars has worked, so this year he’s on my goal board. Like every year, there’s also a border of glittery stickers around the edge—Blessed Bees, flowers, stars, fancier flowers, fancier stars. Some people might deem it tacky. I think it’s gorgeous.

And creative. I spent five hours, nonstop, creating this collage that is now hanging on my wall. I look up and see glitters and goddesses and green trees, and I feel inspired. It seems to me that my creativity flowed into my goal board just as it flows into the work I do sitting here at my keyboard. I do creative writing. I put on my creativity cap (which is like a thinking cap) when I edit books for authors who aren’t altogether sure how the writing process works. When I say, “Let me be your editor,” they get my creativity as well as my education, and some of that creativity shines out in glittery stickers and pictures cut out of magazines and pasted on green poster board.

Occult Adventures with Walter Troll & Other Invisible Friends

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:39:54 GMT

This article was published in Circle Magazine in the winter, 2002, issue. Yes, it really is a true story, though I did change some names. I also put Rev. Debbee (not her real name) into one of my novels.

Back in the olden days, 25 years ago, when I was young and exceedingly naïve concerning the invisible worlds, I was a practicing Unitarian and a technical writer. Evidently, some higher being thought that made me good fodder. First, one of my friends told me that the things suddenly started happening were not “just my imagination.” Those colored balls zipping around the room were real. There were no coincidences in the universe. Next, I fell in love with a man who worked by day as an engineer. He also did automatic writing, and his “control” had convinced him that he had a Great Mission To Accomplish In This Life. He believed it. I came to believe it, too.

And then someone advised me to visit a metaphysical church of good repute (which I’ll call the Loving Light Center) and study with Rev. Debbee. God spoke directly to Rev. Debbee! While she was in the bathroom. “Well, that’s the only time I have any privacy,” she would explain. She was, she went on, pursued simply all the time by her students. “They call me for advice at all hours of the day and night. They depend on me for every little thing.” Why, Rev. Debbee was so wise that she already knew she wouldn’t have to reincarnate again after this life. That’s why she was teaching so many classes—so her knowledge would not be lost to us forever.

Like I said, I was exceedingly naïve. I started taking her classes. I tithed to her.

Rev. Debbee taught that everyone living on earth has Eight Spirit Guides who surround and protect them at all times. Members of this invisible crowd that sit on our shoulders, whisper in our ears, and fling Significant Signs And Signals in our paths are (1) an American Indian Warrior to teach us to be strong, (2) a Naturopathic Doctor to heal our physical ills, (3) a Space Brother to help us explore the cosmos, (4) a Saint to lead us to God, (5) a Teacher or Scientist from Atlantis to bring the lost knowledge back into the world, (6) a Knight in Shining Armor to keep us safe from evil influences like demons and witches, (7) an Ascended Master from the Far East to teach us Upper Chakra Wisdom, and (8) our own Soul Mate to Love And Protect Us. Rev Debbee assured us that these Eight Spirit Guides led us every day along the Right-Hand Path to the White Light of God. How cool is that, I said to myself. How can I get in touch with these spirit guides?

Being the studious type, I started with books. I read the mainstream metaphysical literature, the books on the European Occult Revival and the various psychic sciences, books on ceremonial magic and the Qabalah and theosophy and the Universal White Brotherhood. I read Blavatsky, Leadbeater, Besant, Dion Fortune, Horace Quimby, Manly P. Hall … well, the list goes on and on. Although I learned enough to be a walking footnote to this day, I didn’t learn anything helpful about that mob of spirit guides that was supposed to be running my life. Next I did Tarot readings for myself. Every reading predicted fame and fortune. I did numerological readings for myself, got astrologers to interpret my natal chart, got my palms and irises read. No spirit guides revealed themselves. Hey, I said to myself. That’s not fair. How come everyone I know gets to talk to their spirit guides but all I get is one lousy Kirlian photograph with eyes in it?

Under my boy friend’s tutelage, I tried automatic writing. All I got was a stiff hand. I visited The Psychics To The Stars. All I got was a lot of debits in my check register. I turned to Rev. Debbee. “I really want to meet my spirit guides,” I told her. “I need to know what’s coming in my life.”

“Well,” she said after a minute of deep thought. “Come to our next psychic fair. Let Kenny draw a spirit picture for you. That will be one of your Spirit Guides.”

So I went to the next Loving Light Psychic Fair, and Kenny sat me down, got out his conte crayons, and drew an Indian that he said he saw standing behind me. “Wow,” I said. “Is this one of my Spirit Guides?” “I’m sure he is,” Kenny said modestly. “He says his name is Sun In Sky.”

Breathless with enthusiasm, I took my drawing home. I propped it up against a stack of books on the table and sat there, gazing at into its eyes. I just knew this drawing was going to help me. I was going to be taught or protected or healed or led. “Here I am!” I said aloud. Let’s get on with it already, I thought. “Hey, I’m waiting! What do I need to know? What should I do? Why am I on earth this time? What is my Purpose In Life?”

Nothing happened. I went to work every day and wrote about copper mining in Peru, about building a harbor in Saudi Arabia, about propping up the Alaskan Oil Pipeline. I edited proposals and engineers’ resumes. In my mind, I talked to Sun In Sky. Hey! Why don’t you answer me?

Desperate for cosmic communication, I went back to Rev. Debbee. After two minutes of deep thought, she said, “Well, have you tried the pendulum?”

Although I didn’t realize it, that was the beginning of the end of my enchantment. But it took me more than a year to get through the learning process.

What Rev. Debbee told me to do was get a piece of typing paper and print the letters of the alphabet on it in an arc, like a Ouija Board, plus the numbers from 1 to 10. She showed me how to hold a pendulum above the paper. Soon it began to swing from letter to letter, spelling out words. “Just write down the words,” she said. “This always works. You’ll be hearing from your Spirit Guides now!” “Good for you,” my boy friend said, “but just to make sure you don’t get under the influences of any evil entities, say the Lord’s Prayer before you begin. And give yourself an hour or so every night.”

Reader, do you know the meaning of “compulsive”? Have you ever seen obsessiveness in action?

I should mention here that my son, Charles, was about nine years old at the time. He has always been very bright, very skeptical, very resourceful. I suppose I could safely say that my adventures with the Invisibles helped him become more resourceful, more self-sufficient. Within a week or two, my nightly hour with the pendulum doubled. We moved the TV into Charles’s bedroom. My doubled hour doubled again. I sat on the couch, not watching TV, not listening to music, not talking to friends on the phone, not reading mysteries, not petting the cat or meditating. I sat there with a mini-Ouija Board and a pendulum and talked to spirits. As I told my son, I was watching the “wizards drive the pendulum,” and they were teaching me everything I’d ever need to know.

I don’t remember the names of all the Invisibles who came through my pendulum. Sun In Sky called me his “precious child” (something my physical father had never done) and told me I’d been a Lakota Princess in 1800 before the white men arrived in Nebraska. He told me that my boy friend and I were destined to marry and create a dynasty.

Oh, yes—did I mention that my boy friend was not only self-absorbed but that he was also married? Another spirit, Mr. Kahlil, told him via automatic writing that we were to go to Egypt and/or Saudi Arabia together to save the world. From what was never specified. Mr. Kahlil started talking to me, too, about eternal love. My boy friend and I were advised to wait until his wife died, then we’d be together again forever. I am forever ashamed that I believed that story. Mr. Kahlil soon said he would assume a human body and visit the construction company where we worked. He’d bring a major construction project to which we’d be assigned, and off we’d go. I believed him.

I went back to Kenny for another spirit drawing. This time he drew an Incan prince named Kuti. And, sure enough, Kuti started talking through my pendulum. I learned about this past life and that one, about how famous I’d been, about my royal heritage, about my sacred destiny.

Wow, I thought. Now I know why I’m on earth. I know what My Purpose In Life is. Four hours every night after work with pendulum, spelling out a sentence and writing it down, spelling out another sentence and writing it down, watching the wizards steer the pendulum round and round and round.

Someone who said she was Isis came and talked to me. She said she’d been my mother in a past life. Another Invisible said that my boyfriend had been David and I’d been Bathsheba. Another one said I’d been Cleopatra and he’d been Caesar and another boy friend had been Marc Antony. Another one said my boy friend and I had been the King and Queen of Atlantis.

How cool is this, I said to myself. I am royalty! Charles wanted to know what’s for supper and could I give him his lunch money and would I buy a “Frogger” game for him and hook it up to the TV and could he visit his friends for the weekend. My boss in the tech pubs department wanted to know why my work was so slow. My friends wondered why I never phoned them, why we never went to movies anymore, why I didn’t know what was going on in any of our favorite sitcoms. I am royalty, I replied in my imagination. I am above such mundane matters. I have a Major Task To Perform. All these Spirit Guides were running my life, and I was happy to let them do it.

By this time, my boy friend, who had been writing automatically for four or five years, had a whole stack of notebooks filled with different kinds of messages in different handwritings, none of them his own. My stack of pendulum papers was about ream-high. We were waiting for Mr. Kahlil to come and take us away from mundane construction. We were waiting to assume our rightful places in the sacred hierarchy of the world.

One Friday night, as soon as supper was over and my son was in his bedroom listening to Billy Joel records, I picked up my pendulum, assumed the position, and waited for wisdom. The pendulum began to swing.

We want you as our earth slave.

What? Oh, yes. I’d forgotten to pray. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven ….”

We want you to be our earth slave.

Who’s there? Who are you? Where is Sun In Sky? “Hallowed be thy name. … and deliver us from evil….”

We want you to be our earth slave.

Rev. Debbee wasn’t home. Her message machine said she was delivering a lecture at a metaphysical congress. Kenny was with her. I certainly couldn’t call my boy friend.

We want you to be our earth slave.

I put the pendulum away. I went into Charles’s bedroom and watched TV with him.

But I was addicted. First thing Saturday morning—back to the pendulum. We want you to be our earth slave. I prayed over the paper. I cupped the pendulum in my hands and prayed again. I visualized white light on the paper, around the pendulum, around my hands, around my pen and notebook, around my whole body, filling my living room. White light everywhere. I called upon angels to protect me. I implored my Eight Spirit Guides to come to me and do their jobs.

Now I had figured out by this time that I could influence what the pendulum said. I could make it spell out what I wanted it to say. Well, not this time. We want you to be our earth slave.

It was noon. I tore up the paper and burned the pieces in an abalone shell on sacred sand. Then I buried the ashes in my back yard. I took the expensive crystal pendulum outside. I also took a ball-peen hammer. I smashed that crystal point, burned the black thread, and buried it all.

But I was addicted. Sunday morning, I found another crystal point and tied it to another piece of black thread. "What’s going on here?" I asked, then held the new pendulum over the new paper and waited. "Who are you?"

My name is Walter Troll.

I nearly dropped the pendulum. "Who are you? Why are you scaring me?"

That’s not really my name. But you may know me as Walter Troll. It’s my job to scare you.

"Well, you’re doing a really good job of it."

Glad to hear that. Have you looked at your life lately?

No. All I’d been looking at was that pendulum. Well, I’ve been learning things from my Eight Spirit Guides. And Isis, she’s a famous goddess, you know, and she talks to me all the time. And my Indian father. They say I have a mission on earth.

Do you expect me to believe that?

"I believe it."

Do you really believe what a pendulum is telling you?

"Yes! Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?"

It was, Walter Troll told me, time for a reality check. What is the quality of your life?

The quality of my life was lousy.

Good girl. Now pay attention. The way to live your life is to get out there and live it. That’s trite, yes, but it’s quite true. You’re so smart? Examine your life. What are you actually learning that is of any use to you, your son, or anyone in the world? Has anything Mr. Kahlil promised come to pass? Has anything any of these entities told you come to pass? What are you learning that is true and useful?

Reality check, indeed. I put the pendulum down and picked up a pencil and wrote in my journal. I went for a walk. I took Charles out for lunch and we had a genuine conversation. I phoned a friend, who said she’d been wondering if I was still alive. Monday morning, I went to work and edited a proposal to build a cement plant in northern Idaho. I wrote a report on a construction project in Florida. After work, I came home and watched a little TV with Charles, then took him out for supper. We came home, watched some more TV, and after he went to bed, I picked up a paperback mystery. I had to start at the beginning because I’d completely forgotten the plot.

Attagirl, Walter Troll told me Tuesday night. If you spend all your time waiting for instructions from eight spirit guides, what else do you have time for? You want a task on earth? How your son is growing up? How do you think your boy friend’s wife feels? Would he be any more faithful to you than he is to her? When’s the last time you spent time with your friends?

"Walter," I replied, "are you my friend? Really? Who are you?"

Yes, my dear, I am your friend. Who do you think I am?

"I wish I knew! Why are you here? Why did you tell me you want me to be your earth slave?"

Do you still believe you’re the queen of the earth?

"Well … no. That just doesn’t make sense anymore."

Do you need this pendulum?

"Okay. Yeah. I’m looking at it with clearer eyes. But why did you scare me? Who are you?"

Walter Troll never answered my questions. Like the Little Prince, he was much better at asking questions than answering them. But, you know, he made me face myself. To this day, I don’t know who he was. And all the other Invisibles who talked to me through that pendulum—were they real or did my needy self make them all up? Were my Invisibles extrinsic to me or intrinsic? I’d read quite a lot and, when I reread their dictation, I saw that none of them had said anything I hadn’t already read. Who was Walter Troll? I have never heard from him again. He spent a week in my head, a week driving my pendulum. What he taught me was to be skeptical of “messages from beyond” and of people who think they don’t have to reincarnate anymore. He taught me to look closely at power and magic and claims of power and magic. He taught me that the invisible world may exist only between our ears and beneath the canopy of our skull. The invisible world may also be all around us. It can be hard to tell the difference. And he taught me not to be afraid of knowledge, whether it comes from worlds visible or invisible. He taught me to face gods, goddesses … and invisible trolls.

Getting Organized

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:21:28 GMT

Overture. A decade ago, I used to think that drumming was the best thing there was. I drummed at rituals and took classes and taught classes. But then the venue where I was part of a regular weekly drumming circle closed (now it’s a hyper-vegetarian restaurant) and the people I drummed with moved away. I sold my ashiko (a drum slightly smaller than a djembe) and most of my frame drums and gave away my other doumbek. Now I live with cats, and I believe that purring is the best thing there is.

Act I. When I say, “Let me be your editor,” and an author says yes and sends me his or her book, one of the issues we often discuss is organizing. I’m editing a dissertation at the present time, for example, and have suggested to the Ph.D. candidate that he reorganize and put all the discussion of his qualitative tests together and all the discussion of his quantitative tests together. He wants me to do this for him, but that’s way beyond my scope of work as an editor, so while I’ll help him, I suggested that he get with his committee and get their advice.

Organization is important to both fiction and nonfiction. You can use nearly any organizing model that works, from a simple list of the topics you want to hit to something grand elaborate. What I’m doing with this blog is using what I’ll call a musical theater scheme: overture, Act I, entre’acte, Act II. I like musical theater and I want to see if this organization works for a blog.

But you might want another organization scheme. When I used to teach public speaking, I taught the most common outline: Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, tell ’em what you told ’em. Introduction, body of speech, conclusion. It always works, and in an oral presentation, the repetition is both useful and necessary. If you want to get really fancy in your book, you might try sonata form: introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, coda. If it worked for Mozart and Beethoven, then maybe it can work for your memoir or novel. You might think about sonnet form: three quatrains and a couplet. The quatrains might be short related sections, chapters narrated by your characters, for example, and the couplet at the end might be your authorial voice closing the story. The model for a novel is rising action, climax, falling action, denoument. If you’re using sonnet form, then it’s your authorial voice that narrates the denoument, or resolution.

You might try baseball, too: nine innings, three strikes and you’re out and the teams change places. How would this work with the book you’ve got in mind right now? Or one of the organizing principles of fine art: symmetry, rhythm, repetition, balance, harmony. In Sunday in the Park with George, George Seurat sings about the difficulties of creating modern art in “Putting It Together,” and to introduce “Sunday,” which is one of the most beautiful songs in the entire Sondheim canon, he lists these principles: order, design, balance, composition, harmony. Although we don’t have to get entirely literal when we apply a model from another field to our writing, these are principles that I think apply to anything from setting the table for supper to getting dressed to writing a memoir or a song to playing just about any sport. (BTW, the Getty has a sketch Seurat made of his mother. From across the room, it looks like a line drawing. Up close … it’s all dots. Extraordinary.)

Entre’acte. Are cats musical? Pax, Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Eliot, but no, cats are not particularly musical. And I’ve never seen one dance like they do in Cats. (Felines are horizontal, whereas homo sapiens are vertical.) Why, then, have I replaced drumming with purring? Maybe it’s the rhythm. Purring is rhythmical. It’s also mysterious. How does a cat purr? What’s the mechanics of purring? Drumming, when you’re really in the groove, is mysterious, and you learn to depend more on muscle memory for that beledi than to try to count it out every time—Doum DOUM tek-a-tek-a DOUM tek-a-tek, tek-a. Or whatever variation you want to try. The beledi is always 4/4, but you can add all the teks you can fit in. (They’re like quarter notes and eighth notes.)

Act II. When you’re organizing your memoir or novel or dissertation, think about rhythm. Think about the overall rhythm and balance of the full composition. This is one reason authors like to open with a prologue or foreword and close with an epilogue or afterword. Balance. Think about rhythm and order and balance within chapters. This includes logical progression. I am forever writing notes about logic and non sequiturs to my authors. Even if you’re writing about a chaotic life, your writing has to be balance, logical, make sense.

And think about the rhythms of the sentences you compose. Are all your sentences simple declarative sentences? Then you have a page of soldiers marching in rank and file. No variety, no interest, unrelenting rhythm, boring. If you’re writing dialogue, get the rhythms of people’s speech patterns right. The easiest way to learn to hear--and write--good dialogue is to sit in the mall and listen to people, not to their exact words but to hear how they put sentences together, to hear the rhythms of their talking.

I think we can all profit when we think about the ideas Stephen Sondheim put into the mouth of George Seurat. Order. Design. Balance. Composition. Harmony.

How the Outdoors Got on Us

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:22:38 GMT

I first met my friend Valerie Eagle Heart in 1995, when she was leading a women’s circle in Santa Ana, California. Our circle drummed and did rituals on the full moons, and we also worked our way through The Artist’s Way and The Vein of Gold by Julia Cameron. Nowadays, Valerie lives in the desert east of Los Angeles, where she “offers Purification Lodges; shares the Teachings of the Medicine Wheel, facilitates Women's Retreats; offers various workshops and Gatherings and leads the Women’s Dance of the Green Corn and the SunMoon Dance.” It was at one of those early circle that I Found Caloria, the Goddess of the Potluck. Valerie tells me that to this day, the women in her circles gather around the table, join hands, and recite the invocation to Caloria. Every time I’d Find another goddess, I’d email her to Valerie, who inevitably emailed me back, “I love her.”

Valerie also supervises vision quests (safe ones), and while I wouldn’t do a vision quest on a bet, I have in fact driven out to Joshua Tree to support my friends. We all stand around the fire all night and send prayers to the person “out on the mountain.” Knowing I don’t like to get the outdoors on me, Valerie Found two goddesses appropriate to my personality. I wrote a story about them. Here, presented for the first time to the public, are Cleanessa and Comforta.

How the Outdoors Got on Us: A Found Fable for City Witches

Back in the Olden Days, when the world was a whole lot fresher (not to mention cheekier) than it is now, the people lived in the City of the Goddess. They were sensible people, beautiful people, smart people, golden people and—because they stayed in the city—they were Civilized People. They were much beloved by their Urban Goddess, who gave them Every Civilized Comfort, and so they lived in clean, comfortable homes and did the things civilized people have always done: they read books, they went to plays and concerts, they entertained their friends with home-cooked meals and home-bred conversation. They did every creative golden thing they could think to do.

Now these civilized people who lived so peacefully in the Olden Days were ruled by the Two Daughters of the Goddess of the City, Comforta and Cleanessa. Comforta and Cleanessa were the Co-Queens of the City and lived at the Ritz, where they enjoyed all the amenities of city life—haute cuisine, haute couture, and haute tub.

“Cleanliness is next to Goddessness,” Cleanessa always said, and …

“You shouldn’t get the outdoors on you,” Comforta always added.

The sisters always nodded at each other, folded their hands over their stomachers, ordered a light supper, and sat upon their clean and comfortable thrones to receive and counsel their people. Life in the City was clean, comfortable, calm, and civilized and nobody got the outdoors on them.

But one day …

One day—something happened! No one knows why. Perhaps the Goddess was bored. Perhaps She decided that Her Daughters were too prissy and needed a little loosening up. Perhaps She decided that Her children needed chocolate to go with the vanilla.

One day, Crystal and Blossom left the City. They ran into the Great Outdoors that was all around the city. They traveled the long, winding path to Turtle Hill, and there on Turtle Hill they began to dance. Crystal and Blossom boogied, they cha-cha-cha’d, they lambadad’d, they charleston’d, they waltzed, they jitterbugged, they macarena’d. For three days and three nights, Crystal and Blossom were so busy dancing that they forgot to eat. They were so busy spinning, jumping, whirling, leaping, and skipping that they forgot to drink. Crystal and Blossom were Having A Good Time.

Crystal and Blossom got the outdoors on them.

Their Mommy called them to come home to supper. For three days and nights, she kept calling them, and finally Crystal and Blossom heard her voice calling them. Finally, they paid attention. Finally, they stopped dancing. They came home. They still had the outdoors on them.

“My goodness!” said Mommy. “Where have you been?”

“Out in the outdoors,” said Crystal.

“What have you been doing?”

“Dancing,” said Blossom.

“Inventing the samba and the fox-trot,” said Crystal.

“Perfecting the tango and the bunny-hop,” said Blossom.

“Is that how you got the outdoors all over yourselves?” Mommy asked.

Crystal looked sideways at Blossom. Blossom looked sideways at Crystal. They looked up at Mommy and shuffled their feet and shrugged their shoulders. “When you dance the outdoor dance,” said Crystal, “you tend to get it on you,” said Blossom.

What could Mommy do? She threw up her hands and shook her head. Then she pulled her big white hankie out of her pocket and told Crystal to spit in it so she could scrub behind her ears. Then she told Blossom to spit in the hankie so she could wipe the back of her neck. She made them smooth their hair and stand up straight. She told Crystal to tuck in her shirt and Blossom to tie her shoelaces.

“We’re going to the Ritz,” said Mommy when she was satisfied that her children were Clean Enough. Comforta and Cleanessa were holding a Full Moon Drumming Ritual to honor their Mother and all the people of the City were invited. Who knows, some of them said—perhaps even Creator might come. “Of course,” they said, “you never know with him.”

When they arrived at the Ritz, all the people were enjoying the drumming and the potluck supper. They were all wearing their best clothes and fanciest jewelry. They were singing the usual songs and chants and gossiping the usual gossip.

And Creator was there. He had brought along his Paint-By-Number kit, which he used to create and name all of the wild things that lived in the outdoors. He was also, as usual, teasing his sisters.

Look,” he said to Comforta, “lions and tigers and bears!”

“Oh my,” said Comforta, taking a step back.

“Look!” he said to Cleanessa, “spiders and flies!”

“Not in my parlor,” said Cleanessa.

“Children,” said the Goddess, “you behave yourselves and Play Nice Together. You don’t want to make me have to take you outdoors and Speak Firmly to you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As the festive night went on, Comforta made sure everyone had enough to eat and drink. She plumped up all the pillows and opened the windows when it became too hot in the Ritz. Cleanessa put her Handiwipes in her pocket so she could wipe up the inevitable spills. She picked up the empty Pepsi cans, kept the cats off the table, and stacked the coffee cups and plates and forks and knives and spoons in the dishwasher. Creator sat in the corner with his Etch-a-Sketch and created aardvarks and wombats and lemurs and Joshua trees and mugwort. Crystal and Blossom taught everybody the fox-trot and the bunny-hop and the jitterbug.

And so everyone lived happily ever after.

Pretty soon, Crystal and Blossom took their friends out dancing and taught them the spiral hokey-pokey. They had so much fun that they stirred up the outdoors and got it all over themselves … and, you know, sometimes even Comforta and Cleanessa could feel their toes a-tap-tap-tapping.

The End

Maybe