Years ago I thought I'd be “musing” once, maybe twice a month. Didn’t seem all that ambitious. I mean, there’s stuff floating around in my head all the time. Just type it up. Well, it’s been over five months since my last blog post, so you see how that’s going. I could blame the pandemic or any number of modern day traumas, but I’m tired of that. Instead, I’m going to reboot my blog based on one of those floaty ideas.
From this point forward, “Musings” will be “Birds and Stars.” Why? Because birds and stars pop up in my writing on a regular basis. Also, I won't run out of stuff to talk about. By latest estimates there are over 10,000 bird species in the world, and when it comes to the universe, I've got light years' worth of material.
So let’s start with the birds. I just finished my Bird Nerd novel and took the big step of printing it out for its final fine-tuning before querying. What had begun as a short story, morphed into a novel, then morphed again into a rather different novel is finally done. I’m so thankful to my critique group and everyone else who had eyes on it (or parts of it) along the way.
Now to the stars (representing all of space—planets, nebulae, etcetera and so forth). I was pleased see my poem “City Girl Stargazing” published in the June issue of Spaceports & Spidersilk. Inspired by my childhood backyard stargazing in Philly, it tells the story of a girl who gets transported to the Andromeda galaxy. Since the earliest “wow” experience I remember was seeing Jupiter for the first time through my telescope, that’s how I opened the poem:
Last night I visited Jupiter—
a tiny, striped glowing bead that
grew into a monstrous world
that pulled me through its cloudy
swirls down, down to a secret core.
And there I met metallic giants
dancing on a molten sea.
I’ve also got more stars in my future, as I embark on another rewrite of my novel The Star of Moon Village. It’s been waiting in the wings for a couple of years now, and I’m chomping (champing?) at the bit to see what I can do with it to make it bigger and better. That should keep me busy well into 2023.
Okay, that’s enough for now. I’m already thinking of my next post, so that’s a good sign! Here’s to another attempt at blogging!