Due to my involvement with several creative projects – fiction writing, music, film production, and other miscellaneous stuff, the blog has gone quiet. I plan to revive it at some point. The old posts remain available, so pull up a chair, pull on your favorite beverage, and have yourself a fine browse.

If you’ve come for:

War on the Humanities, start here.

Writing and its Discontents, start here.

Creativity as spirituality, start anywhere.

The post Matter Notes – update appeared first on .

Les trois Québécois: le froid, Le Bonhomme, et la Grand-mère du Monde

The three Québécois: the cold, Le Bonhomme, and the Grandmother of the World

A trio of encounters in the Great White North. Chanced upon in February 2023.

Carnaval de Québec: Le froid (the cold)

So . . . I had an adventure.  I was recently in Québec, where I decided to celebrate all things sacred to February by taking in the opening days of the Winter Carnival. This is dawn over the city.  The violet light is from Bonhomme’s ice palace, which houses several musical instruments carved from ice. (And no, I did not attempt to play any, although his guests were welcome to try).

The Carnival’s opening was postponed a day, and then another half day, due to extreme cold. When Québec shuts anything down from extreme cold, you know you’re in the middle of something special.  It was -18°F (-28C°) that Saturday morning with a windchill of -43°F(-42C°). 

So I decided, despite Saturdays being sacred to the spirit of Carnival, that I didn’t need or want to experience that level of cold.  Until I saw folks doing just that.  As if this was all another day.  I then decided to do the same.  For the experience.

The second image is of me layered to the max, and ready to venture into this record-breaking Québec winter. I had a fine time stomping around Old Town, visiting shops, and getting pleasantly lost once or twice.  Embracing the Canadian cold so unreservedly that now, weeks later, my bones are still so soaked with it that I swear by the spirit of Carnival it’s always been there.

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Carnaval de Québec: Le Bonhomme

Just returned from Québec, where I kept running into this guy – the Winter King, the Spirit of the Carnaval de Québec Himself, the most playful and hospitable M. le Bonhomme.  So I asked him, in the spirit of play, to be a good fellow (a true bon homme) and pretend to hold my book.  He graciously obliged.

Of course this implies no endorsement on the part of Bonhomme or the Carnaval. I made my request to one of his many images; the living costumed spirit was busy dancing and hugging and tripping his way among his many guests.  Possibly at the bar near his ice palace.

But play is play, and the spirit of Carnival is eternal. Wherever you find it, its origins in the Saturnalia, the Dionysia, and the murky neolithic, are always lurking. In the corners.  Along the dirty floor that helps you isolate yourself by holding your stare as you stand in a crowd waiting to get to the bar. In the fuzzy not-quite-silence of the Saint Lawrence River ice contorting into other-worldly shapes that mark the border of the celebration.

So why not pose an image of the Northern Spirit of Carnival holding a book that displays a bacchante (maenad) mask?  After all, aren’t they distant relatives?

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de Québec: la Grand-mère du Monde (the Grandmother of the World)

Not Carnival – not really. But maybe something like it.

While in Québec, I wanted to track down a statue of Saint Anne that I learned was located at the Sanctuaire Sainte-Anne-De-Beaupré. I had read someplace that this statue depicted Anne as a kindly older woman, a grandmother-of-the world Great Mother type, wearing a crown of maple leaves to represent the spirit of Canada. And for some reason I really needed to see that. To see what the long-dead artist, Joseph-Émile Brunet, did with that. 

I’ve always felt a power in archetypes—whatever context they appear in—so I went in search of this Great Maple-Leafed Canadian Grand Mother. Maybe to make a wish? Maybe to offer a prayer if the statue was beautiful and had energy running through it. Or maybe just to steal some of that energy, because I so seldom go north, into the direction of magic.

So I trudged through bitter claws of cold. Through the shrine itself—which was open for visitors. Although there were several beautiful images of Anne scattered around, this particular one was not just missing—but invisible. No one I queried in French or English had heard of Anne with the maple leaf crown, although one shrine worker was enthusiastically charmed by the idea.

Days later, leaving the city, I stopped again. This time I found her, outside, guarding an empty fountain basin. So braving the gray of a snowstorm, I left the car and stood near the statue, the better to contemplate the balance between creativity and emptiness.

Saint Anne did not look particularly kind, motherly, or even grandmotherly. The maple leaves resembled a crown of thorns. The child Mary looked distant in Anne’s embrace, already missing whatever world she came from and utterly agnostic before a world she hasn’t yet encountered. God hasn’t spoken to her yet.  Maybe he won’t.

And something about searching for the world’s grandmother in the most piercing cold I’ve ever experienced, and finding her guarding an empty basin, suddenly made me cry. For what I can’t tell you, or even tell myself.

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Well, this is unlooked for – and almost missed. 

I just learned that Independent Book Review included The Maenad’s God in its list of best books of 2022.  For a late-in-the-year release from a quiet little indie press (mine), I’m just . . . blown away. Complete list here.

And  . . . I also learned that it won a Literary Titan Gold Book Award back in November (hence the celebratory photo with the gold sticker).

Eh . . . cool.

So . . . the image.  I know it’s standard to post comfy-read images of newly-released books laid near inviting mugs of coffee – so I started to create one for fun. But I added a traditional Quebec Christmas Eve tourtière.  (OK – maybe not so traditional, as I made this one with chicken – not beef and pork).  Anyway, it’s sitting with the coffee and pretending to be a traditional New England apple pie.

Really it is. Pretending. Look close and you’ll almost see it.  Because what cries “comfort food” more convincingly than apple pie? 

Besides, in a book where fantasy and reality have a hard time telling themselves apart, the imaginary union of Canadian and New England cuisine felt metaphorically perfect.

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Autumn, from the series The Four Seasons, by David Teniers de Jonge (circa 1644)

If anyone has issues with me posting a painting that was “appropriated” by a British museum (The National Gallery) from a Flemish court painter who worked under the patronage of an Austrian archduke,

the court painter having “appropriated” scenes from the “lived experience” of peasant life while also managing to “appropriate” Dionysian tropes from the ancient Greeks (more on that later),

 the ancient Greeks being a people who lived in a loose collection of city-states who “appropriated” Dionysus from earlier inhabitants of Thrace and/or Phrygia,

that is, from those same earlier Thracian/Phrygian inhabitants who in turn “appropriated” Dionysus (whom they called Sabazios) from eastern Anatolia when they sacked the remnants of the Hittite Empire in 1200 BCE,

the Hittites being a people who in turn “appropriated” from the indigenous inhabitants of Anatolia when they arrived from the Pontic-Caspian steppe sometime before 2000 BCE,

where they had (most likely) “appropriated” religious ideas from an earlier Indo-European culture or cultures that were comprised of Indo-Iranian speakers,

some of whom migrated over the Hindu Kush into the subcontinent around 1500 BCE, and absorbed (I mean “appropriated”) from the indigenous Dravidian people,

who in turn probably “appropriated” elements of their culture from a mixture of earlier Indo-European and northern and eastern African cultures,

meaning that those Indo-Iranian invaders may have also committed a second-hand “appropriation,” via the Dravidians, of some cultural elements from east Africa, a region that every human being on earth is descended from  . . . . 

OK, I’ve lost the trail, but if anyone objects (horrors!) that certain tropes and images evolved over millennia, through various cultures and time periods, into a 17^th century work of art that is now a public domain image posted on my poor humble blog . . . well, then, they can fuck right off. 

Confused yet?  You should be.

The world is a messy place.  Cultures are messy constructs that make it easier to talk about certain places at certain times that share some commonalities – but like all mental constructs, the closer you look, the more they fall apart at the edges, and then beyond the edges, and then inward to the center, until what you’re left with are individual human lives caught in the strokes of a cave painting, or an oral tradition that gradually gets enmeshed in an alphabet, or broken pottery and food remnants collected thousands of years after dinner ended in the long-hidden layers of a tell.

There is no way to wade into the history of any idea without finding yourself drowning in the history of all ideas.  If the humanities are no longer the study of humanity – all of it – then the war on the humanities has won.

But as to Teniers de Jonge ‘s Autumn.

Here, Teniers de Jonge gives us realism in all its glory.  Or rather, as much realism as allegory will hold.  Autumn is rough and dirty, his girth imposes presence.  The bottom half of his body, clad in brown shoes and brown breeches that shade his rippled blue stockings, emphasize the fruitless land and barely visible, empty sea.

His dirty red outer garment fails to hide his even dirtier tunic.  Even the sky bears dirt, that is, shows limits.  Autumn is of the earth, the material, and that wine-red shirt forces us to keep looking at the material, whatever else might be going on.

But . . .  even as Autumn’s presence focuses us on the bleak severity around him, he looks away.  He ignores the two peasants who study his back while pausing in their barrel-work.  He ignores their two companions who are focused on their own labor.  He ignores us.  Not even the wine glass in his hand, the fruit of the earth, merits a glance.  The glass is full but he neither offers it to us nor drinks of it himself.  Instead, his shape echoes the wine bottle in his other hand, signaling that he, like the bottle, contains hidden within himself the fruit of Dionysus.

Where does Dionysus come in?  The figure strides the dark, stands in shadow as the light shows dim behind him, suggesting the equinox, the time when Dionysus returns and Apollo retreats to the north.  Peasant Autumn appears sober (because after all, the glass is full, the wine untouched) while nevertheless contemplating something beyond the world of the painting, something we’re not privy to, perhaps anticipating the approach of something transcendent, an almost-trance-like state.  As earthy and realistic as the outward trappings of this painting are, Autumn implies something not-of-this world.

So naturally (pun intended) the painter shows Autumn as an allegory; the thing standing in for the invisible spirit of every thing.  It’s what Teniers de Jonge doesn’t show us, it’s what Autumn sees outside the earthy bounds of the painting, that matters. 

Realism lifting its glass to Imagination in a kind of holy communion.

Blessed Autumn. Blessed Equinox.

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June 8, 2020

Waxing moon over New England.

It is all future.  It implies nothing present.  That is how it charms.  Some folks form intentions during this phase, but the waxing moon itself forms none.  It but points to the possibility of intention’s fulfillment, drawing you forward but never feeling like a promise so much as a mark on the way.

Also, here is an invisible veil about to be pierced – or maybe blown open to take you with it.

The waxing moon manages to be in motion, in change, while at the same time perfect and unchanging in itself.  And so it proclaims divinity’s eternal tension with creation.  It must perform this mystery every month, by universal law.

Here is the high priestess in the Rider Waite tarot deck.  A scrying bowl.  Horns from an ancient animal that died thousands of years ago and whose energy a shaman-artist transferred into cave paintings.  A celestial seat for fairies, à la The Fairy of the Moon by Hermann Kaulbach (1891) (see earlier post).

And in the Enemy Glory trilogy, magical research.  That is, intellectual curiosity and the process of acquiring learning and experience.  Also (good) wizardry, and philosophy leading to an ethics of lawful good.  Intentions, sure.  Mirand, Llewelyn’s first teacher, is associated with this phase.  So is his goddess, Athena.

Some witches associate the waxing moon with the Maiden archetype, with Persephone prior to her underworld ordeal.  But Maidens needn’t be young nor naive.   Let’s call it increase – periods of life in which things feel like they are reaching into more experienced versions of themselves. Nothing comes toward you, but you feel yourself drawn toward everything, including versions of yourself you’ve yet to meet navigating half-lit paths you’ve yet to see.

June 23, 2020

Full moon over Greenwich Cove, Rhode Island.

It has no truck with the past, nor traffic with the future.  It is entirely present, revealing and obscuring an eternal now, hinting at the light that the folks who survive death swear they encounter, but can neither forget nor describe.

Here, the illusion of separation blinks. And so you sense the life of things without needing to name them.  The full moon shines through the veil between the worlds and renders it invisible.  That is why it transfixes while failing to charm.

Animals and humans howl, chant, and form circles; clumsy attempts to mirror What Is and know themselves, briefly, as ongoing manifestations of God.  Singing, clapping, spinning, healing, falling back to ground and limitations.  This sort of thing has been happening since at least the late Neolithic.

Some associate the full moon with the Mother archetype.  But moon goddesses tend to be virgins.  Artemis gives birth to nothing, remaining free. Yet she presides at all births, midwifing new lives into the world of separation like so many characters into a work of fiction.  The sloshy nature of mystic play costumes itself in the physical. What we see is all show; an awkward actor pointing up the literal to convey to the imagination the fuzzy light of truth.

“All that I have to say, is, to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.”  — Robin Starveling, as Moonshine in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

So here is, well, the moon.  In the tarot, The Moon. Who, showing all things, sheds teardrops of light like her opposite, the sun.  In song and poetry and myth, the moon.  Always and only the moon.  Imagination creating and becoming Everything, what Blake called “conversing with Paradise.”

And in the Enemy Glory trilogy, Aeren the bard, who transforms into different genders, creatures, characters, and yet remains unrecognized for the tale-teller she is, shares scenes with the full moon.  That she recognizes no divinity save her own imagination makes no difference.  It’s more or less the point.

June 29, 2020

Moon waning over early morning.

It is wholly past.  Even its light is backward, a morning-after remnant of its earlier phases.  But so removed from its sources . . . so aloof . . . it draws nothing from whence it came.  After the full moon’s intensity, its relentless revelation of Experience (see previous post), comes breakage.  Separation.

It is the quietest of the three moons (see previous posts), and so, like most introverts, unnoticed.  Many don’t associate the moon with daylight or blue skies; and so they never see what it does after dawn.  Others are surprised to learn that yes, you really can see the moon by day.  If it’s ending things.  If it’s dying.

So here is the Crone.  Crones needn’t be old or female, just wise and disregarded. Young, cursed Cassandra, forever speaking truth and forever disbelieved. That happens when Apollo spits in your mouth.  Hypatia teaching science in the nascent face of the Church.

But any outsider will do.  Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.  Frankenstein’s poor monster.  Melville’s Ishmael.  “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”  Mourners. Witches.

Survivors of the unspeakable have no shared language with the rest of humanity.  There is only breakage – and then a solitude poorly translated.

In the Enemy Glory trilogy, the waning moon is Hecate’s symbol, and therefore Llewelyn’s.  It’s burnt into his palm, marking him as evil for grasping at magic, at learning, at beauty, at a life imagined and inexplicably denied.  Damned before he knows what it means.  Telling his story to his enemy as he dies.

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May 1, 2020

It’s Beltane. And for some reason, I felt like playing with Emily Dickinson’s “To Make a Prairie”. For my fellow solitaries:

To make a Beltane it takes a fairy and one dance,
One fairy, and a dance.
And the moon.
The moon alone will do,
If dances are few.

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May 5, 2020

It’s still Beltane season, still fairy season.  I’ve always been fascinated by art that emerges from insanity, and what better example of same than Richard Dadd’s famous painting.  Whether he was in communication with Osiris, as he claimed, or suffered from schizophrenia, is perhaps a question of culture and consensus reality.  In ancient Egypt he would have been god-possessed.  In Victorian England, he was considered mentally ill.

But if you must label whatever is going on here, look at the fairy in the red cap at bottom left. Then give me a name for it – for that red-capped fissure in Dadd’s painting that’s been letting in fairy energy since 1855.  And a name for the feller’s approaching crack of the nut.  And a name for Queen Mab’s carriage, yet unpainted.

And what to call the wild grass that reveals this moment before the moment, but forms a barrier between what we see and what we feel?

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May 7, 2020

Solitaries. Madness. (See previous posts.)

And now Beltane closes into full spring.  And now the fairies depart.  Their home is in primeval tales. Tales that are always boiling out of a timeless, opaque cauldron. Imagination’s bounty stirred into life by a witch with an old stick.  An old shamanic woman in a dirty robe who is both creator and character.

The post Three for Beltane appeared first on .

April 4, 2020

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

. . . .

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

            -Geoffrey Chaucer, from the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

Middle English is not to everyone’s taste, but the impulse to go on pilgrimage when “the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,”  that is, in early April, is inescapable. We want to be out – whether lingering on the doorsill or riding to Canterbury doesn’t much matter. It’s the softening earth and insistent light and the plant growth scenting the air that matters. They direct us to go wherever we’re not.  At least for now.

An April pilgrimage to the remains of a dead saint frames the characters’ tales. April may beckon, but the pilgrims know that their journey ends in something sacred and awful. Perhaps that is why they tell themselves stories to get there.

All imagination is an act of prayer.

The Enemy Glory trilogy is available from Amazon.

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April 6, 2020

Holy. Holy. Holy.

Home is a holy place. The folks in my last post “longen [ ] to go on pilgrimages,” and so they ride from London to Canterbury. It can’t be helped. It’s primal. Sweet Aprille pricks them on.

But the best travels are inward. Books are home. Coffee is home. Sweet virgin goddess Hestia – I mean, of course, the hearth – is home; and never more home than on a dark day. New England has dark days between April and October, but not enough, and not reliably. The aesthetic will mostly bury its head for the next six months, like a mythic river running to secret places. Or maybe like the introverted friend it is.

The Enemy Glory trilogy, which was written with much coffee on dark days, is available from Amazon.

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April 21, 2020

It’s National Library Week. 

Inscribed over the door of the library at Thebes, built around 1250 BCE by Ramses II, were the words “Psyches Iatreion” (“Healing Place of the Soul”). All libraries should bear this inscription.  I count them among holy places.

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April 23, 2020

Just another reason to love libraries.  Because where would we be without order?

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April 26, 2020

To cap off National Library Week.  The Enemy Glory trilogy is available at the Worcester Public Library (main branch) for your free reading pleasure.

It is also available from Amazon.

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March 10, 2020

I’ve never cared for the practice of screwing with the clocks twice a year. In spring it feels like a violation of the natural order. In fall it feels like fixing the damage, albeit temporarily.

And yet, isn’t there a sense of profound Mystery in these rhythms, this universal agreement to shift the way we count the hours solely to make the sun yield light at our convenience?

I understand it isn’t good science to arbitrarily change measurements in order to get a desired outcome. But maybe it’s workable poetry?

The King’s Glory begins out of time. Llewelyn doesn’t know how much time has passed during his trial in the North Country, or how he’s going to survive when he returns to the world. Change the measurements. Life and death are now workable poetry.

The Enemy Glory trilogy is available from Amazon.

Photo credit: Harald Pliessnig via Unsplash.com

March 13, 2020

Something in Harald Pliessnig’s photo, taken somewhere in Northern Europe, feels like early March in New England.

I love early March like I love rough drafts. Because March is a rough draft, existing in the midst of inspiration and realization. Just before spring pounces with its burst of green and flowers, the earth and woods go quiet, as if they’ve reached a resting point before once again engaging in the business of life.  

It’s a contemplative time. A bookish time. It’s seasonless and out of time, nursing itself between the worlds, like it just fell out of the calendar and doesn’t yet have a name.

March 14, 2020

March 14 is National Write Your Story Day.  A day that suffers in undeserved obscurity.  Not because all of us have the desire to write down our stories; but because all of us are stories that keep telling themselves, whether we will or no.  It’s good to honor this once in awhile.  The world emerges like a living shadow from the way we create and know ourselves through the stories we tell.

In Enemy Glory (Book One) and in Hecate’s Glory (Book Two), Llewelyn tells his story, at sword point, to his former friend and current enemy, Walworth.  Walworth must listen to and write down every word, for the law requires him to pass judgment on Llewelyn’s acts of treason and murder.  But by setting down Llewelyn’s story, Walworth is helplessly writing his own, for Llewelyn’s tale reveals the previously hidden consequences of Walworth’s actions.

In The King’s Glory (Book 3), Llewelyn speaks directly to us.  He’s telling a new story, one that has the power to save the world or earn him eternal damnation.  Most likely, the latter.  But as with all things that matter, so much depends upon the telling of the tale.  And on the tale depends the heart’s judgment on the gods.

The Enemy Glory trilogy is available from Amazon.

March 20, 2020

Ostara.  Renewal.

Wouldn’t it be a perfect spring if everyone just stayed home, played music, played with animals, played music to animals, learned a new language, read books, wrote books, made outrageously cool art, had midnight tea with the spring stars, balanced green and gold eggs on the Equinox and ate them with mint, danced, planted a garden, created scandalous meals, and maybe  . . . spent a few weeks or months getting reacquainted with themselves?

What would happen if we got through the plague by experiencing how to live fully human lives again?  And how to be fully human with each other again?  We might decide that it suits us so well that we’re going to stay home and keep doing it.  We might even keep doing it in public, and at work.  It might become corporate America’s worst nightmare.

People have taken refuge in storytelling from plagues ever since Boccaccio wrote the Decameron.

The Enemy Glory trilogy is available from Amazon.

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So, what would happen if humanities scholars offered structured private classes in Renaissance art, Victorian literature, ancient Greek philosophy, the Age of Reason?  I’m not talking about a Great Courses recording or a MOOC, neither of which provide the opportunity for interaction with the instructor.  I mean actual individualized instruction that approximates the content of a college class.  Content that goes beyond mere exposure.  Perhaps through Skype.  Perhaps on street corners.  (OK, maybe not street corners.)  But there are stoai everywhere.  Let’s claim them.

I noted that foreign language teachers are already doing this.  Perhaps humanists from other disciplines will follow.

Anyway, Camilla, my Italian teacher, has now claimed her own stoa and created a new foreign language education website called TeachItGlobal, that offers instruction in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.  TeachItGlobal is also on facebook.

I have studied Italian with Camilla for nearly two years.  She is a gifted, creative, simply phenomenal teacher, and I’m very excited about her new project.   Both because she’s a great teacher, and because bringing humanities education to individualized instruction on line is a way to preserve humanistic learning in a situation where many universities are abandoning it in favor of job training programs.

Camilla provides in-depth grammar work and written feedback, personal observations on Italian culture, and conversation practice.  Through TeachItGlobal, I am confident that she will continue to offer high quality foreign language education, the kind I had no access to because my local universities no longer offer Italian.

I have been blessed with the opportunity to live in Italy on two separate occasions over the last two years.  My study of Italian with Camilla has greatly enriched those experiences.

So here, for fun and a bit of showing off, I translate.

Quindi qui, per divertimento e per sfoggiare un po ‘, traduco.

TeachItGlobal Quando Le Università Non Lo Insegnano Affatto

Qualche tempo fa, in risposta alla tragedia in atto delle università che distruggevano i loro programmi umanistici, ho chiesto:

Quindi, cosa accadrebbe se gli studiosi di discipline umanistiche offrissero classi private nell’arte rinascimentale, nella letteratura vittoriana, nella filosofia del greco antico, nell’età della ragione? Non sto parlando di una registrazione dei Great Courses o di un MOOC, nessuno dei quali offre l’opportunità di interagire con l’istruttore.  Intendo istruzioni personalizzate che si avvicinano al contenuto di una classe universitaria.  Contenuto che va oltre la semplice esposizione. Forse tramite Skype. Forse agli angoli delle strade. (OK, forse non agli angoli delle strade.) Ma ci sono stoai ovunque. Le rivendichiamo.

Ho scritto che gli insegnanti di lingue straniere questo stanno già facendo.  Forse umanisti di altre discipline li seguiranno.

Comunque, Camilla, la mia insegnante di italiano, ora ha rivendicato la sua stoa e creato un nuovo sito web per l’educazione delle lingue straniere chiamato TeachItGlobal, che offre istruzioni in italiano, portoghese e spagnolo.  TeachItGlobal è anche su facebook.

Ho studiato italiano con Camilla per quasi due anni.  È un’insegnante dotata, creativa e semplicemente fenomenale e sono molto entusiasta del suo nuovo progetto.  Perché è un’insegnante eccellente. E perché portare l’educazione umanistica all’istruzione individuale on line è un modo per preservare l’apprendimento umanistico in una situazione in cui molte università la abbandonano per favorire programmi di formazione professionale. 

Camilla fornisce approfondimenti grammaticali e feedback scritti, osservazioni personali sulla cultura italiana e la pratica della conversazione.  Tramite TeachItGlobal, sono fiducioso che continuerà a offrire un’istruzione di lingua straniera di alta qualità, il tipo a cui non avevo accesso perché le mie università locali non offrono più l’italiano. 

Sono stato benedetto con l’opportunità di vivere in Italia in due occasioni separate negli ultimi due anni. Il mio studio sull’italiano ha arricchito molto quelle esperienze.

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The problem with middle age is that you never feel present for anything that matters.  The other problem is how easy it is to hide your Romantic, epic fantasy sensibilities because they’ve become disfigured by a society that doesn’t brook such nonsense.  Blogging about serious issues like the corporate-sponsored war on the humanities is tolerated, but please leave the wizard stuff alone.  (As if there’s a difference beyond presentation.)

Also, the culture has developed an unhealthy fetish for all things evidence-based along with a bizarre discomfort around examining what any given piece of evidence does or doesn’t show.   Which means it takes more energy to maintain the necessary headspace to continue writing about a fantasy world whose rules I get to make up as I go along.

Also, I failed to take my own advice concerning the best jobs for writers being the kind you can compartmentalize, because that allows you to compartmentalize your writing time, which allows you to have writing time.  Running a law practice is not one of those jobs.   Much as I enjoyed the practice of law, and much as I learned from my clients, I feel like my legal adventure has run its natural course and I now have the time to return to fiction writing.

Getting back to writing a cool, philosophical, bad-ass but vulnerable anti-hero also takes more energy in mid-life, because consensus reality is a constant nag, and its boosters are zealous in its enforcement.  So magic, mysticism, and fictional world-building is something you don’t discuss in polite society, unless you have a strong stomach.  It makes you guarded, which doesn’t help.  You compartmentalize your imagination.  Then, over time, you forget where you left the key.

But finish Book Three I did.

It’s full of magic and wizard battles and plot twists and new characters and old.  Llewelyn is back.  He’s older, more cynical, and maybe even more world-weary than in the previous books.  But that just gives him more interesting issues on which to comment.

It is a shorter work than the first two books, but that is intentional.  Thematically, it is meant to function as an epilogue, and no epilogue is longer than its mother text.  At the end of Hecate’s Glory Llewelyn finishes his story to Walworth.  The King’s Glory focuses on how the stories we tell about ourselves and about each other impact everything that does matter: the world, magic, our understanding of good and evil, impossibly fraught choices, who we are, and who we want to be.  In that sense, it is a final word on Llewelyn’s trial testimony.  Without being too meta – I hope.

Anyway, as Isulde says to Llewelyn in the first chapter, as he’s trying to make sense of the end of his trial, “Welcome back to the world you know.”

Welcome back to my world.  Dark blessings.

The post So Karen, Why Did it Take You So Long to Finish Book Three? appeared first on .