Wake up, America! It's not too late! I love you!

What can I say? I hope and I pray that more and more people can see through the haze thrown upon us all by the criminal master manipulators, see them for what they are, and for what their interests are.  Divide and conquer... Too easy. This is not a happy birthday.

However, in the darkness...

There is perhaps courage to speak the truth...

https://australiannationalreview.com/health/no-one-has-died-from-the-coronavirus-says-leading-pathologist/

There is hope of an awakening...

https://eagenda.collincountytx.gov/docs/2020/CC/20200518_2481/48410_Explanation.pdf

And people who are not afraid to speak out, with intelligence and integrity. Douglas Murray, a Brit, is one of them.




and this:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/this-revolution-isnt-what-it-looks-like

These are just examples.

Put two and two together, see and understand beyond what the mainstream media wants us to believe, notice all the contradictions, the mismatches, the discrepancies, all the things that don't seem right. Then you will be closer to the truth.

I love you!

On this Longest Day of the Year...

day takes

its sweet time

to turn into night
sneakily

magic seeps

into

mundanity

until

there is only

wonder

I Want to Believe

A piece breaking from the soft somber felt of the sky...

the cork of the bottle of sunlight?

a hole through which the Universe to peek at us?

perchance, a fluffy UFO?

Goodbye 2016!

I was about to write a last minute gloomy (almost) poem about the stealthiness with which 2016 has sneaked past me, when I found this in my inbox...

I got a good laugh out of it. Go see for yourself at Atlas Obscura...

Maybe to squeeze the last minute out of 2016 would be tempting... but, no...  I'd rather say Enough of it!

I'm actually looking forward to 2017, not in excitement, but with timid hope.

And so I say, Goodbye, 2016...

First Day of Autumn 2016

 image belongs to Under the Treetops

oh, no, it’s not that I don’t like Autumn
I find her quite aesthetically pleasing—
a painter of inimitable talent
concocter of tart perfumes
and sweet essences
a virtuoso of rustlings
and caws—
but I think I can see
beyond her masks
of reds and golds
a cruel magician casting
the last illusion of bounty
the great hope of renewal
for our fearful souls
before it’s all gone
in the anticlimactic finale of
a flamboyant show
and all that’s left is
just the end

A Duck Story

A girl-duck and a boy-duck are swimming leisurely on my pool, which is yet to be prepared for summer...

This way... That way...

...beauty in the mirror of the dark water...

Suddenly, a rival arrives...

The girl-duck promptly retreats to the safety of the lily of the valley yet to bloom... She waits... Do I detect a mischievous sparkle in her eye?

The boys have a game of war to play... Notice how the water around them tells their tale...

They both fly away. Then, after a while, one comes back. Peace has returned at last... Which one is he? I think it's the rival who's gone...

So beautiful, regardless...

By the way, Chick with a Quill turns eight today... :-)

Lucky or Not?

I think that most stories worth telling are in fact stories about unlucky people. Of course, in the end everything might turn out just fine, with a happy ending, but the beginning has to be bad, hasn’t it?

Think about it.

A girl has loving parents who protect her and who care for her. She grows up surrounded by her loving family, goes to school, always has good friends, gets a great job, meets the right guy, and they live happily ever after. Lucky girl. End of story.

Very nice. Now, how about this?

A girl has loving parents but her mother dies and, unfortunately, her father marries a woman with two daughters of her own and then he has to go on a long trip, leaving the girl alone with the very mean stepmother and stepsisters. You know the rest of the story…

Some guy goes on a balloon ride, has a great time watching the landscape from the sky, then lands back nicely and is ready to show to his friends all the pictures he’s taken.

Another guy goes on a balloon ride but the ropes break and he’s up in the air on his own and before he knows it he’s blown away. After days of being a toy to the winds, he lands in an unknown land, full of wonder and dangers…

Maybe something like this…

An illustration by Edouard Riou for Jules Verne’s “Five Weeks in a Balloon”, 1863

When I was reading Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” – have you read it? – I was very intrigued by the concept of “the luck of Teela Brown.” Teela Brown was a young woman, with very “lucky” ancestors, six generations of winners of the Earth’s Birthright Lottery. She was recruited by Nessus, the Puppeteer, for a voyage to the Ringworld, in the hope that her luck will rub off the entire expedition bringing it success. I can only wonder, though, if her “luck” didn’t really end right there…

I’m thinking that even the meaning of “luck” could be interpreted in different ways. Is one lucky to live a sheltered, dull, “normal” life, or is one lucky to live an “interesting” life albeit with some serious heartache in it? I assume the answer depends on which side of the “fence” you consider yourself to be when you’re giving it. Of course, there’s always the combination of dull and unlucky…

Care to share your thoughts?

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!

Life and the Beach

A beach, I think, is a pretty good allegory for life. I find it especially true for the crowded beach of an all-inclusive resort.

Let me tell you why.

You come there for a week, ten days, or, if you’re lucky, two weeks. You lie in the sun, you bathe in the sea, you participate in the activities, you drink your mojitos and your daiquiris.

Sometimes, something mildly exciting happens. The people on the banana-boat got overturned again. Look at them, they can’t get back on. A photographer parades with a huge yellow snake or with a cute monkey. Not both of them at the same time. A man and a woman with beautiful athletic bodies, their skin ebony, wearing tribal attire, pose -he with women and she with men- perhaps for the same photographer.

Sometimes you might even get noticed. If you’re too fat, too skinny, too beautiful, too ugly, topless or wearing the loud neon-green bathing suit that doesn’t hide anything. Most of the time you observe the scene from underneath your umbrella. You might play a game or two of volleyball or take the salsa lessons given right there on the sand by an impossibly flexible guy from the animation team. You might build a sand castle. Others have certainly built nicer sand castles than yours, but you’re proud of yours anyway. You might even think it will last.

And then, it’s time to leave. You thought it was going to last forever but it’s really time to leave. And you’re gone.

Somebody might remember you for a while, for instance the people who occupied the umbrella next to yours, just because you were always there if nothing else. The same way you remember the teenager looking like Heckle (or Jeckle) the cartoon magpies, or the trail of Dolce & Gabbana “Light Blue” always following the woman whose face you’ve never actually seen, or the guy with the tiny boom box at his waist (the same guy with the neon bathing suit!) or the guy miraculously carrying five plastic cups of beer in each hand plus one in his mouth. But then those people leave too and there’s nobody there to have even seen you let alone known you. New people come to the beach, build their sand castles and then they leave, and so on.
 
The beach is always there. People come and go.

I guess that’s the beach. And that’s life.

So I suppose what I mean is that it’s nice to enjoy it while you’re there. Dance your dances, drink your drinks, and don’t worry too much about your sand castles.

This is me, drawn by my youngest daughter in sand.

Out of my Cave to Say Hi and... Seven Years

Well, hi guys!

I’m not dead (yet) but I’m sort of dead to the world... I reside exclusively in the world where my heart is... the story that unravels now for me and that I try to write down.

I’ve started occasionally to scribble some verse for the blog but stopped every time. That is because all (of my) poetry comes out sad, most (of my) thoughts that lend themselves to poetry are sad, and I don't want to be sad. I’ve had it with feeling at the bottom of a deep well (I do feel like that a lot of the time) and looking up at a patch of blue sky that seems infinitely far. So I am wary of all 'poetic' thoughts...

(This is an illustration from "The Green Ray" by Jules Verne, translated by M. de Hauteville, 1883)

I’ve also started writing a review or two or other thoughts on various subjects but never got to finishing them. (One thing I have to say though is this: Karen Marie Moning is brilliant and her series Fever is brilliant. If you haven’t read it, check it out. Need I say that it is brilliant?  Barrons and V'lane - enough said...  :-) )

However, I think of you often and I miss terribly the thoughtful exchanges with my blogging friends, the daily snippets of beauty and wisdom, or just the news of your whereabouts and of your endeavours. I apologize for not replying to all those kind enough to comment on my two most recent posts. But I’m not leaving this place and I hope to be truly back one day.

Amazingly, Chick with a Quill is seven years old today.

Bye, guys! See you soon! Be well!

The Eye and the Mind

The picture below is one that I took this past summer in Cuba, in a washroom in the lobby of Iberostar Ensenachos. A housekeeper had arranged the words with tiny flowers, and she was standing there, not far from her creation, a discrete smile on her face. Perhaps she was simply proud of what she had done, or perhaps she was hoping that the women who used the washroom and admired her floral arrangement would have a dollar for her.

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” True, isn’t it?

This quote is frequently attributed to the French philosopher Henri Bergson but it belongs in fact to the Canadian writer Robertson Davies, from Tempest-Tost (Toronto: Clark, Irwin, 1951), p. 127.

I have no idea how this woman came by this quotation. Maybe a tourist had shared it with her. But I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it came from her directly. Despite the poverty of the Cubans, their education is rich. In Varadero, I have seen a woman reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” while selling trinkets to tourists in an outdoor market.

More than any place where I’ve been in Cuba, Cayo Ensenachos rouses a strange stir in my heart. It has a certain feel of decay, of lost glory, much like Cuba itself. Think of a colonial, white, luxurious palace that has been overcome by the jungle and by time… Think of wandering through deserted ballrooms and abandoned gardens, where the only water in the still water fountains comes from gushes of tropical rain… Think of a silence of the end of the world, and of the clickety-clack of crabs’ pincers, and of the surf like a haunting, distant murmur… Think of all the stories such a place might hold…

Since today is the date for Denise Covey’s blogfest, “Sharing,” I thought I’d share this with you. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

The Upside of Rainy Days

This little thing is for Geraldine's Woven Dreams... :-)

An Anniversary

A bit more than six years ago, I was reading an article about some famous blogs that had turned into book deals and thought Hmmm...

One of them was Girl with a One-Track Mind, the other one Wife in the North. There were others too. I didn’t think I could find something constantly interesting to write about, in my life or in the place where I live, nor have the stamina to do it daily, but the idea of writing a bit of my soul and let it float away on a tiny paper (or rather, electronic) boat on the river of the World Wide Web, felt kind of exciting. Scary, but exciting.

So, exactly six years ago today, I took the plunge. (Or maybe the first shaky step.)

A link from Wife in the North had taken me to the Inner Minx, the blog of Minx, aka Kate Bousfield, author of “Coven of One.” Minx was just blogging about some lions (not just any lions, but lions of Lyon) up for adoption at Seamus Kearney’s site. Go take a look, they’re still there and they are beautiful!

(Seamus is an Irishman from New Zealand living and working as a journalist in France. Also a short-story writer, novelist, musician, blogger…)

One could “adopt” a lion, name him, write a short poem or text about him, and become a member of the group of writers called The Shameless Lions WritingCircle, initiated by Seamus. Got it? Seamus – Shameless :-)

At the time, Seamus believed –I’m sure that he still does- that powerful writing can be found in many places on the internet. The Circle and the award “A Roar for Powerful Words” were developed by him to put forth that belief and to encourage writers to roar. I completely agree with this.

I chose my lion, which you can see on the right side bar of my blog (yes, go lower, much lower), wrote my poem, actually I wrote two because the first one was too long (also on the side bar, below Alexander’s photo) and Seamus very gracefully accepted me into the Shameless Lions Circle.

This is how I met a bunch of great people. Some have since retired from blogging, some have become successfully published authors, a few are still going on.

I guess I’m one of those still going on…

The Shameless Lions Writing Circle was the first leap for me. The second was The Clarity of Night. In fact, it was Minx again who suggested to me I should check it out. I’m so glad I did.

Jason Evans’s blog, the beauty of his writings, and the high quality contests that he held on his blog have all meant tremendously to me. The blogosphere is certainly poorer without them. I surely miss them. But although Jason’s isn’t an active blog anymore, the goodies are still all there, just a few clicks away.

It is, in a way, mind-boggling to see how paths open one from another, taking you to wonderful places where you can meet wonderful, incredibly talented, like-minded people, and how unbelievably enriching this experience, this communion can be. Not to mention the exceptional quality of the poetry, prose, photography, etc. –art in one word- that these people are posting on their blogs.

This is why I’m still here…

Where Are the Sunny Days?

I am in dire need

of the magic switch

that turns rain

into sunshine

and, no,

do not tell me

that rain brings flowers

there’s no point in

mentioning rainbows

you know what I’m talking about

you surely remember

the days

of brilliant sunlight

when everything seemed endless

when we were masters of the Universe

lovely, lovely photo from http://carolynbremer.com/wordpress/?p=47

This is linked to Geraldine’s Woven Dreams Prompts.

Slowness

Somehow, to me this New Year feels less delineated than previous ones. January 1^st feels more like just a date in the calendar than a new beginning. Thus, my need for New Year’s resolutions is vague, if anything.

Certainly, I could promise myself to write a novel, to finish what I have started, to write more on this blog, to visit more blogs, or rather give a sign that I’ve been there, to read more books, to do this, that and the other, and, of course, all of them more, more, and more, faster, faster, and faster. After all, I did that every January. And every year I did my best to achieve these goals of doing, and if I couldn’t, then I would struggle even more. With each new struggle to do more and do it faster, regardless of its outcome, one thing came for sure. One thing that I’ve come to dread. The overwhelming feeling of Time slipping through my fingers, bringing about the panic of running out of time.

This has to change. Because, you see, this time I’m planning more to be than to do. Just be, here and now, smell the roses or the coffee, even write a line or two when I feel like it, with no pressure. I’m not that sure how this can be done, but I’ll learn.

Less is more, that’s what they say, don’t they?

So, yes, this is my resolution for 2013. Slowness.

 watercolor by Amelia Jane Murray, Lady Oswald, 1800-1896

Are the (Occasional) Highs Worth the (Many More) Lows? or Giving Up is Tempting

Writing stories has been a most important part of my life ever since, at twelve I believe, I read "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" by Jules Verne. Imagining fantastic adventures was my way of living them. I wanted to be a speleologist, a palaeontologist, a marine biologist, and archaeologist, an astronaut. I wrote, wrote, and wrote about that.

Over the years, I have started many novels, which I never finished. However, that never actually seemed important. I have always written for my pleasure. For the thrill of living many lives at once. I never worried about publishing my work. That made me light and carefree. I was also very young and the future stretched endlessly in front of me.

Yet, sometime during the past few years, something has shifted. I got older, of course. The thought of seeking publication has acquired a more tangible shape. The future, also, suddenly appeared finite –as it truly is, unfortunately- hence adding urgency to all my actions. Instead of being hopeful, I have become impatient, anxious. Except for the moments of complete trance, the writing has become (a bit) painful with apprehension. Just a little bit.

I buy a lot of books. However, I rarely go to bookstores anymore. I love books, I adore books, but seeing them all together like that makes me sad. It discourages me big-time. That’s because I can’t help thinking: What are the chances of all these beautiful, colourful, wonderful, shiny, published books to be bought and read by (many) people? I would say, rather slim. Except for the best-sellers, of course, which sell best because, well… they are best-sellers.

Then, there’s Amazon, with so many more books, all kind of books, including a lot of self-published books. While I’m not eloquent enough to express my admiration for these people who wrote their novels and published them, one way or another, I also cringe when I see Amazon best-selling ranks into hundreds of thousands or millions.

Don’t get me wrong. I still find an exhilarating motivation in seeing other people’s accomplishments, especially those of my blogging friends. Maximum kudos to all of them! I do not feel one drop of envy, please believe me, only admiration.

In this sea of books, I feel so lost. I’m not even capable of finishing my novel. I’m too stupid or too lazy, or both, to even finish one novel. I’m too overwhelmed by OCD – what else could it be this obsessive polishing of each sentence, this endless pondering of the logic of each plot element – to go from one paragraph to the next. I couldn’t agree more with whoever said first that perfectionism breeds paralysis. I’m really fighting hard to snap out of it.

I’m not giving up. No way. No matter the outcome, I will still be fooling myself and pushing myself because the “highs” are definitely worth more than the “lows.” And I will never be able to be just a reader.

Oh, Jules Verne, what have you done to me?

On Book Reviews

I like reading book reviews, the good ones and especially the bad ones. I can extract a lot of useful information from them, on character and plot development, on readers’ expectations. I read them on Amazon, on GoodReads, and on other few sites that publish reviews on a regular basis.

Being written by people, reviews are subjective so they have to be taken with a grain of salt. However, the reviewer’s dislike or ignorance of a genre shouldn’t mean a bad mark for the book.

I mostly ignore the good reviews, especially when they are overly enthusiastic. Sometimes, they look partisan, as if written by friends to give a boost to the ratings. But even if they are sincere, too much praise feels kind of syrupy. When the praise, however, is backed by a thorough analysis then it becomes useful.

Of course, many times the bad reviews are prejudiced too and you can tell the reviewer hasn’t even read the book carefully. There are also the self-righteous reviewers who think they know everything about how somebody should behave, fall in love (I’m reading a lot of YA lately) and generally react to a given situation, on the principle that what they would or wouldn’t do is a universal rule. But people are extremely diverse and, although we all partake in the same human nature, we each might take a different bite out of it. If a character in a book annoys you because of how she behaves, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the author is a bad writer, maybe quite on the contrary. In real life, there are stupid people and intelligent people, cautious people and rash people, etc., etc. If we would all be the same, then where would the fun be?

For good or bad reviews, you have to know how to read in between the lines and, in the end, of course, form your own opinion. I love reading excerpts to get a taste of a book, and I have bought many books after doing that. I have also borrowed books from the local library and then bought them because I loved them so much I had to have them. There are books that I cannot put down and have to force myself to put them down, because if I don’t then my stay in their universe would be over too soon. And there are books (I can still count them on one hand’s fingers) that are simply not palatable to me and that I had to put down unfinished.

I know it is very difficult to write a useful book review and I admire those who can. I’ve tried it but I’m not gifted or patient enough to dissect on paper the whole justification behind a simple “I like it” or “I don’t like it.”

I can read, though, read, read, read. And this is a small sample of what I have piled up on my nightstand… (rubbing my hands in gleeful anticipation)

It even makes for nice little almost-poem…

Midnight in Rosary

Hold me closer, necromancer

Die for me,

Shipbreaker,

Our Lady of Darkness,

shatter me

across the Universe.

Spring is in the Air (and Update)

Do you recognize the view?

Yes, it’s the East River down there in a pigeon’s-eye view from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building.

Can you tell that I’ve just got a fresh dose of Manhattan? I’m heartsick now that I’m back in Montreal, but also exhilarated and very eager to write (again). Maybe, hopefully, some of that frenzy that is New York City has rubbed off on me.

I must say that the outlining hasn’t gone that well. (Outlining’s a bitch!) I knew it, but I didn’t want to jinx it. I’ve (re)discovered that the moment I try to put on paper more than the sketchiest of ideas, I become totally blocked. The ideas chase each other around the back of my head and refuse to be chained down on paper in an orderly manner. The story is all in my head and has to be written the way it comes to me. What my brain cannot hold is quite likely to get lost.


However, I did a lot of thinking and re-thinking, and I got some direction from my dilemmas, and my confidence in being able to finish what I’ve started feels a bit timid yet also resilient, like a snowdrop at the end of winter.

These beauties are in my kitchen, not in my garden, but still… spring is in the air.


Last but not least, I wish to thank all of my friends who wrote comments on the previous post. May your kind wishes and thoughts return to you thousandfold. I feel ashamed for answering this late -it's not at all in my nature to be this rude- and I really, truly, deeply apologize. I have you, all of you, in my heart.