SNOW!!!, oh, NO!!!

Ok, I’m a few days late for the column, if you take the word “few” to mean, “between two and seven days,” which is right. Had stuff going on, my mind’s been preoccupied and with the early snow, I’m hurting. Feet are back to blocks of ice despite four pair of socks… slow blood return, which can’t be fixed, and it’s miserable. Constant cold feet sucks!

Part of what is on my mind are the nightmares I’m having. They’re less since I’m adding some light at night and slightly louder music, which helps me come out of a bad dream, and I’m past some anniversaries that give me issue, but three nights ago I had one so bad I still have it in my head. Part of it is from a book I’m reading, so I switched to another for a few nights (I always read for a couple hours before going to sleep,) to something totally different. It’s shrinking, but if I find my mind wandering, it comes back strong. I have eight days until I see my therapist again, and this will be a heavy session if I can’t get rid of it before then. I’m sure I’ll do it, just haven’t had such a screamer in a while. If you also have nightmares and night terrors, I feel for you and entirely understand.

For the Books part of Books and Hooks, I had a new idea for a new novel! So far it’s called Venus Undone. I was reading through a select set of articles on Firefox’s Pocket app, one about each of the planets in our solar system. I got thru Mars and Earth, then read one on Venus… and fell in love! It seems that Venus is our sister planet, and long ago had bigger oceans than we do, when the sun wasn’t as hot as it is now. As the sun heated, the greenhouse gasses ballooned and the oceans boiled away. My story will be the people that evolved there, long before humans started, were water people, advanced rapidly and carelessly used their resources up and had to flee the planet, coming to Earth, which by then had Neandertals on it. I think the Venusian people – who call themselves ‘Denizens’ become a part of our people, the Denisovan DNA we have that can’t be identified as to where it came from.

But I don’t want to lose the head of steam I have on the book I am working on right now, so I’m putting in ideas or doing a little more research and continuing to beat out words in my current work, OtherSpace. This one is about a huge, powerful Texan family, the Morgans and where they live, called The Vale. Starts out when they came out West to find somewhere to put down roots and discovered an odd yellow shimmer that overlaid much of the land and had a surprising aspect to it… it could be entered and the person would come out somewhere else! Like a split in the atmosphere. Over the years it was like a kind of pet to the family and they were unable to figure out what it really was. In the present, so much more is learned, and what to do about it. Nuff said… I’ll put out a call for Beta Readers when it’s done.

The next book to be published is actually already published in ebook form, Earth Maid 2: Down With the Sickness. Here my wonderful Rune Witch, Landa, is pregnant and running away again, her marriage already in trouble. She meets elementals – creatures of the earth, of water, of earth, or rock, of plants of all kinds. There is an awful problem, and a powerful water elemental is ready to wipe out humanity to stop his pain. In her problem pregnant state, Landa must get him to stop, keep herself from losing the fetus and fixing the issue. She will do it, in her own odd way. While this is out in ebook, I have yet to get a paperback cover done. I’ve figured out how it will look, an easy thing for my artist to do, but prices have gone up! I don’t mind… she’s had to readjust two covers that weren’t the right size, so I owe her a huge tip anyway. She’s excellent, and this back cover and spine will be repeated with just a few differences over the other eight books about Landa. The tenth book – when I finish it – goes back to the very beginning, long before Landa. That story still gets worked on as I have a thought on it. It’s the good and bad of being a writer cursed with bipolar, anxiety, long-term depression and a couple others. My mind is like a pogo stick, and if you’ve ever been on one (I have as a kid, wow!) they’re very hard to control the path you take. You can do it some, but if a bounce is off by a fraction, you go a different way! Fun, yes, but not this!! But the stories are all getting there!

On the Hooks portion of my site, I’m on the final quarter – the Fall solstice – of the temperature blanket I started making last December. I take a ten-degree span of temps, like, 0 – 9, 10 – 19, etc, assign each set one color, record the yesterday’s high temp and that tells what color to use. Usually when a temp blanket it done, it’s a big one when finished. I’m doing the solstice quarters, lining each season in a different color, then will put them all together, outlining the whole thing. This is a for me project, but I’ll post pics on my sites when it’s done. I’m also making two shawls, one is a half-circle shape, one is a corner-to-corner made with a very expensive yarn that goes from thread to a thick fluff and back again. These will be put in the Product Guide I’m putting together, to sell that one or to make a different one in a different yarn. I’ve been making a pair of gloves, a slit scarf (you can put the other end thru the slit and have the scarf stay at your neck for really cold days) and a hat in a deep burgundy yarn that has all sorts of pastel color bits in it. Looks really good and I’m hoping to attract a male client to buy the set. I hope the product guide – still small right now, but I keep growing it – will attract people to make purchases. Remember, when you order a handmade crocheted item (or knit, spun, woven, whatever,) you are getting a truly one-of-a-kind item. What chance is there that out there, another yarn artist will use the same pattern and same yarn to create something? Pretty slender. We deserve to be paid for our work, after all, as well as for the yarn we buy to make said items. Let me know if you’re interested in getting a copy of the Product Guide, ok?

To wrap up, I want to say something about the Pandemic, weigh in on the mask mandates and vaccines. Here’s my take, and if you don’t agree, that’s ok, but I feel I need to speak up, at least here.

Do you get the flu vaccine? If yes, why? How do you get the flu? What is it that makes you sick? Are you one who gets the newest shot of it every year? How about shingles? Are your kids vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella? Chicken pox? What causes all these diseases? If you answered, VIRUSES cause these diseases, you’re right on the money! You get the shots so you have a lesser chance of catching it. After all , a lot of people die from the flu every year, even though it’s not considered a Pandemic, I think it should be. Viruses kill a lot of people all the time, all around the world. Vaccines are the scientific way to boost the immune system so we don’t get them. What these diseases do to a person is horrible. I remember seeing kids who got polio and had to be in Iron Lungs, or their legs and spines were twisted, they wore torturous braces with crutches. Back in the past, George Washington had his troops immunized, Benjamin Franklin lost a son to smallpox (I’ve had that shot too, left a huge scar for years!) and he mourned that he had not been able to get him immunized in time.

But because the gov’t is ordering the vaccines, in an attempt to save as many lives as possible, people who don’t like gov’t in any way are fighting it. I got the shots, if we have to have another one every year like flu vaccines, I will get mine done because I DON’T WANT TO GET THE VIRUS! Yes, just like the flu, you can still get one of the variants of C-19, but it usually is lesser, like a cold. Don’t get the shots and get it, it usually ends in death. I get the shot because I not only care about me, I care about YOU. The people I will pass. The ones with compromised immune systems, the underaged, the elderly. (I’m a Senior, but not elderly yet! It’s coming, tho.) I care about others enough to wear a mask as well, despite being vaccinated, because when we talk, yell, laugh, cough, sneeze, snuffle, wobble lips to make some little sound, etc, we are shooting out globs of saliva that is soaking in viruses! (Did you know that in a two-second kiss, you transfer over a million viruses between you? Yea, that one startled me too, but it’s true.) Viruses rain down on us all the time from the atmosphere, viruses cause everything from the common cold to diseases that kill you quickly. If a place says I must wear I mask, I gladly do it so I won’t spread any kind of virus to other people. That’s the whole reason for masks, to stop most of the viruses from getting to others, and yours getting to me! We have already lost hundreds of thousands of people who DIDN’T HAVE TO DIE RIGHT THEN because there was no vaccine, and now that there is, there are a lot who won’t get it. So death will keep going on. Far greater than normal. A lot say “it’s not been tested long enough.” To that I say, how much faster are our computers comparted to what we had in the 1950’s? 1960’s? 1990’s? Even the difference from 2010 to now is incredibly FASTER! We have all sorts of high-speed computing power, so everything we do GETS DONE FASTER!! Of course, it does! As soon as you buy a new electronic device, it is overcome by an even better one that day! This means that research can be done in so much shorter periods that we don’t have to wait for months or years like had to be done in much earlier years. Would you refuse to buy a car because it took only hours to make instead of weeks or a month, like it used to? Is it a much lesser vehicle because it was made faster? You can apply this bad logic to almost everything in our lives. Would you not eat a slice of cake because this one you popped in the microwave, premixed and in a pan, done in five minutes instead of an hour to assemble, make, bake, cool off and frost? You would eat it anyway? Is it a lesser, worse product for being made faster?

So many of the ideas like this out there don’t make any sense, when you compare it to the rest of your life. With greater methods, we can make most anything much faster. Look at In Vitro Fertilization. I remember the first one. It took longer, had to be done by hand in a petri type dish. Now, women can get it done in minutes in a good clinic. Results are better, too. Not perfect, no, for we human beings are imperfect people. What works for one won’t work – or works less – in others. But it’s still better than nothing, don’t you think? Anyway, as Thomas Paine said, “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

This went a bit lengthy, yes, but you know my stance. If you don’t like it, please don’t attack me, just unfriend me and go your merry way. I only wish for everyone to be protected against a force of nature so small we cannot see it with our eyes, yet it can kill us in days.

Sending wishes for your lives to be wonderful!!