I’ve been settling into the slower rhythms of my new life and have started to feel the tickle of story telling waking up. It’s helped that a random fan has struck up an email correspondence with me – and they’re so enthusiastic about book 1 of the Planet Seekers trilogy, it doesn’t feel quite so much like screaming into the void to continue with book 3. It’s also helped that I recently discovered the power of ozonated glycerine to help KouKi. (If anyone is looking for a source, we get our formulations from PurO3.) Since we’ve started her on it on July 7, her appetite and energy has rebounded to an astounding degree. As hubs has said: it’s not a subtle change. I have my baby girl back, and while I still worry because she is still diabetic, I’m not worried anymore that she’s on her final, downward slide. So naturally, I had to check and make sure I’m consistently using words that feel like praise to my pups. (Probably too much, if that’s a thing, but given the amount of joy they bring to my life, I won’t change my approach.)
For other linguistic fun, I was amused to read the origin stories behind certain common phrases. The first five debunk common misconceptions; the second twelve is a list of phrases we’ve inherited from Shakespeare. Finally, five tips for getting better at small talk – a hazard that’s never been my forte… nor, honestly, my interest. I’m much more interested in getting at the meatier, meaning of life kinds of conversations – though this summary of philosophers… philosophizing about the meaning of life reads like mental masturbation. At least until it gets to Lao Tzu’s statement that “one who persists is a person of purpose.” That tracks. 🙂
Interestingly, in the flood of publicity about the recent release of The Odyssey, this review of Anne Hathaway‘s role in the context of her larger career also tracks. I felt the parallel in my life – that women are supposed to be just as ambitious as men… but we can’t show it. I suspect that push-pull of perception and reality was one of the most exhausting parts of participating in corporate life for me. And while I was lucky enough to have generally great colleagues, I was also never supported in the broadest range of my ability to contribute – and generally felt the need to shrink to fit particular perceptual boundaries. I’m glad to be free of those constraints now.
In the meantime, another birthday has come and gone. So I’m also tracking the ways my cohort is aging – seems like there’s a lot of coverage about Gen-X women’s burn-out, and general advice to retire as early as you can. It would be helpful for me to get back on track with the twice/year publishing wheel to see whether I can earn more of my living with my fiction, so I’m setting small milestones to build up my writing muscles. Can I write another 5K words by the end of the month? I’ll check back in next month to report my progress. Meantime, I can highly recommend listening to what the trees have to say. For anyone looking for good news about nature’s ability to recover from human depredations, I can also recommend Dr. Edmund Hale’s YouTube channel for hopeful reporting and scientifically backed information – though I suspect he uses AI to generate his scripts given the preponderance of certain phrases across all videos…