tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27546796947168488032024-03-18T22:01:20.591-07:00Libbie HawkerLibbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.comBlogger142125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-71382969400936396162013-04-10T18:24:00.002-07:002013-04-10T18:24:50.127-07:00Good-bye, Blogger. Hello web site.I've moved all the interesting parts of this blog over to my new web presence: <a href="http://libbiehawker.com/">LibbieHawker.com</a> It's still somewhat under construction (and rather boring looking) but it will be spruced up in the days and weeks to come. Meanwhile, it is sternly functional and depressing in color scheme, but what do you want from me? Technology bores me.<br />
<br />
Blogging continues at the new URL from now on.<br />
<br />
Oh, also I am now writing a weekly feature for <a href="http://theseattlevine.com/">The Seattle Vine</a>, wherein I get to yell about book things that make me mad, and also I'll be reviewing local authors. Enjoy!Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-73206052321720817512013-04-07T19:39:00.001-07:002013-04-07T19:39:10.057-07:00Spring RainWhen I woke, the panes of the windows ran with rivulets. Droplets had collected in the tiny grid of the screen and sparkled like the sharp facets of cut stones. A robin, sheltering somewhere in a nearby tree, gave again and again its falling, wistful, almost sorrowful call, a sound that rose and fell amidst the din of rain. You emerged from the bedroom shuffling, blurred from sleep, squinting though your glasses were on. You tucked yourself onto the couch behind me, pulled me against your warmth and sweetness as if offering these things, as if making of yourself a quiet, earnest gift. You mumbled into my hair, against the back of my neck, something about a European vacation.<br />
<br />
What?<br />
<br />
You tried again. I understood even less of it, but closed my eyes to feel the drowsy hum of your voice sparkling underneath my skin. I let the rain beat into the pause, watched it course down the glass, listened to the bird call two or three more times before I spoke.<br />
<br />
You know what I love so much about you? That I can never understand a word you say when you're sleepy.<br />
<br />
I love spring rain, you said, suddenly clear and emphatic.<br />
<br />
I tipped my head back until it rested on your shoulder. There was a faint gleam of sweat on your arm, the leftovers of your sleep, evaporating, chiming against my skin, a shine like diamonds.<br />
<br />
Me, too.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-63528296156972894142013-02-11T21:59:00.001-08:002013-04-07T08:49:35.144-07:00The Science of Landscape<div style="text-align: center;">
1. </div>
<br />
Mom gave me the last box to go through on my own. She had written my name on it: the old name, the one that doesn't exist anymore, in the same careful, exaggerated hand she has always used to write her children's names. She does not write anything else this way, capital letters symmetrical and ostentatious, lowercase precisely half as high and blackboard-clear. Her usual writing is loose and curving, and sometimes all caps. But never on the old name. I cannot remember her teaching me to read that name, to recognize the symbols that meant <i>me</i>, but this was surely the hand she had used, slowly forming each line of each letter, saying the name of the letter and the sound it made. It became a habit to write the name that way, distinct as a lit sign glowing.<br />
<br />
I put off looking through the box a long time. I had thought I would never be able to face it. I never cried over it; I just said to myself, "No time for that now," and turned away. He had saved a few things, whatever poor scraps of my childhood he had managed to hold onto. A paper bag with construction-paper hearts glued to the outside. It had held valentines in grade school. A small booklet of mimeographed images, the development of a chick inside its shell, and a rhyme that told the story from blastocyst to bird. I had colored it. A page from a Sunday-school scrapbook, some nonsense about making me ready for a mission, as if girls ever went on missions. In the center, a photograph of me in the blue dress with the Holstein cows on the bib, holding a stuffed rabbit, standing on a folding chair. This and that. Weak little things to keep the memory of a daughter, but the fact that he had kept them touched me. I set them carefully in the bin to throw away, all but the photo.<br />
<br />
There were more photos. Somehow pictures of me as a little girl had become intermingled with pictures of Idaho landscapes and models in peasant clothes bent over buckets or sheaves, and references of cattle in every posture, the odd cow circled with a Bic pen if it was lying at just the right angle to the viewer. Slopes of foothills and foregrounds of sage blurring into one another, purpling, obscured by a mist of non-archival acid. I found his thumbprint on the reverse of one photograph, stamped there in burnt umber and smeared at one edge. I found a stack of clippings: Inness paintings clipped from a magazine, or maybe right from the pages of a library book. He was the kind of man who would do something as selfish as that. And at the bottom of the box, the broken end of a maul stick and a long-handled, boar-coarse bright. One side of its bristles had eroded away from use so that it rose to a lopsided point. It was stained a color I first called, inside my head, peacock blue. But no -- you know how to mix that color; he taught you. Ultramarine and viridian.<br />
<br />
I did not throw any of these things away. I looked at them a long time, flipping through the photos and handling the brush and the maul stick, contemplating Inness. His mind was not what it used to be by the time he'd died, ten years ago, age forty-nine, having outlived a too-brief career of untouchable brilliance. The girl whose name was on this box did not exist anymore, as he did not exist anymore. The woman who had replaced the girl did not believe in prescience, in signs or messages.<br />
<br />
I wondered, not for the first time and not for the last, whether he did it himself. As my sister and I had sorted through his grimy, dismal apartment, salvaging what we could of the father we remembered, a crazy man, one of his friends (they were all crazy) entered without knocking and told us, with the lack of awareness that only that kind of man can possess, that our father had killed himself: that the man himself had seen Dad drink from a tin can without a label on it. "Like a can of beans, without the top on it, and no label." My sister told him to get the fuck out of the apartment. We went on working and silently agreed, in that way we have of understanding, that the man was full of shit. But I think about it all the time, and so I know she does, too. He had kept his turpentine in a can just like that. Tin, no label. It seemed almost that he had put these things in this box for a reason, that
he had intended me to look through the box when I was ready and to feel what he felt. Was this his time capsule? Was it my inheritance? Was it meant to confer something onto me, to transfer the strange wild throb of his spirit into my keeping?<br />
<br />
I felt at once hollowed and filled, understood and isolated, shuffling through the pictures, watching my young face alternate with his landscapes. The slope of a sere hill angled sharply into a planting of green. I stood in the shadow of a lilac bush, reaching up, pulling the blooms down to my face. Cattle moving down a brown lane. A puddle reflecting the sky. My hair a halo of umber and sienna around my face. The trunks of paper birches, shot vertically and horizontally. Sage lands. The squareness of my features, my mouth serious as it always is. Thirty years had tonalized the past, pushed it backward into an atmospheric distance, faded, washed, remote.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
2.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
That night you came home late. Maybe it was the strange, invasive magic of the box that worked on me as your hands worked on me, slower and gentler than ever before, conscientious, though I felt so painfully removed from you, for no reason I could name. Your arms wrapped around me entirely, a bird in a gentle fist; you clung to me with a jealous possession. I saw and felt three fractures along reality, as if I stood somehow at a point where my lone life diverged, and I lived in all three at once. One: I never met you, and after the divorce I went to the Tetons as I had planned, to Driggs or to Jackson. Two: you left me somehow, or I you, for reasons unknown, and I went to the Tetons as I had planned, and the world was blue, shot vertically, sage lands. Three: here we were. We rolled together; I looked down on a world that was you, washed and remote. Your arm went above your head, tucked behind the pillow. The friable lines of your body dissolved into a blue distance as mountains dissolve into miles, a mist, ultramarine and viridian. You were uniformity of color, all remoteness, a tonalist landscape, the Tetons under moonlight. I buckled with the weight of longing. I sobbed into your ear, "I love you, I love you, I love you."</div>
Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-19536106047838896922012-12-16T08:32:00.001-08:002013-04-07T08:57:18.698-07:00Updates and changes and interesting things are a-coming.Or I hope interesting things are a-coming. Oh, do I ever hope!<br />
<br />
First of all, I'll be launching a web site soon. Actually, I'll be launching <i>four </i>web sites soon.<br />
<br />
One, a dedicated dot-com for this pen name, with the ability to purchase books directly from the site rather than having to follow links all over the Interwebs, as well as this blog and some other fun stuff.<br />
<br />
Two, the same for the other pen name, which, after gathering and assessing much reader feedback over the past year of using it, will be changing very slightly. Just enough to maximize the name's effectiveness as a marketing tool. <br />
<br />
Three, a site for the press I am starting, an LLC which will function as an umbrella for the two pen names and will also, eventually, offer certain services to other indie authors and to small presses. If I'm going to go all indie on this book stuff, I'm going to do it right, with a company name and a real presence in the book world, with something of value to other authors. I love the give-back atmosphere of the indie community, and I want to be a bigger part of it.<br />
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Four, something I can't talk about yet because it's in such early developmental stages. Well, I can say this: I'm starting a podcast. I won't be the only one involved, either. More details to come as I hammer them out, but I'm really looking forward to this bit. I think it will be so much fun, not only for me and the friends who will be working on it with me, but for listeners. I hate Twitter, I am not that fond of Facebook; I want a more effective, more entertaining, more multi-media way to let readers get to know me. I think this is the answer. We'll see.<br />
<br />
And then there's this other thing that's going on with my independent book stuff...something I <i>really</i> can't talk about just yet, but is perhaps one of the most exciting things that can happen to a book fan-turned-creative type. Something that involves a fan letter I wrote when I was nine, and never sent. My hope is that this other thing will lead to a booming business -- maybe one that will let me quit the day job sooner than I'd planned -- but even if it doesn't, even if it leads to nothing, it is so cool I just can't get over it.<br />
<br />
So how's that for vagueness? I hope to have the web sites up and running by the end of the month, and with luck the Mystery Project/Podcast Thing will be going around the first part of January. Stay tuned, my droogs.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-16849049458514749142012-12-10T08:40:00.001-08:002013-04-07T08:58:23.706-07:00Missed the interview?<a href="http://askanatheist.tv/2012/12/09/baptism-for-the-dead/">Here it is!</a> Plus, in the comments section I elaborate on my thoughts on the current state of the publishing industry...and there's more blogging on that topic to come. Enjoy!Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-85583639180479328462012-12-09T20:10:00.001-08:002013-04-07T09:11:29.646-07:00Winter whiteYou came into the kitchen as I made my coffee, walking like a ghost, drifting and tenuous. All your angles were softened by sleep. White t-shirt (stained), white longjohns, and, for no reason I could tell, your black dress socks pulled up to your knees. Your limbs are as thin and stark now as a bird's legs. This has been a wet winter, not snowy, thank god, and the constant cloud has leeched away all your warm golden hues. In your newly pale skin your eyes are bluer than feathers, scribed all around by the same faint lines I noticed on my own face when I turned thirty. We are watching each other get older, get paler, get lighter, fainter. You apologized sheepishly for the stain on your shirt. I laughed and poured the creamer into my coffee, smiled down at your bird feet on the tiles, and when I kissed your pale face I could smell on your skin the last warmth of fall going, going. When I come home tonight I will fall asleep without you, and the room will be cold. Some time in the night I will wake and your arms will be around me, brooding me against your pigeon chest. I will be warm and soft as caramel in the sun, and my feet will be tangled in yours like a sparrow's in birdlime. What a beautiful, happy trap you have laid for me. I am glad each time it catches me.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-32889156864878961282012-12-08T08:34:00.002-08:002013-04-07T09:13:07.405-07:00Lady writer on the TV radioI'll be doing an interview tomorrow on the radio show <a href="http://askanatheist.tv/">Ask An Atheist</a>, broadcasting out of Tacoma. We'll be talking about Baptism for the Dead (my novel, not the Mormon practice) as well as the general topic of atheism in literature. 3 p.m. PST on Sunday. You can stream the program from the show's website (link above) if you're not in the south Puget Sound area, and the show is also archived as a podcast if you have other plans on Sunday afternoon.<br />
<br />
It's my first spoken interview about one of my books, so I'm a little nervous and a lot curious and I plan on drinking lots of coffee before and lots of wine after.<br />
<br />
There is also a post-show get-together at the Overtime Bar in Tacoma. If you're in the area, stop in and say hi to me and the whole AAA crew. Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-9351683103125728332012-11-18T18:56:00.000-08:002013-04-07T09:15:01.445-07:00MarrowWith my schedule so disrupted I haven't been able to write for weeks, though I have tried. Mostly I set up my laptop and then wander around the apartment, or through the stacks of the library, feeling lost, at a loose end. I know these changes are positive -- my life is heading in a good direction now, our finances will be secure, I will be writing full-time in barely more than ten months. And this is all good. Why is it that when everything goes well for me the words all dry up?<br />
<br />
The last time this happened, I had met you, and I was so happy, so relieved to find happiness, that every concern seemed of no consequence. I felt light every day, filled with joy, buoyed on a perfect, peaceful blue sea. And I could not write. I would kiss you and think, "I'll never write again; not with him around. I am too happy here. I have nothing to fuel it."<br />
<br />
And now here we are, happy again, now that all the money concerns are finally over. We have everything to look forward to. And I cannot write. I blame it on the new job and the rapid changes but I know the truth: it's you, Bluebird. You make me so glad to be alive that I can't feel the anger anymore, the cynicism, the fear, the injustice. All I can feel is <i>good</i>. Good makes for terrible fiction.<br />
<br />
Last night I thought perhaps there is some spell at work here, some magic that siphons all the words out of me and holds them somewhere, some place I can't get to. While you slept I touched you, as if I might find some trick in your skin, some way to reverse what you've done and get it all back. I ran my hand over your chest, felt the frankness of your bones, the tiny twin ridges where your ribs join, the cleft below your sternum. I felt your heart below, the original drum. Your hand lay across your stomach and I traced your arm with my fingers, felt the shape of everything inside you, the long strong bones that angled at wrist, cabochons of carpus, sharp peaks of knuckle. And all at once the words released and fled through my fingers and back into me, a burst and a rattle like a flock of starlings, and I kept touching, kept touching until you rolled away and protested in your sleep. And even then I didn't stop. I pressed myself to your back and my lips to your neck, and everywhere our skin connected, warm and vivid, the rush of words shuddered in. You had locked them all away down in your bones. I imagined the dark of your marrow a jumble of letters, Times New Roman twelve-point font, the curls of lowercase As and the light elegance of Ls and Ts and the sibilants and the consonants and the vowels, compressed, black, and vital. And all I have to do to get them back is touch you.<br />
<br />
When we made love I rocked back against you and howled, and later you said, "I never heard you moan like that." But it wasn't only you that filled me. It was the words.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-91702945570789086222012-11-01T09:55:00.002-07:002012-11-01T09:56:32.214-07:00Hey, kid.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFpGbcxyPirB88h5URQYNxECN44J3hGbiEUeSWivrRZgEslhrR9Q-smsk31fMsINqJOHyuOx6sfo3L3IrVPsBpA1td7YFYawVug5b4QlPru4N7sISUhrTzjR7fwKeNSE5qPcCytLvTiro/s1600/mercedcover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFpGbcxyPirB88h5URQYNxECN44J3hGbiEUeSWivrRZgEslhrR9Q-smsk31fMsINqJOHyuOx6sfo3L3IrVPsBpA1td7YFYawVug5b4QlPru4N7sISUhrTzjR7fwKeNSE5qPcCytLvTiro/s320/mercedcover.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The story once working-titled <br />"John Muir Fucks a Robot."<br />Spoiler alert!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Want some short stories? They'll make you feel <i>gooooood</i>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Light-Merced-River-Short-ebook/dp/B009YBEBSS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1351788527&sr=8-3&keywords=a+light+in+the+merced+river">First one's free</a>. (But only on your Kindle, and only until the 5th.)<br />
<br />
I'm giving KDP Selects a try with one of my short stories to see whether it helps drive sales toward my other stuff. The other shorts are still available on other platforms, and I will rotate this one out and put a different one up as an Amazon exclusive, so Nook, etc. readers have a chance to get it, too.<br />
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Enjoy!Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-64640176299840684072012-10-30T11:57:00.004-07:002013-04-07T09:15:28.596-07:00Nothing to see here, folks.I am just hammering away at revisions on The Crook and Flail, and really liking how the book is turning out. I like it so much that <a href="http://lavenderironside.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-writing-high.html">Lavender got a little high with Hatshepsut</a>. <br />
<br />
I'm sure I'll be back soon with some kind of weepy/pretentious journal entry or something similar. For now, I am busy writing.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-56056375190572390822012-10-29T13:46:00.002-07:002013-04-07T09:18:53.306-07:00Flogging the revisions, some short stories, and also I hate the sound of chewing.I have been trying so hard to get the next <a href="http://lavenderironside.blogspot.com/">historical novel</a> revised and published by the end of October, but it's just not going to happen. Depression has been a real problem for the past several weeks, and it has interfered with my writing tremendously, as have all the a-holes at the library who have no manners. You see, I've found that if I expect myself to write while I'm at home I never write anything at all. I find all kinds of excuses to avoid writing, such as doing laundry, starting new and exciting crafts, or taking a nap. And while laundry, sleep, and making spooky ghosts out of cheesecloth and starch are all very important, so is my writing. So when it's time to write, I really need to remove myself to someplace else to get the work done.<br />
<br />
My place of choice is the public library. The one in my town is usually excellent and quiet and it's open seven days a week (albeit with short hours on the weekends) so I can plan to write every day, no matter what my work schedule is like. I'm transitioning to a new, better-paying day job next week and I will probably not be able to make much use of the library then. We're looking into some options to keep me writing. Renting some tiny, shoebox-sized office space might work out. The books are selling well enough that we could probably justify the expense, although not so well yet that we can just take office-space rental for granted without having to really justify it. I'd be more comfortable waiting on that until the money isn't an issue.<br />
<br />
So I'll probably have to figure out a means of making the library work, or hit a library for a few hours on the way home that's closer to the new job. I am hoping that I can continue to use this one -- it's USUALLY so peaceful, except on days like today when people sit right next to me chewing gum with their mouths open and I have to get up and frantically search for a more secluded seat that also has a place to plug in my laptop, where I can hide in my personal bubble and not listen to nausea-inducing sounds of smacking and chewing. Seriously, adults have no reason to chew with their mouths open. Especially not in a public place. This is the kind of totally unacceptable behavior, indicative of willful social cluelessness and/or apathy, that ends marriages. In fact if it were socially acceptable for me to kick the noisy gum-chewer in the face, I would have done that instead of scarpering to my corner.<br />
<br />
Anyway, how about some short fiction? <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Libbie%20Hawker&search-alias=digital-text">Kindle</a>, <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/libbie-hawker?store=allproducts&keyword=libbie+hawker">Nook</a>. The Kindle version of Finnegan's Pig should be up soon; I am in the process of convincing Amazon that publishing rights for that story reverted to me back in 2010.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-45973327483726405692012-10-15T17:38:00.002-07:002013-04-07T09:20:20.649-07:00The Friendly Atheist does what it says on the tin.I recently approached Hemant Mehta over at <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/10/15/baptism-for-the-dead-a-book-by-libbie-hawker/">The Friendly Atheist</a> with a few ideas for how I might get Baptism for the Dead to appear on his blog. (He's got quite a wide audience, in case you are a non-believer who lives under a rock.) I didn't really expect much of a response, since bloggers and other media personalities are still largely in the "so what; not impressed" phase when dealing with self-published authors. But dang, Hemant was just so <i>friendly. </i>I guess that should not surprise me. He suggested posting an excerpt, and by Jingo, there it is.<br />
<i><br /></i>
Thank you, Hemant, and welcome and hello to new readers of my own humble blog, who found it via the link at The Friendly Atheist. I hope you stick around; I hope you enjoy Baptism for the Dead.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-16180145835607945162012-10-15T13:30:00.002-07:002013-04-07T09:23:55.372-07:00CaddisflyIn our kayaks we crept around the edges of Lake Ballinger, counting and identifying species. The day was cold -- "The day is cold," Dan said aloud, composing the nature-writing report he would later create, the reason we were there. "The day is chilly. The day is chill. No. The day is cold."<br />
<br />
The day was cold. Fall at last, after our short, fitful, insistent summer. The day was dim and cold and the sky low and gray, a mist of earthbound cloud sighing and sagging to the shore, falling among the blooms of the asters and dampening their electric purple color. October was still on my mind, the beginning of the end of the year.<br />
<br />
I cut my paddles deep into the black water and pulled and exed them above my head in a blur, and felt the droplets of lake water fall on my face like rain, but no matter how hard I paddled, wherever I looked at the water it moved in an even reticulation of silver and black, and gave me the illusion of sitting absolutely still. I made myself dizzy, watching the water hold me immobile, and then glancing up at the shoreline to see alders and the spent stands of sweet flag speeding by, dead brown leaves above a quiet core of hopeful green stem. I would speed away and reach out and brace my knee against the rib of the boat, and stab my paddle deep into the unmoving water, and, fighting my boat's keel, turn in a ponderous circle back toward Dan, paddle back into the range of his words. "...alder grows thick on the shoreline. Alder grows in profusion on the shoreline." Paddle away again, stillness and motion, turn. "...leaves of lilies, golden with the change of season." "That's good," I told him, and paddled away again, and turned.<br />
<br />
Finally I grew tired and simply sat on the surface of the lake, out where all was silent. The cold surface rippled here and there, gases from the decaying layer rising in slow bubbles. The gentle movement seemed to me the visual equivalent of a room full of soft voices, faceless speakers murmuring, mouth to ear, to loved ones, words inaudible to me, but the fact of words all around me.<br />
<br />
There was a tickle in my sleeve. I laid my paddles across my lap and probed into the sleeve, and drew out a caddisfly, long-bodied, delicate, its veined wings half-folded. I laid it on my spray skirt, where its threads of legs folded before its head, a posture of absolute exhaustion, like a man fainting into sleep at the supper table, head on folded forearms. Its body was silvery-blue, cold blue, and the powder bloom along its length put me in mind of blueberries, and then all at once I remembered Mel's mother, the cake she made that summer, an American flag with strawberries and whipped cream for stripes, a field of blueberries for the stars. She had loved rough collies, and her home was beautiful and warm, and now she was gone, and so was my friendship with Mel. I thought perhaps her voice was one of those speaking on the surface of the lake, rippling it, leaning her mouth to her daughter's ear, and I could feel the warmth of her words even if I could not hear the sound of them.<br />
<br />
I picked the caddisfly up gently, held it on my fingertip until it composed itself, righted its wings, and flew away.<br />
<br />
Last night I dreamed of the curved ribs of boats, of Paul's body holding mine against the boat's wood, of the water speaking against the hull. I dreamed that Mel drifted in distracted thought past a doorway, and I saw her go from left to right, looking away, carrying a baby girl in her arms. I dreamed of wings over water. The day was cold. The leaves of the lilies had turned golden with the change of season.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-39899743214378993022012-10-13T13:05:00.002-07:002013-04-07T09:25:09.057-07:00FearsWith you away, I have plenty of time to think. About time, about the nature of love, what little I understand of that nature. Fully half my lifetime has elapsed since then, but I still stick sometimes in the mire of sixteen, an awful place where I came to understand that I would never be good enough, that sooner or later I would always be passed over for a more appealing girl, prettier, quieter, not so terrifyingly tall. A girl more conventionally feminine, not driven by applause, not wielding with relish her ferocious word-power. Even though I know that this was half my lifetime ago, even though I know that boys back then were boys, and men are different, I am still braced.<br />
<br />
I remember how it was at first, when we had afternoons when we let all our plans go in favor of spending our time staring into each other's eyes, or simply touching one another's skin -- I will never tire of the shape of your shoulders, or the feel of your woolly knees. There will never be a morning when I will see you dressing, see the light fall upon your knees, and I will not want to rub my lips against them just to feel the soft hairs brush my mouth. And yet we don't do these things anymore.<br />
<br />
I wonder if it's better now, the deeper familiarity, the confidence in mutual presence. Sometimes I fear that, in the natural progression of love, in its firming-up, we have lost something precious. I remember watching you pack in that hotel room -- I was so tired, and yet I couldn't sleep, because my eyes refused to close; I had to watch you. I physically had to; I could look nowhere else but at your solemn movements, your hands folding the shirts you had recently stenciled with your blood type, your broad mouth in a quiet, pale line. I remember thinking, This is only a chemical in my brain. This is a chemical reaction stimulated by all the sex. I am on a fantastic drug -- hormones, just hormones. But I still couldn't look anywhere but at you.<br />
<br />
I fear the loss of that chemical reaction. I didn't ever want to come down from the high. But on nights when you are away, even in the hazy margins of sleep I realize how often at night you clutch me to you, even now, when we both have found more productive ways to spend our afternoons, how often you tangle your warm legs with mine, breathe onto my shoulder a warm coin of breath that heats and recedes with the rhythm of your sleep.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-41674383733117581872012-10-06T10:21:00.001-07:002013-04-07T09:25:24.509-07:00Delicious, delicious pie. And looking back. At pie.Not looking back at pie; looking back at what I wrote about self-publishing 15 months ago.<br />
<br />
But you guys, I made the most epic pie yesterday. I bought eight pounds of concord grapes for making jelly, and with the leftovers I made a pie. I did not expect this pie to change how I looked at all other pies forever -- to change, in fact, <i>how I looked at life</i>. And then I made this pork loin roast that was to die for, and I didn't follow a recipe. It involved gorgeous halved pears, roasted right alongside the pork, atop a bed of red onion wedges, oh god, oh god. The fat on the top of the roast formed, with the sea salt and cracked pepper and rosemary I sprinkled there, a crunchy crust, and when you took a bite of pear with a bite of pork the experience was transcendent.<br />
<br />
I think I am actually getting really good at cooking.<br />
<br />
Don't worry; I don't intend to turn this into a food blog or anything like that, but this particular blog does double as my personal journal (as evidenced by all the eye-rollingly sappy things I write here about my dude) so maybe once in a while I might have to share some of my culinary conquests with you. I promise to make them all very writerly*. It will be as if James Joyce started a food blog.<br />
<br />
Over at Lavender's blog, I looked back at my opinions and expectations re: self-publishing The Sekhmet Bed, and I declare myself a hardcore indie from now on. Viva la 70% royalty rate!<br />
<br />
<a href="http://lavenderironside.blogspot.com/2012/10/retrospectivefuturespective.html">It's long, so don't bother to read it.</a><br />
<br />
Now I am going to go have a big fat slice of that concord grape pie for breakfast. How bitterly I regret my jelly; I should have made eight pounds of pie filling and frozen it so I could have this again. Maybe the fruit stand still has some concords left. WHY must they be so fleeting a fruit?<br />
<br />
<br />
*not an actual promise.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-34774697976238978212012-10-04T21:07:00.002-07:002013-04-07T09:32:12.418-07:00OctoberI slipped into bed just after 2:00 a.m., weary from the day's traumas, the deaths, the constant need for my black humor, the buoy that keeps our terrible little boat on its course. The sheets were warm, as always, and sweet-smelling from your body. Mostly asleep, you said, Hey, babe. How was work?<br />
<br />
Awful, I said. And September is over. It's gone. I never even realized it was going. Where did it go?<br />
<br />
You didn't know what to say to that. You mumbled something into your pillow.<br />
<br />
Life is going by too fast, I said.<br />
<br />
The door to another apartment opened, the teacher downstairs letting her cat in or out. The change in air pressure rocked our blinds, clattered them gently against the window pane, a lonely, fast sound.<br />
<br />
Don't worry, you said.<br />
<br />
I'm not worried. I'm just disappointed. My life is just passing by me. Our life. I want to live forever.<br />
<br />
Babe, you said. You can't.<br />
<br />
I pulled the quilt up to my chin and shivered. I couldn't tell you, asleep as you were, that what I wanted was forever with you, forever getting into this bed and feeling your welcoming heat, forever knowing I would always be able to draw the scent of your skin out of your side, that it would always be replenished. There will come a day when one of us leaves the other, I know it. It will probably be you who leaves first. Statistically. Scientifically. Damn my skeptical mind. Fuck my inability to suspend disbelief, to even imagine an eternity with you. What good is it, to be so rational? October settling all over me. Sweater weather. The tail end of a too-brief year, petering out into a dark winter, the way my life will stumble to a close one day, too soon, years without you. But not, I hope, decades.<br />
<br />
Well, I want to. I want us to live forever, you and me. I want to remember everything.<br />
<br />
You rolled over in the blue darkness to gather me into your arms, smiling at my small, unimportant wretchedness. The color blue flashed off your teeth, off those big beautiful teeth you hate so much but which are the happiest sight in the world to me. I made a concession to inevitability: I'm just going to remember one amazing thing every day, I said. I'm not going to let a single day go by without making some good memory, somewhere.<br />
<br />
Okay, you said. That's a good plan. Now go to sleep.<br />
<br />
I'm not good at this yet. I've tried for four days, but the thing that's stayed with me is that exact shade of blue shining in your big, unlovely, perfect mouth. It's hard for any single moment in my ordinary life to compete with something so distinct and beautiful.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-88351577030896988582012-09-30T09:18:00.003-07:002012-09-30T09:18:35.504-07:00Get Baptism for the Dead for your Kindle!Baptism for the Dead is now available <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Baptism-for-the-Dead-ebook/dp/B009J7D1AG/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1349021705&sr=8-3&keywords=baptism+for+the+dead">on Kindle</a>. Hopefully the formatting translated properly! I am going to give it a test drive on my own Kindle today to be sure.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-70641077940879716412012-09-28T22:52:00.000-07:002013-04-07T09:32:36.575-07:00Baptism for the Dead<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8JXou6mnMUE9MRqCZez8LwOd0JEYNBVbGO77dj5xx7A43OQEOcrXFhyphenhyphenmYgrH6nuxMJ54kA05CMQYasnYogdeXK-Fx4EWG2fYat5zWYPVPsKkyO4GfTXpgScUkaTrO5jAmhK7RFqx5eGc/s1600/ecoverbaptismsmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8JXou6mnMUE9MRqCZez8LwOd0JEYNBVbGO77dj5xx7A43OQEOcrXFhyphenhyphenmYgrH6nuxMJ54kA05CMQYasnYogdeXK-Fx4EWG2fYat5zWYPVPsKkyO4GfTXpgScUkaTrO5jAmhK7RFqx5eGc/s320/ecoverbaptismsmall.jpg" width="213" /></a>Now available. All ebook formats over at <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/240430">Smashwords,</a> and the Kindle Direct version is currently stewing somewhere in PendingLand. I anticipate it will be live on Amazon by the time I wake up tomorrow morning, and then I anticipate another round of fiddling with its formatting to get it just right. The Smashwords version is as close to "just right" as I have ever managed to get an ebook (I can't wait for the day when I'll be able to afford professional formatting!) and looks good enough to read now. You might want to hold off on the Kindle Direct copy until, oh, October 1st or so. Just to be sure I have plenty of time to futz with it.<br />
<br />
Enjoy! Please remember to leave your honest review on Goodreads, Amazon, your blog...anywhere you typically review books. Word of mouth sells books, and lordy do I ever need the money.<br />
<br />
<br />Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-75915442426976624312012-08-31T10:12:00.002-07:002012-08-31T10:12:27.571-07:00Working, working.Today and tomorrow I hope to finish revisions for Baptism for the Dead so I can tackle formatting next week. We'll see how it goes. I have a few scenes to add to demystify X, or make him less annoying, depending on your point of view.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, over at <a href="http://lavenderironside.blogspot.com/2012/08/ski-for-your-life-with-jeff-foltz-and.html">the other pen name's blog</a>, I've done an interview with independent author Jeff Foltz about why Norwegians should not eat potatoes.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-63287593527772474302012-08-19T10:32:00.001-07:002012-08-19T10:32:11.423-07:00Coming Soon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8JXou6mnMUE9MRqCZez8LwOd0JEYNBVbGO77dj5xx7A43OQEOcrXFhyphenhyphenmYgrH6nuxMJ54kA05CMQYasnYogdeXK-Fx4EWG2fYat5zWYPVPsKkyO4GfTXpgScUkaTrO5jAmhK7RFqx5eGc/s1600/ecoverbaptismsmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8JXou6mnMUE9MRqCZez8LwOd0JEYNBVbGO77dj5xx7A43OQEOcrXFhyphenhyphenmYgrH6nuxMJ54kA05CMQYasnYogdeXK-Fx4EWG2fYat5zWYPVPsKkyO4GfTXpgScUkaTrO5jAmhK7RFqx5eGc/s640/ecoverbaptismsmall.jpg" width="426" /></a></div>
<br />Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-1614376964979217562012-08-11T21:09:00.000-07:002012-08-11T21:09:03.918-07:00Maybe so.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/vCWdCKPtnYE?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-26364940305708715432012-08-04T21:21:00.000-07:002013-04-07T09:43:23.961-07:00Tell us why you do thisWe sat in a ring on the stage. The green velvet curtains, heavy with age, were pulled back and waiting to left and right in their neat long vertical pleats. The house lights, cheap and fluorescent, mismatched in color, raised a skin of dust over the curtains that makes them in the light of memory silvery, glowing, enchanted, though rational recollection tells me they were in fact dirty and poor and striving for a little too much. We were going into our fourth musical of the school year. We were burnt out, but too young to know what burnout feels like. We were listless, depressed, angry. Bruce and Doc sat in their rolling wood chairs at the opposite apex of the circle from where I slumped on the black floor.<br />
<br />
The musical was terrible. No one had any more to give. We had two weeks until dress and it was not coming together like it should. This was to be the kind of moment I'd later hear called a "come to Jesus." Since that day, age sixteen and burnt out, dried up of all the song and dance and Rodgers and Hammerstein I had to give, I've thought of it as a "come to Bruce."<br />
<br />
"Tell us why you do this," Bruce said, demanding an answer. The house lights cast long regular reflections on his bald head. I thought wearily how much I loved him, how I'd do anything for him, the best teacher I'd ever had, how I only wanted to earn his approval and then I'd finally know what achievement was.<br />
<br />
My schoolmates reached into a grab-bag of answers and offered each one up tenuously, hoping they'd found the right one. Approval, approval. Give it to us, please, god. Let us guess the right answer and then we'll know we've done well and we can stop wondering what it takes to succeed.<br />
<br />
"Tell us why you get up on stage and do this."<br />
<br />
It's fun. It's creative expression. The chance to be somebody else for a while. It's an education in the arts. All these little hopeful offerings in the dozens of young hands.<br />
<br />
Doc frowned. He always frowned, but his frown grew more intense.<br />
<br />
No one had produced the right answer. And so I decided to offer my own. And honest one, though it was not the one my teachers wanted to hear, and I knew if I said it aloud the whole school would look askance at me. I'd be the one who was doing it for the wrong reasons. <br />
<br />
"I do it because I love the applause."<br />
<br />
It was like ice inside me, to say it. Such an awful chill, knowing I'd been honest and knowing that it was wrong. No one is supposed to do art for the applause. <br />
<br />
Bruce looked at me. He nodded. And Doc. He nodded, too. <br />
<br />
"Libbie. Is anybody going to applaud for the job you're doing now?"<br />
<br />
"No."<br />
<br />
"How are you going to earn that applause? How are all of you going to earn it?"<br />
<br />
Somebody else said, "We're going to do better. We're going to put everything into this. We still have two weeks; we can do better."<br />
<br />
But Bruce kept looking at me, so I came out with more honesty. It had worked the first time. It had been the only right answer.<br />
<br />
"I'm going to be so good they can't not applaud."<br />
<br />
"Good," Bruce said. "Do it."Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-91912353573331530072012-07-28T20:47:00.003-07:002013-04-07T09:44:57.178-07:00The unfairness of perspectiveWhen you roll onto your back and turn your face away I am caught by how beautiful you are, and staring, I cannot help but think what a joke reality plays, that we can't see ourselves from these tender angles, in this blue light, with the setting sun winking through the eyes of the blinds. Asleep you are even less aware of the metered, measured poems that sing along your lines, the simplicity of your ankles crossed, the narrow longness of your feet. Beyond the frank ridge of ribs the soft convexity of your stomach rises, edged by its thin line of fine fur, and the whole of your body gently jogs to the pulse just beneath your skin. My hand rises to touch you, to smooth the spike of hair at your navel, to brush the angle of your hip. Instead I put my fingers into my mouth and bite them, and let you sleep.<br />
<br />
I wonder if you ever watch me sleeping. And if you do, have I ever looked half so lovely?Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-46623913667402085632012-07-27T19:59:00.000-07:002013-04-07T09:45:40.616-07:009.5 miles in the mountainsHoped to make it 11, but had to turn back due to ice. By the time I got back down to the bottom of the ridge my feet were screaming in pain and my head was full of ideas. There were some places where I stumbled on the trail, one scramble over a down tree that almost sent me off the side of the mountain. My hands grabbed the trunk, snap like a mousetrap, bent back my thumbnail on the bark, fingers sticking to my trekking poles from the pitch. My hands smelled fresh and green the whole rest of the day. It's time for new hiking boots. The soles are coming right off the old ones. They'll stick in the mud somewhere and I'll walk on without them.<br />
<br />
I feel a lot better.<br />
<br />
I am going to kick a hole in the sky.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2754679694716848803.post-24890595666249585992012-07-26T21:04:00.001-07:002012-07-26T21:07:26.523-07:00Confident (possibly without reason, but to hell with the play, see what I mean?)<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark -- hub of bicycle wheel -- moved, shivered, and she was gone.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian's dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three steps and run three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed -- no, not her, mistake. My talons still tingling, I flew on.<br />
<br />
Half a mile or so east of number fourteen, Thayer Street tangles with a private lane and a cross street; the latter leads to the town proper; in front of the first drugstore, I saw -- with what melody of relief! -- Lolita's fair bicycle waiting for her. I pushed instead of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled, and entered. Look out! Some ten paces away Lolita, through the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us), cupping the tube, confidently hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her treasure, hurriedly hung up, and walked out with a flourish.<br />
<br />
"Tried to reach you at home," she said brightly. "A great decision has been made. But first buy me a drink, dad."<br />
<br />
...And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.<br />
<br />
"Look," she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk, "look, I've decided something. I want to leave school. I hate that school. I hate the play, I really do! Never go back. Find another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again. But <i>this </i>time we'll go wherever <i>I </i>want, won't we?"<br />
<br />
I nodded. My Lolita.<br />
<br />
"I choose? <i>C'est entendu</i>?" she asked wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl.<br />
<br />
"Okay. <i>Entendu</i>. Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you'll get soaked." (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.)<br />
<br />
She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashion, leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird.</blockquote>
<br />
-Lolita, pp. 206 - 207<br />
<br />
Going on a long day hike tomorrow. Going to do some thinking and some planning.Libbie H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/16366896974551157202noreply@blogger.com0