Summer Solstice

Happy Litha, everyone! This is the second fertility festival, and it marks midsummer. Today is a day of revelry; it is traditional for handfastings to happen around Litha, and is also a good time for divination spells. From here on out the days will get shorter as we move closer to harvest, but today, celebrate the abundance of nature in high summer. We were going to celebrate tonight with a bonfire and a couple good friends, but since today is supposed to be 98 degrees out, we may skip the bonfire, traditional though it may be. We'll see how we feel about it at eight or nine o'clock tonight. I need to see if I can find some mead in my neighborhood. . . . Happy solstice to everyone! Blessed Be!

take a breath, dive back in

It's been over a week since my last post. Sorry about that; I just have a hard time sitting down and documenting, I guess. So, life since the last time we spoke . . .
K's visit was great. She was here for a week filled with sunshine and thunderstorms, museums and walks in the park, medical appointments and lazy mornings with big cups of coffee. K is one of those friends who is so comfortable, so easy for me to be with, that it's like we've never been apart. And it'd been almost two years since we'd seen each other last, so it was really nice for her to finally make it out to NYC. It was her first time here ever, so it was really entertaining to show her around the city! We also went to a concert. Concrete Blonde. They were AMAZING, as always! This year is the twentieth anniversary of Bloodletting so it was a greatest hits concert, of sorts. They played every song I could have possible asked for. The night before that I saw Patty Griffin---equally good, but totally different. Much more mellow. Concrete Blonde rocks pretty hard.
The best part of seeing K? I'll see her again in August, when I'm in Seattle, and I'll see her probably one more time later this year here in NYC again.
Ah, books. There've been a few, and I've been remiss by not talking about them. And here I am running out of time, so I'll just hit one or two. 25) Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss. Full disclosure, I submitted a short to this collection, so was really looking forward to seeing what stories did get chosen for inclusion. And I have to be honest and say that I was not impressed with most of it. I understand why most of them got chosen, and the interstitiality of them. But I didn't think all the writing was very good. Sometimes the story was better than the writing, and sometimes it was the other way around. A couple stories really caught me, like Catherynne Valente's and K. Tempest Bradford's, but there just wasn't enough in this collection that I really loved, so it's not a keeper for me.
Happy Litha, everyone! It's that time of year again; Summer Solstice, when the days are longest in the whole year. According to the old calendar, this is actually Midsummer (which makes sense if you look at the length of the days).
And now it's time to go. More books next time, but now I'm heading home to play my clarinet and do some writing!