erin

monday miscellany, with photos

Went for a twilight walk last night in this oddly gorgeous weather. Met a black cat who liked pets on the head. Hadn’t met a black cat in Salem before, though we’ve seen a couple. This one was sweet and liked having his picture taken.

Have all sorts of things to do this week. The tarot knights are in progress, sitting on the workbench in blurry shades of grey. I have a huge stack of books to read that will get taller when my box of birthday books from Amazon arrives. And lots of writing to do. But not this Friday’s flax-golden tale, that’s already finished.

I wrote out a to-do list, something I don’t do nearly as often as I should. It is manageable, I think, and doesn’t look as daunting all typed up as it seemed in my head.

I’m also listening to all of my Tori Amos, in order. According to iTunes we have 1.2 days worth of Tori. The boy started it yesterday as cleaning music, and I’m about halfway through The Beekeeper now. Getting very jazzed to see her in August.

By erin, ago

flax-golden tales: simple as kisses

simple as kisses

People say he used to be a prince. Probably because it seems appropriate and romantic, traditional for tales about frogs.

Neighborhood girls dare each other to creep through the brush into the yard, to tangle the ropes of his swing or kiss the top of his green, frozen head. They run off in screaming giggles, leaving him alone with his sorrow and no way to right himself.

The rules are not as simple as kisses, not these days.

He is part of neighborhood folklore now, the Prince on his swing. One Hallowe’en someone placed a paper crown on his head but it would not stay, carried off in a rush of midnight leaves by a cold November wind.

But he was never a prince. Just a boy. A stupid, stupid boy.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern

By erin, ago

menagerie

Yesterday, for my birthday extravaganza, the boy and I went to the Peabody Essex Museum. We hadn’t been in awhile, so all the special exhibits were new to us, but by far our favorite was the Trash Menagerie, an exhibit teeming with creatures made from recycled materials.

(Sulphur Blue Smeck, 2005, Michelle Stitzlein, mixed junk, 62 x 84 x 11 inches)

This butterfly is even more impressive in person. The stripes on the bottom of the wings are piano keys and the circles at the top are pots. It was impossible to pick a favorite, between the cardboard monkeys and the clam made of cigarette butts and the bunny with cigarette filter fur (bunny was even more adorable in person) and the glowing centipede comprised of bundt cake pans and bicycle brakes.

I love art made from repurposed stuff, and something about repurposing junk into animals is entirely enchanting. I can’t precisely put my finger on why, but the whole exhibit made me very happy. Finding new and exciting things, especially on my birthday, is a happy-making sort of thing.

After museuming we went out to dinner and managed to not get rained on, though it is the second coldest birthday that I can remember having.

We are still munching on funfetti cupcakes and I have a beautiful new necklace, my very first piece from Parrish Relics after years of coveting. Will be posting the first flax-golden tale tomorrow morning, and so far being thirty-one is very nice, indeed.

By erin, ago

birthday

Today is my birthday.

I have been working on a birthday present for myself, and for sharing. It officially starts on Friday, but it is being unwrapped today to be more festive.

flax-golden tales is an experiment in words and pictures.

For awhile now, the idea of doing short stories based on images has been percolating around in my brain. Something akin to Chris Van Allsburg’s brilliant The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, only with slightly longer tales.

But I didn’t know what kind of images I wanted to use.

And then I was looking through my friend Carey’s photographs, and something clicked. She finds marvelous things with her camera, capturing images brimming with story.

Carey granted me permission to use her photos, so I started writing these tiny stories and stole an appropriate title from a Shel Silverstein poem I have always loved.

And thus, flax-golden tales is born. Please wish it (and me!) many happy returns.

Each Friday, starting on July 10th, I will post a photograph of Carey’s with an accompanying ten-sentence story.

Stories will be posted here on the blog, collected on their own page, here, and cross-posted to the flaxgolden community on dreamwidth. (Thanks to someone absolutely lovely, there is now an LJ-feed over here.)

I’ve had a lot of fun planning this, and I hope it will continue to be a lot of fun both to write & read as it goes along. Comments, questions, concerns & birthday wishes welcome!

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
— Invitation, by Shel Silverstein

By erin, ago

randomness for the 29th day of june

I finished the pages for the tarot deck today. They’re over here on LJ and in the tarot minors gallery on phantomwise.com. I have the sketches for the knights finished but I likely won’t start painting them until next week.

I am working on the aforementioned unexpected YA novel idea and it’s going pretty well. I think I want to do a relatively fast first draft over the next couple of months and see where it wants to go.

Query-wise I am playing the waiting game, and I seem to be getting better at it. Or better at distracting myself by baking cookies and drinking lots of wine.

I can’t believe it’s almost July.

That’s about it. Apropos of nothing, here is a photo I took on Saturday as we were driving off into the sunset.

By erin, ago

attempting to be zen

The past week or so has been all up & down in various ways. More rejections, more requests. And lots and lots of rain. Strangely, the up & down makes it easier to be zen about the whole querying process, and I’m trying to just go with the flow and be patient about the whole thing.

I have plenty to distract myself with. Paintings to paint, carrot ginger soup to make, kittens that need tummy rubs. I forget sometimes that I feel better when I keep myself busy, and that it’s a very good way to keep my brain from being neurotic.

Oddly, though, the writing part of my brain does not seem content with my work-in-progress of choice, piecing together my subterranean library. I’ve accomplished a lot as far as reworking the structure and the plot and I know what the shape of it is and what needs to be cut, what needs to be rewritten and what needs to be added.

And yet, my brain doesn’t want to write it.

My brain, tricksy thing that it is, wants to write something entirely different. I ignored it for awhile, but over the last couple of days I’ve been allowing myself to play in this new novel and I’m rather enjoying myself. It’s different than anything I’ve done before. It’s linear! It’s YA! It’s not fantasy! It’s speculative, in a way that feels fantastical, but it’s not a straight-up fantasy.

It’s coming together fairly quickly, too, so I think I’ll play here for awhile before returning to the other, more complicated, non-linear place. Maybe it’s just all about karmic lessons in going with the flow and not trying to over-plan things.

So yeah, that’s the current state of the nation. Spending the end of this rainy, rainy June playing things by ear and attempting to be zen. And I’m working on a super secret project that will be announced in July for my birthday, too.

By erin, ago