frozen hiking

These photos are from several weeks ago, but I still wanted to share them.

A wintery hike, and some beautiful and very frozen) puddles and streams. It was cold that day, but the hiking felt good.

It makes me think I should do something with my characters from Pyresnakes set in the winter. Fire and snow, red and white, it could be visually dazzling.

a rainforest of socks

I've been doing laundry today and I have a pile of winter wool socks that needed washing -- and with wool socks, you don't put them in the dryer. They need to be hung dry (to make them last longer, these aren't the sort that'll end up felted, thank goodness) and so I've got them laid out on every possible hook and bar that I've got. Over doors, over the shower, along the bar in my closet, etc. It's like fighting through a dense jungle of woolen socks. I expect to hear the caw-caw-caw of birds and monkeys at any moment. Perhaps the low warning growl of a felted wool lion....

The good news is, these socks dry pretty quickly. The jungle will be rolled up and packed away by morning.

Then i can start on the weird sheet city that happens when I get to washing the bedding. Draping of sheets over all the surfaces, like a maze, leading me from room to room.

Once Upon a Rianbow, Volume II

The Ninestar Press anthology, Once Upon a Rainbow Volume II was released last week and is now available!

It's a lovely mix-up of reworked fairy tales -- the themes and the story-lines are there, but they are all re-envisioned and gorgeous in the re-telling.

The link: https://ninestarpress.com/product/once-upon-a-rainbow-volume-two/

I've always been enchanted by fairy tales since they occupy a different sort of space in our heads -- they contain morals and meaning, warning and lessons learned, but all done through a spinning yarn story. (Sometimes that underbelly is unpleasant to behold.) You have to take some things at face value for the stories to work -- magic is real, animals can talk, true love exists, people trade cows for beans, and all of that -- as a way to get past the curtain to more glamorous, glittery, enchanted, dark and bitter, this-is-how-we-view-things-as-a-society sort of thing. When you start to deconstruct fairy tales, you see their seams on the inside -- as you look at how fairy tales are told across the years, you see them morph to reflect changes. (If we don't like that the mermaid turns into sea-foam when she can't kill the prince, then we'll rewrite it to make it more palatable. And everyone knows that step-mothers are evil, even if the majority of step-moms out there in the real world are putting their honest effort and resources forth to raise children, without expectation of getting anything in return, and doing a hero's job.)

One of the best things about this anthology is that the morphing is done in favor of romance across the beautiful varieties that love comes in. Well worth a cup of tea, a few cookies on a plate, and some time spent curled up in your favorite reading nook.