I understand that this has been around for a while, but I just encountered it a few weeks ago. I laughed hard enough that I whimpered, so naturally I had to share it with you. Enjoy!
That was me when I was given my first iPod. “Where is the manual?” I asked. And was answered: “It’s online.”
Aaaaack! 😀
My mother once remarked that she’s amazed at the useful tidbits of information that I find online. I was surprised by her observation. I’m not particularly adept at search terms. Nor am I truly computer savvy. I manage. But when I thought about it, I realized we were both right.
While skill has little to do with my online efforts, serendipity has played a large part in leading me to water in the online world.
When I finished my novel Troll-magic, I discovered Dean Wesley Smith’s blog with all his marvelous information for the writer who wants to get her work out to readers.
When I was longing for a greener way to wrap gifts, I stumbled upon a video that showed how to wrap presents using cloth.
When I realized that our modern ideas about what comprises healthy eating were probably incorrect, I bumped into Sally Fallon’s book, Nourishing Traditions.
There were more happy discoveries, but I’m not going to list them all now. 😀
So what’s my latest discovery?
The KonMari technique for tidying up.
I’ve always had a liking for books about organizing and de-cluttering. The first one I ever encountered remains one of my favorites: Clutter’s Last Stand by Don Aslett. It made me laugh out loud even while it inspired me. Organizing From the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern was another good one. And Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui also had some good points, although I disagreed profoundly with some of the information presented.
With my penchant for books on de-cluttering, you might think I struggled with tidying and organizing, but for much of my adult life I didn’t. My home felt comfortable to me and not overburdened with things. I read the books for enjoyment and for inspiration when I embarked on one of my periodic pruning of the possessions.
But after my husband and I bought a house, the balance tipped. Our house had less storage than my previous living spaces. My parents asked me to take the boxes I’d been storing in their house. (They were generous to keep them for as long as they did.) And my book collection reached a size that overflowed our bookshelves.
Then we had kids. Then I experienced a long string of illnesses interspersed with injuries, during which housekeeping fell even further behind. And, and, and.
Twenty years down the pike, my home was cluttered, and even my own spaces within it were cluttered. Cluttered enough that I felt overwhelmed and stuck. I didn’t know where to start.
That was the unhappy state of Casa Ney-Grimm when I saw mention of Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, on the monthly newsletter from LibraryThing. The title attracted me, and I poked around on the internet to learn more about it. I discovered oodles of videos while I waited for my turn at the copy in our local library. What I found inspired me.
I’d looked at a few new books on de-cluttering when I noticed how stuck I felt around the whole issue, but they seemed to merely re-hash all the stuff I already knew. I needed a fresh, new angle of approach to deal with my situation. Neither plain commonsense nor the old advice from experts was enough. Marie Kondo’s technique looked to be that new angle I needed. I decided to give it a try.
What is Marie Kondo’s technique?
1 • Tidy by category, not by location
2 • Keep only those items which spark joy
I liked the first of those two instructions, because it was different from anything I’d heard before. And I needed something different. I’d always tidied and organized room by room. The bedroom. The living room. The kitchen. And so on. What might organizing by category be like? What categories would Kondo use?
The second instruction reminded me of the quote by William Morris: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” I wasn’t convinced it would be helpful, but I was wrong. After I’d heard Marie Kondo speak (via a translator, since she is Japanese) and after I’d read her book, I realized that there was one detail that was critical to my success with instruction #2.
Hold each item in my hands and notice how my body feels.
If my body feels energized and light, the item “sparks joy” in Kondo’s vocabulary. That item is a keeper.
If my body has that slight (or not so slight) sinking sensation, then the item does not “spark joy.” It needs to go elsewhere.
The first instruction – tidying by category – also possessed more to it than I’d initially realized. Kondo not only recommends tidying by category, but tackling the categories in a specific order, from easiest to hardest. That way, you train your ability to discern which items “spark joy” and which do not.
What is her order?
1 • Clothing
2 • Books
3 • Papers
4 • Miscellany
5 • Memorabilia
With that information, I dove into my clothing. It was time to stop thinking and pondering, time to start doing.
Kondo recommends finding absolutely everything in your house in each category, placing it on the floor of one room (or on your bed), and going through it in one fell swoop.
I can see why she does. Most people say: “Wow! I didn’t realize quite how many clothes I owned!” Plus comparing how each of two dozen tops makes your body feel makes it really obvious which ones “spark joy” and which do not.
But I’ll confess that I didn’t follow her instructions to the letter. I started with the clothes in my wardrobe and my chest of drawers. I didn’t pull out the dresses stashed in the back corner of my daughter’s closet. I didn’t pull out the trunk of clothes buried in the eaves under the roof. I knew that if I wanted to get started NOW – and I did – I needed to go with what could be accessed easily.
So I went through my clothes, and it was easy.
I discovered two consistent mistakes that I’d made all the other times I’d de-cluttered in my life. It hadn’t mattered when I was younger and didn’t have as much stuff. But it was a heavy contributor to the clutter that built up later.
I’d tended to get confused about useful things. Using the “spark joy” criterion cut through my confusion and showed me what was really useful and what was not. In the past, I been keeping at least a few things that might be useful, but were not truly so, because I never did actually use them.
I’d also kept things that were beautiful, but that I didn’t love. I’d never realized that just because I found something beautiful didn’t mean I loved it. I’d always assumed the two things went together. For me, they do not.
Getting rid of three gigantic leaf bags of clothing that didn’t “spark joy” felt wonderful. Of course, I’d felt that particular relief before, but this time there was something else that I’d never felt before. Kondo had mentioned it in her book, but I’d not truly realized what it would be like.
When I open my wardrobe now, I see only clothing that I love.
I’d never had that experience before. Never.
Always, until this month, my closet included a few (or more than a few) garments that I didn’t love. Opening the wardrobe doors onto only clothes that I love feels really different. It’s energizing. I begin to see why Kondo says her method is life-changing. Imagine if my whole house – not just my wardrobe – produced this feeling! I hope to find out!
I also discovered that I really did have enough clothes, even when I kept only those I loved.
I’d wondered about that, and apparently I’m not alone. Many of Kondo’s clients have wondered the same. What I learned is that the reason I’d felt like I didn’t have enough clothes before I got rid of so many was that the clothes I loved were hidden by all the clothes I’d grown to hate. It’s a paradox. Now, with fewer clothes, that “not enough” feeling is gone. I have enough.
Imagine that feeling multiplied through the whole house!
Kondo also recommends folding clothes into neat rectangles that can be placed in a drawer the way a book is placed in a bookshelf. This allows you to see everything in the drawer at a glance. It allows more items to fit in the drawer. And it prevents items at the bottom of stacks from getting crushed and creased, because there are no stacks. (The photo at the top of this post shows one of my drawers with the clothes folded and placed in this way.)
I was so energized with my experience of KonMari-ing my clothes, that I wanted to go on.
The next category should have been books. But I hated looking at the messy top of my chest of drawers, when the interior was so wonderful. And most of the clutter was paper generated by doctors’ offices during my last two illnesses. I didn’t want to wait until I’d finished books and started on papers. I decided to do a little location-based de-cluttering and tackled both the nightstand by my bed and the top of the chest.
I put the papers in a pile on my coffee table in the living room and went through them all in one swoop. Most could be discarded – either recycled or shredded. I placed them in the appropriate bins. A few went into a medical file folder.
I placed all the items on my bed and then sorted them – holding each in my hands – into keep or toss (give away). Here is where my discernment of the difference between “might be useful” and “actually useful,” as well as the difference between “beautiful” and “loved,” made a huge difference. I tossed many useful and beautiful things and felt great about it, because I kept the things I really use and love.
I changed my mind about the fabric-covered box that I’d thought to keep. It was actually useful (to store my barrettes), but I didn’t love it. In fact, just looking at it produces that sinking feeling, so it definitely needs to go. I chose an old blue and white sugar bowl from the china closet to keep my barrettes instead.
I aimed for quick in my first stab at the KonMari technique, rather than perfect. I suspect I will need to fine-tune some of the work I’ve done. I know I’ll realize that some of the items I’ve kept really don’t “spark joy.” That’s okay. Kondo herself recommends doing it right and doing it once. But I’m comfortable with revisiting my work after I’ve done it. I don’t fear the dreaded “rebound.” Maybe because that doesn’t feel like my problem.
My problem has been getting out from under. And doing this quickly will get me out from under. Once I’m out from under, I won’t feel overwhelmed. I’ll be up for tackling a little fine-tuning and the correcting of any mistakes.
My spot de-cluttering has worked so well, that I’m going to do a bit more. There’s a shelving unit in the living room that really belongs in the study. It’s slowly accumulated clutter while awaiting its transfer to the proper room. I’m going to de-clutter it next. It will surely need that before it can be moved anyway!
And then I’ll move on to books!
I plan to share how each of the different categories goes for me. Cheer me on! 😀
For more life-changers, see:
Writer’s Journey
Test First, Then Conclude!
Butter and Cream and Coconut, Oh My!
Great Soap & Etcetera Quest
Mother Holle (or Frau Holle) is one of the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, but it may be far more than a fairy tale.
In most of the other Brothers Grimm stories, anonymous and magical beings enter the world of the protagonist to assign heroic quests, bestow blessings, or mete out punishment.
Mother Holle is quite different, in that the magical being is named, she lives in the heavens, and the protagonist of the story must go to her by paradoxically diving into a spring. When Mother Holle shakes her featherbed, the loosed feathers fall to the earth as snow. These features suggest that the story is an origin myth for a supreme Mother Goddess with roots in the early Bronze Age.
Holle seems to be a northern version of the southern Perchta or Berchta, a goddess of spinning and weaving. She had both a light and a dark aspect, the one beautiful and shining, the other old and haggard. The name Perchta seems to derive from both beraht (Bright One) and pergan (Hidden One).
In my novel Fate’s Door, I imagine Holle as a Great Mother Goddess and the first weaver to sit at the loom of fate, weaving the lives of her children – mortal and immortal – into being.
After millennia of weaving alone, she longs for company. When a wandering oread – a nymph of the mountains – climbs too high and is carried away by a cloud to Mother Holle’s cottage, she begs shelter. Mother Holle gives it, and the nymph stays for some time, recovering from her ordeal in the sky.
As she regains her health, the nymph helps the goddess with her tasks – both those of the household and those involved with her weaving. The two become friends. The nymph asks if she might make the cottage her home at the same moment when Mother Holle asks the nymph to stay forever, thus becoming a spirit or a numen of time.
This is the young Orroch, who eventually becomes the eldest norn.
In time, Mother Holle acquires another helper. When she is weary, the two young numeni play music to soother her and themselves, for the burden of crafting destiny is heavy.
After yet more millennia, another young nature spirit joins the family, and Orroch persuades Mother Holle to seek her freedom and leave the weaving to her helpers. Orroch promises the goddess that they will faithfully hand down the traditions of destiny to the new heirs that arise, and only then does the goddess depart.
Orroch imagines the goddess roaming the cosmos beyond even the confines of the sky, meeting strange denizens, and pursuing adventure, but no one really knows where Mother Holle has gone.
Orroch herself takes the role of weaver, while her helpers become the Pattern-maker and the Shuttle-catcher. They also seek the materials needed for the loom.
As the centuries roll by, Orroch remains steadfastly at her weaving, but newcomers take the roles of her assistants. No longer are they selected by chance. Invitations are sent to promising candidates. Orroch is content that this should be so until a certain lake nymph named Cinnisuent learns the ways of the norns. Only then does tragedy enter Orroch’s breast.
A widow had two daughters. Her stepdaughter was beautiful and industrious, but the widow favored her birth daughter, allowing the girl to become lazy and spoiled. Thus the stepdaughter had all the work to do, becoming the Cinderella of the house.
Every day the poor girl sat by a well, next to the highway, and spun so much that her fingers bled. Now it happened that one day the spindle was completely bloody, so she dipped it in the well, to wash it off. It slipped from her hand and fell in. She ran to her stepmother weeping, and told her of the mishap. She was scolded sharply and mercilessly.
Her stepmother said, “Since you have let the spindle fall in, you must fetch it out again.”
The girl went back to the well, and did not know what to do. Terrified of more scolding, she jumped into the well to fetch the spindle. As she sank below the water, she lost her senses.
When she awoke and came to herself again, she stood in a beautiful meadow where the sun was shining, and there were many thousands of flowers. She cupped one in her hand to study it more closely.
Then she walked across the meadow and came to an oven full of bread. The bread called out, “Oh, take me out. Take me out, or I’ll burn. I’ve been thoroughly baked for a long time.” So she stepped up to it, and with a baker’s peel took everything out, one loaf after the other and set them in a wide basket lying nearby.
After that she walked further and came to a tree laden with apples. “Shake me. Shake me. My apples are all ripe,” cried the tree. She shook the tree until the apples fell as though it were raining fruit. When none were left in the tree, she gathered them into a deep basket which lay under the tree, and then continued on her way.
Finally she came to a small cottage. An old woman peered out through the open window. She had very large teeth, which frightened the girl, who wanted to run away. But the old woman called out to her, “Don’t be afraid, dear child. Stay here with me, and if you keep my household in an orderly fashion, all will go well with you. Only you must take care to make my bed well and shake it diligently until the feathers fly, then it will snow in the world. I am Mother Holle.”
Because the old woman spoke so kindly to her, the girl took heart, agreed, and started in her service. The girl took care of everything to Mother Holle’s satisfaction and always shook her featherbed vigorously until the feathers flew about like snowflakes. Therefore she had a good life with her: no angry words, and roast meat to eat every day.
After she had been with Mother Holle for a time, she became sad. At first she did not know what was the matter with her, but at last she determined that it was homesickness. Even though she was many thousands of times better off with Mother Holle than at home, still she had a yearning to return. Finally she said to the old woman, “I have such a longing for home, and even though I am very well off here, I cannot stay longer. I must go up again to my own people.”
Mother Holle said, “I am pleased that you long for your home again, and because you have served me so faithfully, I will take you back myself.” With that she took her by the hand and led her to a large gate.
The gate was opened, and while the girl was standing under it, an immense rain of gold fell, and all the gold stuck to her, so that she was completely covered with it. “This is yours because you have been so industrious,” said Mother Holle, and at the same time she gave her back the spindle which had fallen into the well.
Then the gate was closed and the girl found herself on earth again, not far from her mother’s house. As she entered the yard the rooster, sitting on the well, cried, “Cock-a-doodle-doo, our golden girl is here anew.”
The girl went inside and, as she arrived all covered with gold, she was well received, both by her mother and her sister. The girl told all that had happened to her, and when the mother heard how she had come to the great wealth, she wanted to achieve the same fortune for her other daughter. She made the lazy girl go and sit by the well and spin. To make her spindle bloody, the girl shoved her hand into a thorn bush and pricked her fingers. Then she threw the spindle into the well, and jumped in after it.
Like the other girl, she too came to the beautiful meadow and walked along the same path. When she came to the oven, the bread cried again, “Oh, take me out. Take me out, or else I’ll burn. I’ve been thoroughly baked for a long time.”
But the lazy girl answered, “As if I would want to get all dirty,” and walked away.
Next she came to the apple tree. It cried out, “Oh, shake me. Shake me. My apples are all ripe.”
But the girl answered, “Oh yes, one could fall on my head,” and with that she walked on.
When she came to Mother Holle’s house, she was not afraid, because she had already heard about her large teeth, and she immediately began to work for her. On the first day she forced herself, was industrious, and obeyed Mother Holle, because she was thinking about all the gold that she would receive.
But on the second day she grew lazy, on the third day even more so, and then she didn’t even want to get up in the morning.
She did not make the bed for Mother Holle, the way she was supposed to, and she did not shake it until the feathers flew. Mother Holle soon became tired of this and dismissed her from her duties. This was just what the lazy girl wanted. She thought that she would now get the rain of gold.
Mother Holle led her to the gate. She stood beneath it, but instead of gold, a large kettle full of pitch spilled over her. “That is the reward for your services,” said Mother Holle, and closed the gate. The lazy girl walked home, entirely covered with pitch.
As soon as the rooster on the well saw her, he cried out, “Cock-a-doodle-doo, our dirty girl is here anew.”
The pitch stuck fast to her, and did not come off as long as she lived.
When I envision Mother Holle as she appears in my protagonist’s thoughts, I see a queenly woman resembling those painted by the Pre-Raphaelites of the 19th century.
Therefore, when I began my search for images for this post, I looked among the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. Although John William Waterhouse painted several decades after the break-up of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, his style blended theirs with that of his contemporaries, the Impressionists.
And it was amongst the Waterhouse paintings that I found images that matched those of my mind’s eye, as you can see from the selections above. While searching, I also discovered a video combining a slide show of many Waterhouse paintings with the music “Tu chiami una vita” by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, lyrics by Salvatore Quasimodo. It is so beautiful that I simply must share it with you. 😀
For more about the world of Fate’s Door, see:
Nerine’s Room
Brocade and Drawlooms
Cottage of the Norns
The Norns of Fate’s Door
The Baltic Sea
The Ancient Goths
Lugh and the Lunasad
Crossing the Danube
The Keltoi of Európi
For more about Mother Holle, see:
Mother Hulda on Wikipedia
Frau Holle on Wikipedia
Perchta on Wikipedia
For more about John William Waterhouse, see:
John William Waterhouse on Wikipedia
Waterhouse Signatures on the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood
The Winds of Waterhouse on the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood
Waterhouse’s Undine and Mermaids on the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood
Some years ago I learned that the soaps and lotions and shampoos we moderns use can be nearly as harmful – over the long haul – as the cosmetics used by the ancient Egyptians or the Renaissance English and Europeans. I looked for safer alternatives. Finding them was quite a search. Many offered on the marketplace were just as bad or didn’t work or irritated my sensitive skin.
Eventually I found a handful of products that worked for me. (Discovering along the way that conventional products had been irritating my skin in a chronic, low level way that I thought was normal for me. It was not.)
But my hair was shorter then. As it’s grown to shoulder length, I’ve found myself wishing for some kind of conditioner. Not enough so as to take up another laborious search. More as a passing wish when I combed my hair.
I’m not really sure how I stumbled upon homemade lemon rinse. Something must have prompted me to do a little googling, but I no longer remember what it was. I bopped around a few websites, and what I learned made me decide to give it a try. Naturally I’m going to share my experience with you. 😀
First some basics.
A strand of hair has layers, sort of like an onion (or an ogre, if that ogre is Shrek). At the core is a pith or marrow that is light and airy. It occupies about one-third the diameter of the strand. Around it are rod-like bundles of keratin. And on the outside is the cuticle, a layer of flat, thin cells that overlap one another like roof shingles.
Normal hair is somewhat acidic.
Substances that are acidic have a pH between 0 and 6.9. While those that are alkaline have a pH between 7.1 and 14. (A pH of 7 is neutral.) Human hair varies between 4.5 and 5.5.
This natural acidity of human hair prevents fungi and bacteria from growing on it. That’s critically important, obviously, but the acidity serves one other important function. When the hair strand has its proper acidity, the cells of its cuticle lie flat and tight, creating a smooth outer surface. When the hair is less acidic than it should be, the cuticle cells loosen and flap, creating a rough surface.
For this reason, a vinegar or lemon rinse serves as a beautiful conditioner.
Reading about it, I wasn’t sure I believed it. It seemed to simple. Too easy. But I decided to try it.
I purchased some ReaLemon® juice and mixed 2 tablespoons of it with 1-1/2 cups water, and poured the solution into a ketchup dispenser.
(You need to dilute the lemon juice with water, because undiluted lemon juice is too acidic. You want a rinse that will put your hair right smack in the middle of its natural range.)
When I next washed my hair, after I’d rinsed out the hairwash under the shower, I poured my homemade lemon rinse over my tresses, gently working it into the strands and into my scalp (which should also be mildly acidic).
I was astounded to notice that my hair did indeed feel slippery, just like with using a conventional conditioner, except without that super gooey, gunky feeling. My hair felt slippery, but still clean. Once I was out of the shower, dry, and in my robe, I took a comb to my hair. And was delighted to have the comb slide through the strands easily. Yay! Total success!
ETA: I did rinse the lemon rinse out of my hair after I’d worked it in. You don’t want to simply hop out of the shower leaving the lemon in. Let it do its work of making the hair strands properly acidic and then rinse the lemon away.
That experiment was 6 months ago, and I’ve continued to be very pleased with the results of my lemon rinse. It works. Simple as that.
I do have one caution, if you decide to make your own lemon rinse experiment.
I like to keep my rinse right in the shower with my hairwash and soap. I can do so when I use ReaLemon® as my source for lemon, because it has preservatives in it. But one time I ran out of ReaLemon® and couldn’t find it at the grocery store. I purchased the type of lemon juice that must be kept refrigerated. After 3 days of sitting in my bathroom, my rinse had a nasty coating of mold floating on the top, and I had to throw it away.
So, if you prefer to avoid the preservatives (and I do in the food I eat, but I’m willing to suffer them in my hair rinse for the sake of convenience), keep your lemon rinse in the fridge, pull it out for your hair washing, and put it back after. 😀
For more about safe and effective toiletries, see:
Hair Wash with Rhassoul Clay
Great Soap & Etcetera Quest
Facial Soap Eureka
For more info about alternative hair care, see:
Kanelstrand.com
I’ve been catching up on my bookkeeping. This is appropriate, because my current work-in-progress, Tally the Betrayals, is about a bookkeeper.
(He inks his tallies on scrolls. Thus the photo above.)
Now he’s not your ordinary bookkeeper.
He works in the “dark tower” of Silmaren in the Bronze Age of my North-lands, keeping track of the tin and copper flowing into the smithies where the weapons of the troll-lord’s armies are forged! And one of his tin ingots has gone missing.
But I digress. (And, yes, that was a tease.) 😀
Back to the bookkeeping at Casa Ney-Grimm.
I was updating my year-on-year spreadsheet, where I see how many copies of each book title sold each year, from 2011 through the present. It helps me assess the big picture.
Several things became clear after I tallied the numbers for 2015. My short stories sell sporadically and by the handful. This is normal. Short stories just are not as popular with readers as longer works.
Except my Crossing the Naiad, which sells steadily. Still by the handful, but every month readers are choosing Naiad, which intrigues me. It’s a great story, yes. But so is Resonant Bronze a great story. What is it about Naiad that has extra appeal?
More experienced writers than I tell me that this is always the unanswered question, so, moving on…
Next conclusion: novellas sell better than short stories, still by the handful, but steadily. (Sort of like Naiad, in fact. Except that Naiad is not a novella.)
And novels sell best of all.
None of the above is really surprising. But the thing that caught my attention was that Livli’s Gift – a novel – is alone amongst my novels in selling merely like a novella. What’s up with that?
I think I know the answer. It was the cover. The old cover just wasn’t right.
Now I revised the cover a few weeks back and blogged about it. But seeing the cold, hard numbers made me revisit the issue. Sure, I’d revised the cover, and I liked the new version a lot. But had I revised it enough? If the old cover had been hurting its popularity that much, had I truly fixed the problem?
No, I didn’t think I had.
So I’ve been tinkering with it some more. I’m not quite done tinkering. I have a few more details I want to change. But I thought I’d show you what I have thus far.
What do you think?
😀
To see the original cover of Livli’s Gift, created step by step:
Creating Livli’s Cover
To see the cover revision of Livli’s Gift:
Why Revise a Book’s Cover
To see the inspiration for my novel Tally the Betrayals:
Tally the Betrayals
When Nerine first enters her room in the 6th scene of Fate’s Door, she is desperate to find some oddment that she can add to the tapestry of destiny that will save her friend Altairos.
The well at the roots of the World Tree has just shown Altairos drowning at sea. And Nerine knows that if she can just find the right forbidden something, she can save him. Maybe.
She tries to calm herself – anxiety rarely helps one think clearly. The warmth emanating from the tile stove in the right corner on the outer wall helps, but not enough. Her errand is too fraught, too weighted with life and death.
So she’s looking at her room with far more attention than she’s given it in the last 5 years, and we look with her.
There are the built-in wardrobes on the left, with a stack of drawers and a niche between them. Could that vital something be behind those wardrobe doors or in one of the drawers?
Across from the room’s door, there’s the shelf and mirror, and the two chests of drawers tucked beneath the shelf. There must be many trinkets stored in them. Maybe the saving item is amongst them.
The bed on the right with its nightstands seems less likely, as does the cushioned armchair near it. Surely the the linens in the blanket chest at the foot of the bed are too large to be incorporated into the tapestry of fate.
But Nerine considers everything. She does not have much time, and only the right thing will save her dear friend.
For extra chapters from Fate’s Door, see:
Update on Fate’s Door (Eilidh and Mount Olympus)
Nerine’s Youngest Sister (Agnippe and Mount Helicon)
The Nine Muses of Antiquity (Agnippe and the Muses)
Hera’s Handmaidens (Eilidh’s Farewell Party)
For more about Nerine’s world, see:
Brocade and Drawlooms
Cottage of the Norns
The Norns of Fate’s Door
The Baltic Sea
The Ancient Goths
Lugh and the Lunasad
Crossing the Danube
The Keltoi of Európi
Vertical Looms
More than a month ago, I blogged about my torn retina and its repair. In that blog post, I promised to report back when I had more news on the success the repair. Did it work? Did my retina rip again? Would I get to keep the vision in my left eye?
The short answers? Yes. No. And, so far, so good!
I saw my ophthalmologist two weeks ago, and he was really pleased. He said the cryo repair was one of the best looking he’d ever seen. He also said that the gas bubble (injected to stabilize the repair) was nearly gone, dissipating as expected. Which meant that I could sleep on either my left side or my right side. But not on my back.
If I slept on my back, the bubble would float up to bump my eye’s lens and damage it.
This was all fantastic news. The repair had “taken.” I’m still at an increased risk for another retinal tear, because once you’ve had one, having another is more likely. But it’s unlikely that the cryopexy itself would cause a tear. At this point, the eye simply needs to finish healing (which will take another couple of months), and all is well.
Being able to turn over was also fantastic news. It turns out that my body does not do well when it has to stay in one position all night long. I would wake up after about five hours of sleep with my left hip in agony. I simply had to change position.
Since I couldn’t turn over, I had to get up. Two months of only five hours of sleep each night meant I was very, very tired. And cranky. And grumpy. I couldn’t take naps because my hip joint needed a full day to recover, so that it wouldn’t still be hurting when it was time to go to sleep again. Being able to turn over helped. A lot. But not quite as much as I’d hoped.
Turns out I generally do a lot more sleeping on my back than I’d realized. Sleeping only on my left or right sides meant that my hip didn’t hurt as much and that I woke after six hours of sleep instead of five.
But about a week ago, the bubble in my eye, which had appeared as a round purple circle at the bottom of my vision, and which had been getting steadily smaller and smaller, disappeared altogether. It was gone! Which meant I could sleep however I wished.
That first night of sleeping freely was glorious! Glorious, I tell you! 😀
However, there remains one plaguing difficulty. All the spots of blood in my eye from the cryopexy have turned into floaters. The floaters from the original retinal tear no longer remained after the cryopexy. And the blood specks, while clearly visible, were tiny with lots of clear vision between them.
The current crop of floaters covers almost all of my central vision and is fairly dense. I can see through it. I have no problem walking around my house now. (I had been bumping into doorways when my left eye was too painful to open.) But I don’t think it would be a good idea to get behind the wheel of a car. And detail work is very challenging.
As you might guess from the photo at the beginning of this post, reading is a strain. I can and have been reading, but I have to blink a lot and squint.
I’ve also been working in Photoshop to create floor plans for the tower citadel in my work-in-progress, Tally the Betrayals. And, phew! Seeing the ruler markings at the edges of the Photoshop file is really hard.
So my eye is healing well, but all is not yet heavenly at Casa Ney-Grimm. I am supremely grateful that I can see, but January and February have been hard. And, so far, March is not great either. I trust I shall make it through this siege, but any prayers or healing vibes or good wishes you can spare for me would be much appreciated!
I love the illustrations done by Kay Nielsen for the collection of Norse folk tales East of the Sun and West of the Moon. His work inspired the North-lands in which so many of my stories take place. And his drawings appear on the covers of several of my books.
The cover for Livli’s Gift features an illustration of the gardening queen in the folk tale “Prince Lindworm,” a story that is mentioned as part of the folk lore in my novel.
I still love the cover I originally created, but I felt some qualms about it after I submitted it to Joel Friedlander’s monthly cover design contest in March 2014. Joel found the design depressing. I didn’t agree with him at the time, but his opinion introduced a sliver of doubt into my awareness.
What if he were right? Was my cover causing readers who might love the story to click away from the book’s Amazon page without ever checking the “Look Inside”?
That doubt niggled and niggled inside me. Finally I realized what bothered me. At full size, on the paperback or on a Kindle Fire, the cover still looks great to me. But at thumbnail size – the way you initially see it online – it does look gloomy. Or at least somber. Which is all wrong. Livli”s Gift is not a gloomy tale. Honestly, none of my stories are. I infinitely prefer hope and redemption!
I decided my cover needed revision. After all, every indie publisher should revisit the covers of her backlist every 3 to 5 years. Times change, cover styles change, but stories can be forever. Every good story deserves a cover that isn’t dated or stale. And Livli’s Gift deserved a cover that didn’t give a false impression.
But I didn’t want to change the art. I love the line drawing of the queen bending over her cherished plants. Could I achieve my goal by changing the title and byline treatment? That’s what I decided to attempt.
Some thinking was required.
What sort of a title treatment should I attempt? Livli is a healer who works with magic, a magical hot spring, massage, and herbal treatments to cure her patients. Perhaps I could give the title a leafy texture to reflect this?
The cover for Quantum Zoo came to mind. I’d given its title a watery texture. Perhaps the same font, Orial, might even work well for Livli’s Gift. The curling ornaments of Orial had the right feeling for Livli, and the broader letters would provide a little more space to give the plant texture visibility.
I put all those elements together.
And I didn’t like it. The colors were dull. The letters were too blocky. They’d looked graceful on the Quantum Zoo cover, but they seemed clunky on the Livli cover. I didn’t even bother to test the byline with the Orial-leaf treatment.
I was going to have to try something else.
But I still liked the idea of a leafy texture. Maybe I just needed to find leaves with a brighter green. I remembered a walk I’d taken through my neighborhood, photographing spring flowers and bright green foliage. I checked my files of photos and found the very thing!
But what font should I use?
Maybe I didn’t need to change the original font. Maybe the Palatino on the original cover would work just fine when a texture was added to it. Excited, I put all of these elements together.
Okay!
Now I felt like I was getting somewhere. I liked the brightness and the warmth of the green. I liked the allusion to life and growing things. It still wasn’t quite right, but I could work with this. Where would I go with it next? How might I manipulate it to make it fully right?
I looked at what I had, and looked at it some more. And then one of those inspirations that every artist loves struck me. What if I gave the Palatino font some of the curlicues that were part of the Orial font?
Perfect! It would be perfect!
I set to work again, slicing and dicing, moving this piece here, that piece there. I was knitting or crocheting with Photoshop, and it was fun!
Would this be it? Would this be the cover I was longing for?
Yes! It totally rocked! I was so excited. I’d done it!
With the peak so high, you know the fall would be low. And it was. As I looked at my work, I realized that despite the bright warmth of the green, combining it with black yielded the feel of the horror genre.
Oh, no!
Livli’s Gift hasn’t even one speck of horror. Readers who like horror would purchase the book and be disappointed and feel cheated. Readers who like warm and human fantasy with streamers of hope and joy – the perfect audience for Livli’s Gift – would never give it a chance.
Gloom buried me.
I recovered, naturally. But I let the whole project rest. I’d reached the “I got nothing” stage.
So Livli’s Gift kept its old cover for another year.
Then, just last week, I had another idea. The lacy version of Palatino I’d created really was perfect for Livli’s Gift. What if I filled it with a different texture? What if I filled it with a water texture? Livli worked with water far more extenisvely than she did with plants anyway!
With trepidation, I opened that year-old file to see what I could do.
Filling the title with water was actually quite easy. The challenging work of creating a lacy Palatino was already done. I pasted in the water texture and looked at what I had.
Hmm. It was a nice idea, but it just wasn’t working. For whatever reason, the green leafy texture held together and didn’t confuse the eye. But the water texture didn’t behave similarly. It was too variegated, acting almost as a camouflage pattern, breaking up the edges of the letters and making the title hard to read.
I decided I would search for a better water texture.
After a night of sleep.
When I awoke in the morning, I had another idea. The original blue in the original cover had the bright, warm hue that I wanted. What if I simply used that, instead of pouring in a texture on the already complex lace of the altered font?
I selected the title, filled it with blue, deselected it, and took a look.
I noticed the byline was wider than the title. For no good reason. I modified it, so that the edges of the byline on the right and the left matched up precisely with the edges of the title. Much better!
I liked it.
The lacy Palatino has a pleasant liveliness to it. That particular hue of blue is indeed warm and bright. I hadn’t realized how much the unmodified Palatino creates a somber mood. Somber enough to overpower even the brightness of the warm blue.
Had I achieved my aim?
I reduced the cover down to the tiny size of a thumbnail and studied the result.
Well, first off, on my computer screen, looking at the image in Photoshop, and looking at it on my own website, the original cover looks much more cheerful than it did on either Joel’s website or the Amazon site. That’s because both the other sites don’t render the blue accurately. Different sites really do render colors differently, unfortunately.
On the Kobo site, the cover for Perilous Chance suffers the most of all my covers. Instead of a clear and luminous indigo for the sky, it becomes a dingy purple. Ugh!
And even beyond the alterations caused by the hosting website, there are also all the variations caused by how each individual computer monitor is set. Each reader browsing online will see a slightly different view of each book cover in existence.
In fact, if we want to be through and precise, each reader’s brain and eyes will be calibrated slightly differently from every other reader’s. That way – considering every individual viewer – lies madness.
So, back to Livli’s Gift and how the thumbnail looks on my computer through my eyes. And it looks good. Not quite as nice as at the larger size, but still more cheerful than the original.
I double checked my assessment after I uploaded the new cover file on Amazon. There, the improvement was marked. At both the thumbnail size (which turns up in searches) and the slightly larger size that appears on the product page, the new version is much better than the old one. I’d say it’s a keeper.
Until I decide – in 5 years or so – that it’s time to revise the covers on my backlist again. 😀
To see the original building process for Livli’s cover:
Creating Livli’s Cover
For more about Kay Nielsen:
Kay Nielsen
And for more cover builds:
Building Star-drake’s Cover
Building Glory’s Cover
Building Wild’s Cover
In Greek mythology, Hera was the queen of the gods and the wife of Zeus, the king of the gods. She championed the well-being of women and the sacred essence of marriage.
Her own daughters – Eileithyia (goddess of childbirth) and Hebe (goddess of youth) – are listed as members of her retinue. Iris (the goddess of the rainbow), the nymphs of the clouds, and the nymphs of the seasons also attended her.
In my novel, Fate’s Door, I envisioned her entourage as a less static group, drawn from the offspring of royalty among the myriad nature spirits associated with all the features of the world, and changing over time.
Thus does Eilidh, eldest sister of my heroine Nerine, join Hera’s cortege.
When Nerine visits her sister on Mount Olympus, Eilidh greets her warmly, entertains her during her stay, and gives a party on the eve of Nerine’s departure. I suspect that Hera herself would not have approved of the course that farewell celebration took, had she been present, but the nymphs of ancient Greece did have a reputation for wildness. 😀
The scene with the party was cut from the final version of Fate’s Door, but I share it here for those of us who wish we could visit the Mount Olympus of mythology.
That evening Nerine saw a part of Olympus new to her, when Eilidh and the handmaidens gave a party in honor of Nerine’s departure.
The festivity took place in and around an oval pool of clear water emerging from a grotto in the mountainside. Unlike Agnippe’s sacred spring or the many streams of the area, this body of water had not been left in its natural state. The pool itself was scooped from grooved white granite and surrounded by a broad terrace of the same material, even within the grotto. Fluted white columns and a balustrade edged the outside terrace, but within the grotto a wall of rose marble had been carved, depicting a scene of merfolk celebrating.
Only the handmaidens attended, none of the greater gods, which was a relief.
Eilidh donned the pectoral and belt in which she’d left home, platinum with clear yellow topazes. She was as beautiful now at twenty-three as she’d been at eighteen, maybe more so, because her pride had mellowed into confidence. Nerine chose to swim bare, since the handmaidens did so. If you could call it swimming. Mostly they splashed and shrieked and laughed.
Nerine raced Eilidh to the grotto end of the pool and back, discovering that she was quite a bit faster than her sister.
The handmaidens laid bets on the race, with the losers drinking goblets of mead, while the winners quaffed nectar.
Then the winners decided this wasn’t quite fair and begged Eilidh and Nerine to race again, so that the winners would receive the mead. The party grew far from decorous after that.
Nerine gave several races away, not wanting to make her sister feel bad.
But Eilidh didn’t seem to mind when she lost, joining the handmaidens in drinking mead whenever the round called for the losers to drink.
Nerine stayed away from the mead altogether. It was too sweet for her taste. And when she saw the drunkenness it induced in the handmaidens, she was doubly glad for her choice. Five of them sat on the steps down into the water and sang off key, while another group retired to the grotto to – apparently – hold an orgy.
Eilidh, hiccuping, dragged Nerine over to the balustrade and began sobbing, saying that she had never appreciated her sister properly and now it was too late, because Nerine was going away.
“Oh, oh, oh!” wailed Eilidh. “Shay you forgive me, do!” she slurred.
Nerine couldn’t help laughing. It was all so ridiculous.
She reassured her sister, and then put her to bed in the shrine with all the divans.
As she checked her pouch of toiletries and the satchel with her writing supplies, Galena entered. She had not attended the party, and was garbed for her repose, although not in the usual sleeping gown. Instead she wore garments similar to Nerine’s travel costume, tunic and trews, but woven of a linen so fine it was translucent.
“I am come to offer you more restful quarters for the night, as I must suppose this location will be quite insupportable when the handmaidens eventually arrive.” A smile was strongly present in the tone of Galena’s voice. Nerine was beginning to love that smile sound already for the way it lifted her spirits.
She accepted Galena’s offer gratefully. She did not indeed want to remain to witness the handmaidens’ drunken return, whenever that might be.
The more restful quarters turned out to be a tapestry pavilion or tent – Nerine wasn’t quite sure what to call it – with blankets and sheets laid upon fleeces on the tapestry floor. She found them more comfortable than her divan and fell asleep quickly, despite her excitement about the morrow.
Galena awoke Nerine at dawn.
They visited the shrine of the fountain to perform their morning ablutions and then dressed in their travelling clothes.
The weight of the garments felt unfamiliar and strangely sumptuous, as though they meant she were to participate in a mysterious rite. Perhaps she was. The journey across Európi would require nearly ninety days. She would be travelling so many stadia that the distance was measured in leagues – three hundred and seventy some leagues. She would see lands and peoples utterly strange to her, and she would not rest more than a night or two in any one place. If that were not a rite of passage, what was?
For the first three extra chapters from Fate’s Door, see:
Update on Fate’s Door (Eilidh and Mount Olympus)
Nerine’s Youngest Sister (Agnippe and Mount Helicon)
The Nine Muses of Antiquity (Agnippe and the Muses)
To purchase and read Fate’s Door: Amazon I B&N I iTunes I Kobo I Smashwords
In November, I decided it was time to update the links on my site that point to my books’ Amazon pages.
When I first started my blog, in February 2012, I included links to Amazon.com and Amazon UK, figuring that since I write in English, the residents of the UK were in my potential audience.
Then I had my first sale in Germany. Another in Spain. One in Italy.
It became obvious that there are English speakers, or readers, all over the globe. So whenever a new country showed up in my sales, I’d add that Amazon to the links.
That method brought the number of Amazon links up to 10 out of the 13 Amazon stores this year. Since most of my books are also available at B&N, Smashwords, Apple, and Kobo, the list of links after each title was 14 stores long. Too long, especially for my readers who shop at one of the stores in the middle of the alphabet.
So I found a source for a global Amazon link. All thirteen Amazon stores are accessed from one link that directs the browsing reader to the Amazon store serving his or her country.
I asked my international visitors to test these new global links and let me know if the links worked. My visitors tested. Thank you! The links worked. Yay!
I celebrated my link success for all of a day, before it occurred to me that B&N also has separate websites in different countries, and Kobo as well. The links on my site led only to the US B&N website and the US Kobo website. That was a serious problem.
I tackled B&N first, with absolutely no luck. If there is a way to make my B&N links global, I can’t find it.
I moved on to Kobo, and what I found impressed the heck out of me. Not only is there a way to make Kobo links global, but that way is native to the Kobo’s own set-up. For the Amazon links, I have to rely on an outside provider. If that provider ever goes out of business, I’ll have redo all my links. But the Kobo links are likely to be good for as long as there is a Kobo.
Kobo has a user guide, which I’ll link to here.
And on page 36 of that user guide are instructions for creating global links. Page 36 says:
A big part of promoting your Kobo ebooks is making sure your readers can easily find them. If you give readers a direct link to your ebooks’ item pages, readers can easily access your Kobo ebooks from your website or blog. The creation of links to product pages is fairly simple. To direct readers to a particular ebook on Kobo, you drop your ebook’s ISBN into the following formula:
http://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=[eISBN-13]
I visited the Kobo web page for each of my books to get the eISBN-13 number assigned by Kobo and pasted it into the given formula. Easy peasy! Did I say I was impressed by Kobo?
Thus my link for Troll-magic became http://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=1230000222926.
My link for Sarvet’s Wanderyar became http://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=1230000118098. And so on.
Of course, I tidied up the links so that they look neater: Troll-magic and Sarvet’s Wanderyar. Or Kobo and Kobo.
So, readers who favor Kobo, my site is ready for you! 😀
