Entering Anew & Looking Forward
Wordless Wednesday (This is How My Christmas Went Down & IT Was Freakin’ Awesome!)
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The Long, long Night
The Winter solstice and the longest night has now past. The occasion brings to mind one of my favorite poems:
The Long, long Night
He would sculpt and I would write
to get us through this thing called life and
what seemed to be an aimless plight
The long, long night
I used pen and he used clay
to cope with all the pain filled days
which lived within our slow decay of
The long, long night
But in between the words and mud
we found the art of making love
and pacified the angst and blood of
The long, long night
Forsaken pages ripped and torn,
spattered earth across the floor,
graphite tales of love and war and
The long, long night
Come into my bed sweet angry lover,
your tender calloused hands beneath the cover.
Find the place where none has been,
beneath the ink and turning pin,
get us through yet once again
The long, long night
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Is it Enough to Just Show Up?
Is it Enough to Just Show Up?
We all need to do a little soul searching from time to time but you should do a little self-searching too.
Don’t just google yourself.
Sure Google is probably the most widely used search engine in the USA but it is not the only one.
Take a swing at Bing and Ask yourself; Yahoo you and waddle over to DuckDuckGo.
Hopefully you are showing up somewhere on the first page of each search provider.
I have to admit I was quite happy to see that Janna Hill (that’s me) was easily discoverable and was going to talk more about discoverability until the husband’s grumbling caught my attention. You see, he was helping by browsing “images”.
So the focus veered off track.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Hmm.” He said as he shook his head, “Um-um-um. This is not good.”
I spun around and nearly broke my neck, tripped over a chair getting up and I’m sure I had an arrhythmia too.
“You took those ridiculous pictures!” I griped as I hobbled closer. “And now you’ve made me break my foot!”
Sometimes I think the husband is trying to rain on my parade and wreck my crazy train.
“Oh, it’ll be okay.” He grinned at the feet he has no sympathy for before he assumed a more serious tone, “Have you ever heard of Dogpile?”
“Nope — never heard of`em.” I truly wanted to reply with a festering, “Yes. I stepped in something like that when I married you” but I didn’t because: A. that is not true, and B. I noticed some of the images were… well they weren’t bad but…
Example: this post from 2015, Winter Makes Me CRaZy also makes me look crazy. It (and a few other things we found in searching Janna Hill) left me pondering…
I had to ask myself, “Self, is it enough to just show up on the first page of these search engines? Should you reconsider the books/material you have published as well as the images that pop up on page 1? Maybe clean up your act?”
And then I answered myself as honestly as I could, “Self – suck it up. Heck yeah it’s enough! It’s not an arrest record or nude photos so go with it.”
Whoo-whoo all aboard! Even the husband concurred.
After all, I am just living out loud and flinging cake against the wall.
- This should not be construed as advice to be reckless with your career or your future but to hopefully find you are present in your career and future.
- Photos compliments of Pixabay.com
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From Me to You -Take any one you choose – You’re Welcome (Wordless Wednesday)
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Winter in Texas
In the dark of the moon with the Winter Solstice only days away…
The first frost arrived this week.
Spit forth from the infinite stars like a sneeze leaving sprinkles of sugary ice on the landscape.
The remaining blades and leafs gave way and withered at daybreak leaving nothing but the scattered evergreens to give us hope… no blooms worthy of expectancy.
However there is hardly anything more beautiful than a berry laden Juniper dotted with Cardinals; the Christmas tree with all of her ornaments pales in comparison.
Oh Christmas, we have that to look forward to – with the Santa Claus fable, the forgotten Jesus and colorful lights draped over bare limbs and the cherished red-nosed reindeer standing pretentiously on brown turf.
And New Year’s Eve – ah, the kissing; corks and fireworks detonate in unison to commemorate the failed promises yet to come. Eagerly we gorge on black-eyed peas and cabbage not earnestly expecting anything more than flatulence.
❤ Let us not forget Valentine’s Day – the heart shaped occasion when romance blossoms, proven with sentimental cards and candy and flowers; V-day — a cruel day for a lonely or broken heart; dinner date and obligatory sex.
Gaudy clumps of snow — bulky and shaped as if they had been intended for hail tumble down like chopped feathers. Alas, a reason to utilize the fireplace and marvel at the pansies.
Next week’s forecast is warm and dry. We will take it, we have no choice.
We will ride the weather-coaster, counting the birthdays of dead leaders and full moons and scattered days of sunny and seventy-five while we wait for the ides of March to come marching in.
From Getting Me Back (The Voices Within)
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I Was Just Thinking … Quotes & Covers & Useless Experiments
I love this quote:
“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
And while thinking (or living out loud and flinging cake against the wall) it occurred to me:
J.R.R. Tolkien’s quote from The Hobbit may have inspired GREED, a trio of short stories. Though these stories are another genre and tremble in the shadows of Tolkien’s [other] worldly genius, it is the bent finger of that beautiful quote that lured me to my conclusion.
About GREED:
What does A Face in the Falls, August Wolf and The Sharecropper’s Son have in common?
These stories reveal the perplexities, the strengths and the weakness of people that are true to life and, like life; these stories expose the innate greed present in mankind.
“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
We have changed the book cover at all stores except Amazon. Call it a lopsided useless experiment. 😉
The Amazon cover
B&N, iBook’s, Kobo (and all other stores) cover
A Face in the Falls was first published in Unshod, An Anthology of Traditional and Contemporary Western Short Stories by AIW Press,LLC
Psst. If you haven’t read The Hobbit or want to re-read it again there is a special 75th anniversary audio/video edition for for $9.99. MeRrY ChristMas to you, huh. 😀
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Thoughts on Writing (The Requirements of an Author)
Am I still so harsh? It appears so.
Excerpt from Getting Me Back
Thoughts on Writing (The Requirements of an Author)
Desire: A congenital need to tell the story.
Determination: It is not enough to walk a couple of blocks or run five miles on a treadmill, come prepared to hike the Himalayas and explore the abyss.
An exoskeleton: A thick skin will not suffice — no indeed. Colleagues and critics are apt in the sadistic art of shaving and burning the thickest of flesh; their tireless wheel of pumice leaving the toughest callouses raw and bleeding. They will thin your skin; get beneath it and prove your vulnerabilities. Like a flesh eating bacteria they will consume you — kill you if you let them.
A poker face: Never let them see you sweat.
Gratitude: Because no one owes you anything!
Grace: For the rise and the inevitable fall.
Pills and booze and smoke: Because it is a hard and hateful world and you are not a god-damned ant.
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The Real Janna Hill in 