In Which The Author Experiences A Few Unexpected Complications

My target date to get the web site and serial up and running has been pushed out to July due to unforseen changes in circumstance between now and my last blog post.

Most recently, The Hive experienced a reorganization. Our cell leader was eliminated, and The Reanimator took her place. The Reanimator has worked with me in the past and he does not let me die every three months (for which I am incredibly grateful).

However, after surviving the initial blow, a second strike against our cell took out the two permanent senior drones on our team. That left myself, another full time contracted drone, and a part-time drone who does not engage the public. Despite the lack of drones, the same commitments must be executed. As such, the other full time contracted drone and I have taken on additional work until our cell procures more resources for continued expansion.

Coupled with an unexpected but necessary surgery, process has been slower going that I had hoped. Neither of these factors have stopped me from putting in effort on web site and content creation, however. Though I'm moving more slowly than I would like, I am still steadily working on getting the website and first serial installment ready for publication.

Lastly, it helps if one clicks on the "publish post" button instead of the "save now" button. (This post was originally created on June 2, 2010. Finally I discovered that it was saved in draft format instead of published, rather than whisked away by aliens for experimentation. Imagine my relief.)

Hold, Please.

For those of you who are planning to get married and have an actual event to commemorate the joyful occasion, here's my advice:

Hire a wedding coordinator.

If you have ever been described, even in passing, as "control freak" or "Type A" (like me), just be aware that doing it yourself will take a lot of effort and energy. It can be incredibly rewarding to have your hands wrist-deep in the process of making such a memorable event come together. It can also cut into your reserves of time and capacity to deal with anything other than your daily responsibilities and staring at the wall blankly while quietly drooling on yourself.

For me, that means that I'm on blogging hiatus until after the honeymoon in May.

Please stay tuned. I'll have some stories for you after I become The Mrs.

The Artistic Process

I find that a few things help me to feel more creative and productive when it comes to writing. Diet and exercise are important not just for general physical health, but for my creative health as well. My physical and mental states are very intimately connected (as above, so below) and keeping myself in some semblance of working order proves crucial for the creative faculties.

There's also a certain room in my home where good ideas consistently come into being. No, this is not my office. I'm talking about the bathroom. More specifically, I am discussing the shower. For a while I found myself on a quest for those bathtub soap crayons used to scrawl on shower walls without damaging the paint and which can be scrubbed off easily. Do you know what I discovered? Both local toy stores and craft stores carry rows and rows of various crayola crayons, but not one of them carried these bath tub crayons. Ordering them off of the Internet seemed gratuitous at the time, so I made do without them. Now I just streak out of the shower to scrawl things onto my office whiteboard or get them out directly into my computer. *

This is precisely what I did this evening, incidentally, as the missing pieces for a short story idea fell into place while in the sacred water temple that is my bathroom. Now I have a skeleton for the short story and I just need to sit down and knock out that first draft, which I intend to do this week. Then it will be editing for the short story and the prologue for the website serial.

*I am thinking of putting whiteboard markers by the bathroom mirror so I can negate the running-across-the-hall urgency on my mission to record ideas or bits of inspiration.

Ghost Stories

A couple of weeks ago, I died. At least according to the system at The Hive, I'd been terminated.

The system kills me periodically. It's a glitch with my account and something having to do with contractor status. At least twice a year I cease to exist, murdered by a sociopathic electronic system determined to maintain security and efficiency at the cost of a human being or two.

Unfortunately when this happens, I still need to work. Getting around The Hive can be challenging as a ghost. I either need to slip in and out of closing doors right behind living worker bees or con somebody into allowing me to borrow their proof of life (in this case, a badge) for five or ten minutes to get around.

It usually takes about a week for the system to reanimate me. Part of this is due to bureaucracy, part is due to outsourced IT staff, and part of it is just due to having to prove to faceless administrators that I am in fact neither dead or fired. This is difficult to do when one can't send email from their Hive account, or access new passwords because the passwords are sent to an email that can not be accessed due to one's presumed terminated state.

Luckily, the reanimation process only took about three days this time and I have been restored to a state of approved life by the guardians of The Hive system.

For the record? Being a ghost sucks.

Poltergeists In The Machines

Have you ever had a nice day off and then wished super hard that you didn't have to work the next day? That was me on Wednesday. Still, like a responsible little worker bee I came into the hive on Thursday morning ready to work.

It should have been a day like any other, only it wasn't. For lo! At 8:26 am, just about when I was leaving for work, the building experienced a power outage. In fact, all of the power was knocked out of my building, and only my building, out of the whole campus. After two hours on site, touching bases with my coworkers and coordinating for our guest arrival today, my boss sent me home for the day. Even better, it was just the kind of day on which I best like not working: sunny and clear.

"Freeeedom!" I cried once securely locked in my car.

So what did I do with my found time? Lunch with my fiance, and then a little shopping trip to pick up a curtain rod for my lovely sari curtains that need to go up in my home "office". After that I indulged in an afternoon nap on the office divan, and once I'd stretched and shaken off the nap grogginess, I set about working on the prologue to the serial fiction (which should be ready to post sometime in May). After that, I jaunted over to our baker for a cake tasting and then indulged in a delightful sushi dinner with my sweetie.

So what happened to the office building power? Apparently the circuit breaker blew or some such, and the engineers were able to have it all up and running in time for us to resume normal activity. So here I am, with a healthy respect for the system poltergeists who so obligingly provided me with a gorgeous day off.

Of The End Of The World

One of my high school teachers once said, "I don't know what it is about me. I'm a freak magnet. I can sit on an empty bus, and immediately a strange person will get on and sit next to me." Similarly, I'm a mystic magnet.

I can be rooting around in the office supply cabinet when a coworker will chat me up about her guardian angel visiting her in a dream, or tap-tapping away on my keyboard when one of the facilities guys will (seemingly randomly) begin to discuss with me the impending apocalypse in 2012 CE. I'm not complaining in the slightest about this occult water cooler gossip, but sometimes I do wonder if this sort of thing happens in other offices on a regular basis.

It's not just the office that I encounter this phenomenon, though. For example, this weekend my fiance and I visited my family jeweler to have a ring sized properly. While we were there, the jeweler began talking about his earthquake sixth sense, the unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach that takes over when the earthquakes seem to be ready to rumble. The 2012 end-of-the-world topic also came up (completely independently), but he had a different take on it than Ryan the Facilities Guy.

In fact, Frank the Psychic Jeweler thinks that when the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 CE, good things are in store for the world. He discussed with us how the Mayan calendar is divided into ages, and how when it ends the cycle begins again. The world just doesn't end. According to Frank, the first era is the best era of the set, and the ending era is the period of unrest and transition leading up to that golden time.

"Well that's a relief!" I exclaimed. "We're only a couple of years away from a renaissance."

Moses and the Starbucks Sea

Like many people, I have a morning ritual. The highlight of this ritual is the pilgrimage to the java temple, otherwise known to me as Starbucks. Sure, I could brew my morning tea at home for a fraction of the cost but I appreciate having a small, achievable goal to start my day off. "If I get out of bed today, I get to go to Starbucks. And after that, I get to go to work." Do you see how the prospect of work becomes appealing with the intermediary step?

So there I stood in line yesterday morning, still sleepy-eyed and slightly groggy. I never acclimate well to early morning starts, and this morning was a particularly early one.

The customer at the counter paid for her beverage, turned, and regarded those of us crammed into the available standing space of the small caffeine chapel.

I stepped to the left just as the woman in front of me stepped to the right. Lo! The sea of pilgrims parted before her like the sea in front of Moses.

The moment struck me as a mundane mystery. After all, how often does one get to be the parted sea, both separate and confluent all at the same time?

Open Letter From The White Witch to Facebook Executives

To Whom It May Concern (and it does concern you, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger):

When I first stepped from The Wood Between Worlds into Narnia (hereafter referred to as Oregon State), my breath caught in my long, pale throat. I had never seen such a brilliant lapis blue sky or the rich, lush foliage of evergreen foresting lands. To me, this gorgeous place was a lily and as an artist I immediately set about to gilding the place with snow and ice. Of course, being the Queen of Oregon State would make such a task feasible, so first I had to set about conquering this foreign land.

Since ascending to the throne, I've received an influx of visitors from the lands of Google and Microsoft. Through some savvy negotiations and diplomacy, we reached an agreement allowing those visitors to set up data centers here in Oregon State to help their businesses run more efficiently. In return, those two companies have agreed to power their centers on clean energy and pay me for the use of the hydroelectric power used to run their centers.

Recently, we have also received visitors from from the land of Facebook. I have welcomed the opportunity to host a data center for them, which I think is a fantastic idea. Hosting the data center will give some of those pesky talking animals jobs so that they can do something other than plot insurrection against me. However, I have learned through my spies that you intend to power your center by burning coal.

As you may be aware, in order to produce coal the land must be strip mined or tops of mountains removed to get at it. In addition, burning the coal will release billowing clouds full of particulate matter into the atmosphere.

There is a prophecy that after my rein, two Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve will sit on the thrones of Cair Paravel and rule Oregon State as sovereigns. I will do my best to prevent that, but should they win that ultimate battle, I do not want them saying that they have inherited a burned-out lackluster shell of a land. They can slander my name, but I will never let it be said that I destroyed the land with unfriendly environmentalist practices. Furthermore, with all of the slatey-smoke covering the land, I'll have to change my moniker to "The Grey Witch". How ridiculous does that sound? It doesn't have nearly the ring that "White Witch" has, and people will think that I am attempting to imitate that silly old man in Middle Earth.

I urge you, Facebook, to reconsider the powering of your data center by burning coal and instead follow the examples of the lands of Google and Microsoft by employing hydroelectric means. I have signed the petition at Change.Org. I have also sent an email addressed to you at info@facebook.com since your email addresses are not easily publicly available.

Sincerely,

Her Imperial Majesty Jadis, Queen of Oregon State, Chatelaine of Cair Paravel, Empress of the Lone Islands

Sanctum

If I had known about the field of environmental psychology back in high school, my whole life may have turned out very differently. The book House Thinking by Winifred Gallagher introduced me to the idea of environmental psychology, a discipline which focuses on the relationship between humans and our surroundings. House Thinking addresses an inherent area of fascination for me: space. Not "space- the final frontier", but space as an important representation of the human psyche and as part of the human experience.

Space has always been important to me. From a few moments alone, locked in the bathroom to gain some respite from a parental confrontation, to carving out some personal space in a shared apartment, the proverbial "room of one's own" has always provided me with a feeling of comfort and creativity.

Recently I faced a space-related challenge. With my work space placed in the shared "game space", writing creatively (or doing anything productive at all, really) proved challenging. All space in the apartment was shared space, and I need to emulate the archetypal Hermit in order to really dig down and pull out something that I can transmute into compelling story.

After some contemplation and discussion with my fiance, we moved my desk into a spacious corner of the bedroom. Suddenly, the space began to transform, and with it my own feelings. The addition of a matching cabinet provided and extra arm to the desk, making the desk into an "L" shape, and on this arm I set up my muse shrine.

The muse shrine contains a nymph statue that belonged to my grandmother, a ceramic bowl made my best friend in Oregon, an etched carafe that belonged to my mother, and various other bits and bobs that have struck my fancy over the years. It also hosts a few statuettes of powerful ladies of myth and faith-- Bast, Kwan Yin, and Kali.

The current configuration sends a powerful and uplifting message to me. It tells me that my work space and my sacred space are not separate. It reaffirms that my work is important (to me) and creative, spiritual and whimsical at the same time. (One can see the whimsy in the little silver plaque reading "Follow your dreams" which hangs from the desk lamp next to my computer.)

Most importantly, it establishes a personal sanctuary to which I can retreat for introspection and the creative process. Though the space is shared, my fiance rarely spends time outside of sleep in the bedroom, so it's a wonderful compromise. What did he get out of it? He got an office of his own with a delightful reading nook. As he said to me this morning, "There are worse things than sharing my office with cats and books."

My fiance is pretty wise, don't you think?