Blogiversary: 14 years blogging and I’m still here

arizona tate university 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle
Fourtheen years later, we still do jigsaw puzzles every year over the holidays! Although there was a bit of a SNAFU this time when my parents’ cat stole one of the puzzle pieces…

So I actually missed noting this by a few days, but I posted my very first blog post 14 years and four days ago.

The topic, btw, was jigsaw puzzles and how much I love my family. “Working a jigsaw puzzle,” I wrote,

is a way for a few people you care about to gather around a table and share something, which isn’t the puzzle but your time. You’re facing each other — unlike when, for instance, people watch television together. You talk about whatever comes up, serious topics or lite topics or just how you’re certain that the particular piece you’re looking for is surely lost. You laugh, a lot. And if you pay attention, you realize how much you love each other and how comfortable you are together.

Coincidentally, I was back east over the holidays and yep. And we did a jigsaw puzzle :)

Meanwhile, however, over the last several weeks, I’ve been doing something else.

Tackling a long-overdue job: website cleanup

I’ve written nearly 1200 posts over the years (!).

And in all that time, I’d never gone back over them to do things like remove broken links or clean up taxonomies.

I had good reason to procrastinate: it was a lot of work. Dozens and dozens of hours’ worth of work.

But as of today, I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve paired the published posts down to around 750 and fixed links. I re-categorized some posts and cross-linked them where needed to better capture updates on specific topics.

The exercise also served as a major explore of the ol’ memory-lane.

That time period — the mid 2000s — was a the golden age of blogging…

I can still remember how incredible it felt to be able to write about anything I wanted to write about, and publish it, without having to navigate any gatekeeper or satisfy anyone but myself. It was so, incredibly freeing. I’d been working as a contract writer for years, I’d co-written Outwitting Dogs, I was working on a novel that I hoped to sell to a publisher. Now, all of a sudden, I could just write.

All of a sudden, I could hit a button and be out there for anyone to read.

I discovered WordPress. I taught myself a little php coding so I could modify its default Kubrick theme (remember Kubrick? Oh, that blue… oh, how thrilled I was when I made my site turn green!)

Comment spamming became a thing. I told them to go away and wrote an ode. I discovered Akismet — phew :)

It’s impossible to understate how life-changing it felt to be able to blog.

And I wasn’t alone. I was part of a blossoming online community of people who appreciated what I published, who would link to me, comment on my blog — and of course I did the same for them. (The right-left divide was there, btw, but it didn’t feel as dire and insurmountable. It wasn’t vicious. We were still trying to understand each other.)

Many of us coalesced around our respective communities. I wrote a lot about Rochester, New York, where I lived at the time, and exchanged links and information with a dozen or so other Rochester-area bloggers, many of whom are gone, now. Mr. Snitch. Zinnian Democracy. For some topics of local interest, like Rochester’s proposed Renaissance Square, my blog could arguably be considered an important contemporaneous record.

Many of the sources I quoted about that project are no longer available online.

And then there were the other aspiring fiction authors.

We linked each others’ posts. We shared ideas and advice and writer resources. This started a year before Amazon launched the Kindle, before the indie author became a thing. One of our favorite subjects was literary agents: how to query them, what they liked, what they hated, which ones to avoid. (Remember Miss Snark?) (Her stuff is all still online btw.)

And then came 2007 and Kindle Direct Publishing — another moment I will never forget. Because, when you think about it, indie authors were to books what bloggers were to online journalism / opinion essays. There was that same sense of loosening and freedom and “now I can write what I want and put it out there and who knows? Someone might actually read it and like it.”

Writers who had focused on courting literary agents suddenly rushed to self-publish their books on Amazon…

I was one of them. I self-pubbed my first novel, ran a giveaway, and watched it climb to the #11 spot on Amazon’s Free Kindle Ebooks store.

Heady times…

Word had been spreading in the lit-o-sphere about National Novel Writing Month and I participated a couple of times (before deciding, ultimately, that the format doesn’t work for me).

And naturally, scammers began to emerge to prey on authors who dreamed of writing fiction for a living…

And Then Came Facebook

Oh, what a temptation it was! So much easier than running your own site, courting readers, vying for eyeballs. You could write a face book post and suddenly everyone you knew would read it and comment.

I fell for it. I essentially abandoned my own blog. Instead of publishing hundreds of posts per year, I’d do maybe a dozen.

Well, you know the quote, right? “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” It’s a concept that has been around for a very long time. And yet, strangely enough, we don’t seem to have fully wakened to the implications.

Products are things. Ergo:

If we let ourselves be turned into products, we can expect to be treated like products — that is, like things.

So why are we surprised to learn that Facebook would sell us out? Why shouldn’t it? We aren’t “people” to Facebook.

By definition — as soon as we agree to the Facebook TOS and start uploading “content” — which includes not only our words, our personal diaries (!), our insights and links and information-sharing but also all that “data” about ourselves, our likes dislikes comings going relationships, which in aggregate is essentially our selves in a very important sense — our virtual avatars — as soon as we enter that transaction, we agree to be treated like objects. Commoditized. Bought and sold.

It’s little wonder that there’s been a backlash against the platform. We’re slowly beginning to grasp what “a Facebook” is and how “a Facebook” is going to treat us.

(It’s no coincidence, either, that as a platform Facebook feeds political divisiveness and vitriol. We don’t treat each other like people on Facebook, either.)

Of course, when you’re a writer, there’s another nuance to this as well.

Writers create content. Content has value. Why should we give it to Facebook?

Of course, writers give our content away all the time. I do it. I run Amazon giveaways. My novel The French Emerald is available to read for free here and on Wattpad (where it recently broke 16K reads!)

But the difference is that in these instances, I am interacting with you, my reader, directly.

So when you find my blog and read a post, our shared experience belongs to you and I. It’s direct. It’s not beingi mediated by a third party.

I have the kind of control that a content-creator should have. If I want to pull The French Emerald off my site, off Wattpad, format it, and sell it instead, I could do that. It wouldn’t be a violation of anybody’s terms of service. It’s crystal clear that I own the copyright to those words and can do whatever I want with them.

I’m still on Facebook. I have a page for promoting my novels. I go on the platform from time to time to catch up with friends and family. But I no longer invest time in posting content.

Instead, I’ve recommitted to my home: this blog. I didn’t publish a single piece here in 2016 or 2017, and only did a handful in 2018. But in the last month of 2019 alone, I put up around 8 posts.

Will anyone see them? Who knows? I lost a lot of traction when I abandoned this site for Facebook four+ years ago.

But I’m good with that. In a way, it’s like it was back in the beginning, in 2006, when I first hit “publish” and put a little piece about doing jigsaw puzzles out there for the world to see. I don’t care if “I’m read.” I’m a writer. I write. That’s what matters.

Happy New Year to anyone who finds this.

And thank you, thank you, thank you for reading.

Fixing broken (book) backs

worlds best fairy tales readers digest
It broke. But I’m fixing it :)

Okay, so I don’t often do product endorsements on this blog.

But I love books.

I own old books.

Old books break.

Like this book. It’s The World’s Best Fairy Tales, a Reader’s Digest book my grandparents gave me in 1968. And OMG how I loved this book! I must have read every story in it a million times. (I also used to make Grandma read to me out of it — makes me laugh now thinking of it — I wonder if she ever regretted gifting it, maybe? A teensy bit? Because of course I used to request the longest story in the book, Sinbad the Sailor. I think it’s 50 or 75 pages :D)

adhesive for fixing broken books
PH Neutral PVA. I’ve used it to fix broken books a bunch of times, now, and it works like a charm!

Anyway, today I pulled the book out and GAH.

The original glue had become completely dry and brittle. I no sooner touched the thing and chunks of pages started to fall out.

Fortunately, I have a fix. This stuff –>

Its an adhesive that is flexible when it dries. So when you open the book the spine can flex like it’s supposed to.

How to fix a broken book in 6 easy steps

fixing a broken book oh noes the glue dried up and the pages are falling out
I love old books, but when the glue dries, this happens :(

Step 1, open the book to the spot where the pages are starting to fall out.

I try to be super careful while I’m doing this so that I don’t break the book even more. Because the last thing I want to have to do is glue the pages back in one at a time =o

But usually what happens is what you see here: chunks of pages falling out …

fixing a broken book run a bead of the adhesive down the inside of the spine
Run a little bead of PH Neutral PVA down the inside of the spine. Not too much! Let’s not get sloppy here…

Step 2: Run a little bead of the adhesive down the inside of the spine.

I try to be careful here, too. I figure, too much adhesive and it might leak into the pages.

The trick is to move the tip of the bottle kind of swiftly and smoothly so that the bed is thin and light.

First time? Practice first! Lay a bead down on a piece of paper, before you start on the book, so that you get a feel for how fast you should go to keep the line of adhesive thin & light.

fixing a broken book press the pages into place
After you’ve laid down the adhesive, push the pages back into place, flush against the inside of the spine.

Step 3: Press the pages back into place.

So far, every time I’ve done this, I’ve been dealing with chunks of pages. So it’s kind of easy to just press and tap the pages as a chunk.

fixing a broken book make sure the pages are pressed flush against the spine
Make sure the pages you’re gluing are flush against the inside of the spine.

Step 4: Check to make sure the pages are nice and flush. You want to make sure that the adhesive is adhering to both the spine and the pages :)

fixing a broken book keep the pages pressed against the spine until the adhesive dries one option
One option is to prop the book on its back, like this, until the adhesive dries.

Step 5: Rig something to keep the pages flush against the spine while the adhesive dries.

For some of the books I’ve fixed this way, I’ve just set the book on a table, spine down (propped by other books to keep it from tipping over while the adhesive dries). When I fixed my old Roget’s Thesaurus, that’s what I did. The weight of the book was enough to keep the pages pressed against the spin until the glue was dry.

fixing a broken book keep the pages pressed against the spine until the adhesive dries
Yes, the ruler is probably about as old as the book … also remember when people didn’t need to use area codes because why would you ever want to call someone out of town, plus long distance was expensive?

But for my Fairy Tale book, I got a little creative. It’s a thick book — 2 and 1/2 inches! — so the spine tends to curve inward slightly.

So I used a rubber band to strap a wooden ruler against the spine.

fixing a broken book keep the pages pressed against the spine until the adhesive dries2
The ruler just happened to be the right shape for the job :)

It just happened that one side of my ruler is kind of convex, so it worked perfectly. It snugged right up against the spine.

Step 6. Wait for a day or so until the adhesive dries. And that’s it!

Would I try this on a valuable book? Probably not. I’d probably take that sort of book to a professional to be restored. (And yeah, I see that in some cases people are asking for a lot of money for World’s Best Fairy Tales. But you can also find copies for cheap. So yes, I recommend you pick up a copy if you’re a fan, but maybe don’t spend $80 for it.)

But for old books that I just want to be able to handle again, this stuff is fabulous. I’ve fixed the dictionary I’ve had since I was a kid, I’ve fixed this old Roget’s thesaurus that I absolutely adore (sooo much better than online thesauruses. Really.)

And now I’m fixing my beloved Fairy Tale collection :)

Have you ever tried to glue a broken book?

Did it work?

Did you use PVA?

Drop me a note or leave a comment!

P.S. this post includes affiliate links. If you click and buy I get a few pennies — no extra cost to you. But I promise you, you will be soooo glad you have a bottle of this stuff on hand. Thank you!

An idea so crazy it just might work …

The croissant diet.

butter croissant diet brad marshall fire in a bottle
I will love you and squeeze you and call you George.

No. Really!

So there’s this guy Brad Marshall … (who I believe lives in Upstate or Central New York) (already a huge plus in his favor, of course).

He’s a science guy and a foodie guy. From his bio: genetics degree from Cornell University. Culinary Certificate from The French Culinary Institute.

He got interested in how our mitochondria handle fats.

You can read all about this here on his website, Fire in a Bottle.

Here’s my probably scientifically sloppy if not outright erroneous short version: the type of fats we eat affect signaling by the mitochondria in our cells. Eat saturated fats (butter!) and the signal says “burn fat.” Eat polyunsaturated fats (vegetable oil :p) and the readout says “store fat.”

Seriously, go to this guy’s site and read. I started here, Introduction to the Croissant Diet.

(Subtitle: OR: How I eliminated my spare tire by eating croissants using the six scariest words in the english language: saturated fat, insulin resistance and free radicals. lol)

Warning: when you click you will find yourself surrounded by a ton of science and chemistry. Not being a scientist, I had to read everything 2-3x before it started to fully come alive in my brain.

But wow, it makes so much sense.

And now I have a holiday project. Taking a break from the olive and avocado oil. Hello butter and MCT oil.

Not gonna change anything else. Not going to worry about the carbs.

Full disclosure. If you ran into me in the street & looked me up & down, you’d never think “overweight.” But I have had a tendency my whole life to put on weight, esp belly fat. Keto and intermittent fasting keeps it under control. But I’m always looking for new hacks …

Plus this is going to fun. And delicious.

Who’s with me? :D

Update: 20 months later and I’m a believer.

My short stories & novellas just went on sale … 99 cents!

‘Tis the season!

I just lowered the prices on all of my novellas and short stories. Ebook versions on Amazon.

Here’s the titles you can now get for the low, low price of only 99 cents :D

wynter tale by Kirsten Mortensen

So this is a story that wrote itself. I started with the premise that “the real Santa” might be a kind of pagan god. Then I asked myself: what would happen if this “real” Santa turned out to be rather deliciously sexy?

But before you get the wrong idea, as one reader pointed out, Wynter Tale is more about friendship than romance. As I said, wrote itself. Also worth noting: I originally published this under the title Santa Hunk. Changed the title later to more accurately reflect the story.

Free Money, heist novella by Kirsten Mortensen

Free Money is a novella I wrote as a tribute to Elmore Leonard. It was fun to write, in part, because it weaves in a real-life crime story (and mystery) from 1980s new York. And the climax is set in a rather creepy spot in Mendon Ponds Park south of Rochester, New York. I published some pictures of the location here.

BJs on the Roof by Kirsten Mortensen

Okay, believe it or not, once upon a time — so I heard — someone really did run a prostitution ring on the roof of a building in Rochester, New York.

That said, any resemblance the characters in BJs on the Roof bear to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. OTOH readers say the story makes them laugh — which was my goal!

Ribbon by Kirsten Mortensen

Ribbon is my retelling of the horror story, The Girl with the Black Velvet Ribbon.

Costume by Kirsten Mortensen

Costume is another scary story. I wrote it originally for a Halloween-themed flash fiction event.

The Vette by Kirsten Mortensen

The ‘Vette is more literary fiction. It’s loosely based on experiences I had when I was a teenager in Upstate New York.

Alpha by Kirsten Mortensen

Alpha is another story that I’d call more literary fiction. Male protag again :). The tagline: Boy met Girl a long time ago. Maybe it’s time to admit that he’s her match.

Fourteen Stores of True Love by Kirsten Mortensen number 6 Quitter

I also have a whole series of sweet love stories, like this one, Quitter. The intent was to do 14 (for Valentine’s Day, get it? hahahahaha) but I only got to 7. Maybe this year I’ll get the rest done!

Click here to visit my Amazon author page!



Setting a novel in perpetual summer, plus a Katydid

My current novels / novel project are, as I mentioned a couple posts ago, set in Upstate New York. It’s a fictional town called Tibbs. But, you know. Tibbs is my hometown :)

I’m still debating one element, however: time of year. Originally, I planned to set all three novels in the summertime. I like the idea of compressing Marion Flarey’s adventures into a relatively short time period. You want to subject your protag to nerve-wracking problems. Having them hit her quickly, one after another, helps to keep the pressure high.

dog in snow
Winter in the Northeast. Black and white and cold all over.

But another reason for keeping everything in the summer is that in Upstate New York, summer is the time when “nature,” in its biological form, is most intrusive and in-your-face. In the winter, nature makes herself known as well, but in terms that are tactile and visual. You feel her cold. Your visual field is smacked continually by that striking palette of blacks and whites and grays.

Summertime is different. Summertime is heat and mud and sweat and bugs and plants. You go outside and living things touch you, crawl on you. And the creatures are all having babies. Laying eggs and spinning cocoons and building nests and feeding fledglings.

It feels like that’s the world where I want my Marion Flarey to live. Green and tangled and damp. A perpetual summer, in fact …

We’ll see. There is still time for me to change my mind :)

In the meantime:

Two critter stories from this summer in Upstate New York

Both from when I was back there visiting this summer.

First: my daughter and I went for a walk around dusk, and a deer crossed the road in front of us, followed by a fawn.

The fawn saw us.

It peered at us.

It started to walk toward us.

That’s not an unusual thing. They are curious, they haven’t learned to be afraid, yet. But it was a magical moment. We stood there, watching the fawn as it stepped closer and closer, trying to figure out what sort of creature we were.

maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid?  Scudderia furcata?
Green! Katydid — maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid? Scudderia furcata?

Then it suddenly felt fear and ran into the brush along the road, mewling for its mother.

On another walk, we found a katydid on the pavement.

I picked it up for a photo op, and moved it off the road.

I don’t know what kind it is — there are many different kinds — maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid?

If you can ID please do!

The Othering of Nature

As some of my friends and family members know, I am writing a novel again — actually a set of three novels.

They’re first-person books narrated by my new imaginary friend, Marion Flarey. Marion is a lover of fairy tales — more — she’s a student of fairy tales (or as she comes to think of them, “flarey tales”) (get it? hahahahaha) because she begins to realize that fairy tales are not old, dead children’s stories from the past but that they continue to intrude on her life today, giving her the tools she needs to navigate her often-confusing and very 21st Century life.

Marion Flarey
Marion Flarey–my new imaginary friend. As drawn by my sweet & talented daughter :)

I’ll be blogging more about Marion and these books. I’ll be introducing Marion to you online, as she is about to start writing herself and has begun preparing a place to publish what she writes :)

But I still have a lot to do, and even though these books are in many respects already mapped out, with many words already in place, in other respects I’m still at the stage where I am understanding what they are, what they are going to be.

And once again, I’m breaking rules.

On the surface, this project is chick-litty. Marion’s voice is light and winsome, and many of her adventures take place on the chick-litty surface of her life.

But I’m aware of a sleight of hand going on as I write; no matter how I approach my books, in the end I can’t but do what “they” say that is always the right thing for writers to do.

Write what you know.

And even if “they” didn’t say it, I doubt I could help myself. More times than I can count, I’ve tried to write books that stay on the surface of things. I’ve always failed. Writing, for me, is and cannot be a purely mechanical act. Writing is an act of opening a door, and through that door something emerges whether I want it to or not. The writing becomes a conversation with something that is picking me, no matter how I tell myself I’m picking it.

For example: Dark Chemistry started out, in my mind, with a premise that I thought was intended to do no more than entertain. It was a simple and familiar recipe: a woman would be deceived into falling in love with the wrong man. The premise had a twist (the deception was achieved using a type of drug) but when I started the book, there was nothing in my plans beyond the surface mechanics: how render this recipe in a way that would hold readers’ interest, deliver a romantic pay-off as the woman discovered the deceit and realized who she really really loved.

But then I started writing, and the more I wrote, the more the book became about something else. It became an exploration that deeply interests me about the interplay of biochemistry and “feelings.” When you fall in love, what is happening, really? You think it is your heart, your being. Your soul, leading you to something good, something fated. But how much of those subjective feelings are, in fact, the result of chemicals gurgling around in your cells, inducing sensations that you interpret subjectively and then act on, blithely, obliviously, even when your actions are very much against your best interests?

mayfly
Marion Flarey’s nickname (no coincidence)? Mayfly …

In the same way, in my current project, my sweet and bewildered Marion Flarey begins by thinking the story she’s telling is about love–romantic love.

But she’s slowly realizing that it is about other things, instead.

One of them being nature.

And so, as her channeler, I’ve been thinking about nature myself.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how separated we are from it. How tragic it is, this separation. And how the separation is spiritual, a split that opened in the human psyche and has now, I’m afraid, become a wall.

Without our realizing it.

Several weeks ago, I was in San Diego to have breakfast with a wonderful young lady, also a writer, who I’d worked with but had never met in person. We were sitting outside at a sidewalk cafe, when I noticed an insect.

I can’t be 100% certain what the insect was, but I suspect it was a figeater beetle, Cotinis mutabilis. (Coincidentally I photographed a couple dead ones in my neighborhood and shared the photo in one of my scarab bracelet posts.)

What I can tell you is that the beetle was large and heavy, and flew the way large, heavy beetles fly: ponderously. In the northeast, if you’ve ever seen one of our enormous June bugs, you’ll know what I mean. They’re noisy and slow and heavy-looking in the air.

And sometimes they seem like they are tired. That’s how this particular beetle seemed to me, that sunny morning on the sidewalk. It seemed like he had flown long enough, that he was tiring. His flight pattern had become a circling and a sinking. He was coming in to land.

He circled near another table maybe 20 feet away.

And he landed — big mistake — on a woman’s head.

The woman freaked out.

(Would you?)

Her hair was about the same length as mine, blond and fine, like mine. And beetles have sticky legs. Not sticky like glue, but sticky because of their legs have jaggedy, spiky edges and structures that tend to catch onto things with rough surfaces, like clothing and hair. Useful if you are a clumsy flier, I suppose. When you land you don’t want to bounce. You want to stick it.

I watched all this unfold from where we sat, a little ways away. First the beetle, flying, caught my eye. I watched it circling, heard the screams start, saw it hit the woman’s head. I saw her freak. She bent over, as if cowering, as if ducking her head out of the way although by then it was too late, the beetle was on her — ohdearGod ON her! — and her companions began to grasp what had happened and to shriek “it’s in your hair, it’s in your hair!”

I stood up and walked over toward their table.

My plan was to help. To cup the beetle in my hand, take it off her head, carry it to one of the trees or planters along the sidewalk, and put it down there.

The end of the story is that I never got a chance to do that. Somehow, she shook the beetle loose or maybe one of her companions was able to knock it out of her hair.

The beetle fell down on the sidewalk.

And one of the woman’s table mates stepped on it, smashing it with a grinding motion into the concrete.

Oh, how we hate bugs. How deeply and completely we hate bugs.

And how sorry I am that we do …

This … “sequence of events” … impressed itself on me. Poignantly. And I’ve thought about it many many times in the weeks since, always with a pluck of remorse at the end as I watched the woman’s shoe grind down — me too late. Too late.

It’s only a beetle.

Yet the ending of this story hangs there for me: that pluck of sorrow, and all because I wasn’t able to lift a beetle out of a woman’s hair and move it away.

As I work on my Marion Flarey books, I’ve been reading fairy tales. A lot of fairy tales.

One of the motifs that you encounter in many of these stories is the talking animal. Very often, what happens is that a talking animal begs a human (who is often a simpleton or fool — make of that what you will, hahahaha) for its life.

The human spares the animal. Then later, the human is himself in enormous danger, and the animal reappears and saves the human.

The human’s mercy, in other words, turns out to have been the hidden key that enables a later, magical event, one that helps the human succeed in a mortally dangerous quest.

The heroes or heroines of these stories are not modern city-dwellers. They live in the country — in the forest, often, or in a city bordered by forest. But the essence of the story intrudes into our lives today. For example: how about the news stories that crop up from time to time about how some dog that a person rescued later saved that person’s life? We love those stories, because they suggest that deeper connection with animals — with Nature — that we so crave. They are magical stories.

But we no longer think of them as magical.

We’ve created a new language to describe them — a language of “behavior” and “bonding.” Mixed in with a little chance.

But what if we’ve lost something? What if replacing “magic” for something that is purely materialistic is a huge mistake?

We interact with Nature, today, only in ways that we can tightly constrain: we demand Nature be controlled, antiseptic, abstract.

Take the way that we have turned certain animals — cats and dogs, primarily — into a sort of sub-category of human. We’ve done this partly through breeding, partly through projection. As articulated in this National Geographic article, as well as many other places:

Dogs can read facial expressions, communicate jealousy, display empathy, and even watch TV, studies have shown. They’ve picked up these people-like traits during their evolution from wolves to domesticated pets, which occurred between 11,000 and 16,000 years ago, experts say.

My dog is most definitely “more human” than the coyotes that lope past the fence in our back yard!

(By the way, I’ve read somewhere — if I can remember where I’ll update w/ a citation — that to the Iroquois, dogs occupied a kind of dubious, even conflicted space between humans and wild animals — because by helping humans with tasks like hunting, they betray their animal nature. They’ve sold out. Funny, isn’t it? Dogs’ loyalty, that we so much profess to admire, is the flip side or consequence of a kind of duplicity — a conspiracy they have entered into against their own kind. As dogs have become more human, they’ve taken on something of human sinfulness. Wild, eh? Pun intended.)

And of course we talk about our dogs and cats as if they were people. They are our fur-kids. Many 21st Century humans openly and freely prefer their company to that of other humans.

kirsten mortensen's dog tessa
Nature, so carefully bred to be oh, so cute.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But what I am saying is that it is part of the Othering of Nature.

For how many people, today, allow Nature into our lives in this form, only? Only after we’ve reshaped the Other, like Play-Doh pressed through a form, into something that more closely resembles us. And so it’s only this humanized version of Nature that we allow into our lives, cuddle on our couches, let sleep with us in our beds.

A beetle is another matter altogether. Pun, again, intended.

A beetle is Nature, unadulterated.

Let me pause for a moment, here. I want to be clear: I “get” the way beetles — bugs — insects — trigger horror and disgust. I’ve felt that reaction myself. Another, very vivid memory, this one from very long ago, when I was probably 9 or 10 years old. My best friend at the time happened to be a neighbor boy. And we got along very well, but in this particular instance he caught a daddy long legs and was inspired, devilishly, to chase me with it. He threatened to put it on me — and then, more horrible still — he threatened to drop it down my shirt and squish it. Awful! Awful!

ground beetle
away from me, thou alien thing

The squishability of bugs, I have considered many times in my life, accounts in part for that reaction we so often have to them. Because their squishability evokes at once their otherness (that glossy clickity exoskeleton that envelopes an unknowable goo) and their incredible vulnerability: the horrifying power we have over them, an absolute power of life and death that we can wield so cruelly and without so much as a thought. We step on the bug, grind it into the concrete. Snuff it out. And the act brings to us a sudden relief. In an instant, we have erased the the thing that triggered in us such visceral and instantaneous horror and disgust.

Aaaahhhh….

But such acts raise simultaneously a question. We seldom acknowledge the question, of course — because we prefer to leave it buried in the most hidden parts of our minds and souls — but it’s there, it has to be, it is part of the act. Because we aren’t separate from that bug we just squashed. Not really. It is us. We are it.

So in the hidden part of our mind we know that we, too, are squishable. That right there, under your rib cage, you are also full of an unknowable goo. And the hidden part of our mind knows, as well, that the power of life and death is a terrible power, one that we don’t really understand, one that is horrible to wield.

And we know that like the bug on the sidewalk, our lives can also be smushed away in a second.

And so comes that awful, secret question.

“How like that bug am I?”

How horrible is it that, no matter how much I’d like to hide it from myself, I am part of what is most horrible and disgusting about Nature — the part that is about muck and guts and decay and death?

Some of us try to extract ourselves by abstaining from meat. And just as I “get” how horrible bugs are, I also “get” veganism. I get that the flesh of the cow or the pig or the chicken is, in so many ways, too much like our own flesh. “I don’t eat anything with a face,” the vegan says. It’s a statement that makes sense. Faces remind us of something in animals that is also in us. They remind us that it’s not just humans that can feel. That perhaps an animal may beg us to spare its life, just as we would beg our own life to be spared, if we found ourselves pinned by the paws of a Beast, smelling its awful breath.

This comes, next, to an idea that is not original with me: that we lost something when we began to interact with our meat via plastic-wrapped productized muscle-meats (muscle being the least squishable bit of an animal’s body) instead of living as we did in the olden days, raising our animals on farms or hunting them in the woods, butchering them with out own hands. We don’t need, today, to see look into the face of the animal we eat. We eat a symmetrical substance trimmed of any icky fat, tendons, gristle, rinsed in antimicrobial dip to maximize its purity, placed on a piece of absorbent material to ensure there will be no icky dripping fluids, framed by a cheery rectangular tray. We don’t eat the squishy bits. We don’t eat the bits that remind us too much of our own innards, our brains, our fascia, our marrow.

But most of us stop there. We say: if you can look the animal in the face, and then eat it, that is somehow more honest than opening a package you bought at the supermarket.

I suppose that is true, as far as it goes. But there’s something else that we need to consider.

Today’s 21st Century Westernized consumer is more likely than any other generation before to have been schooled in what we sometimes call the web of life. That you can’t touch one part of Nature without affecting another part. And the implication of this, if you look at it carefully, is that we humans are enmeshed in it this web. That we are part of it.

And there’s no escaping that the web is constructed of prey and predator, of eat and be eaten.

Becoming a vegan seems like a way to extract yourself from this web. “I am not of that.” “I am above that.”

But this is false. It is also an Othering, albeit via a different mechanism — via an illusion. We trick ourselves into believing that we can turn Nature into an abstraction and then, entirely via intellect we can extract ourselves, define ourselves as Something Apart.

But we cannot. We’re still a part of it.

carrot
Time to munch on some nice fresh crunchy carrot legs.

Put another way — and I know this will sound facetious, but bear with me — in the end, how is killing a carrot more ethical than killing a cow?

We argue that there is a difference. Carrots don’t have central nervous systems. Carrots don’t have faces.

Carrots aren’t like us, therefore we don’t have to feel bad when we kill and eat them.

But in some respects, aren’t these arbitrary distinctions?

Life is life.

For me to live, something else must die.

Back in probably the early 1990s I saw an act by the comedian A. Whitney Brown, and his most memorable line from that circuit is now on the interwebs: “I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.”

It was side-splittingly funny because like all honest comedy it hit a truth that we know but try not to see, because secretly it makes us feel dreadfully uncomfortable. And in this case, the truth is that we have no choice but to kill things. And the lines we draw between what we will and will not kill are in many respects extraordinarily arbitrary.

We feel uncomfortable about eating meat, because we are ethical beings that feel empathy for the sad-eyed cow being led to the slaughterhouse.

But we will squash a spider simply because if found itself inside our home.

brown widow spider
squish it – it bites

The people in fairy tales who spare the lives of animals were not adverse to killing animals for food. They couldn’t afford to be. They had set out on long, lonely, physically grueling quests. The bread and jug of water they took when they started has long been depleted. So even in the stories where the heroes spare one animal, they often go on to kill and eat another.

They have to eat.

The difference is that one animal speaks.

Does that mean the one animal was more human than the other?

I think not.

I think that all animals speak. But it’s not human speech.

It’s got nothing to do with an animal becoming more human.

On the contrary. It has something to do with us, the humans, becoming something else — something other than what we usually are, in our ego-focused daily lives. It requires us to shift away from our habitual mode, this awareness that our egos claim is supreme but is more like a chip of wood bobbing along on the surface of a dark frothing current of reaction and counter-reaction and counter-counter-reaction. It requires that we find a mode that approaches a different kind of of awareness or understanding — one where our minds somehow reach out and meet Nature on Nature’s terms.

If you try this, and stay with it, show some patience with it, you can realize first-hand what I’m talking about.

Ask an animal a question and wait for an answer.

Not with your voice. Ask with your mind.

It can be any animal — it can be a pet or a wild animal you see outside your window or in the park or in the forest.

I remember the first time I saw a wood thrush. I heard it, often, in a stand of woods behind a house where I once lived. The song of a wood thrush is unmistakable, an ethereal piping. And so one day I walked into the woods where this wood thrush sang, and in my mind, I asked a question.

“May I see you?”

And a moment later, the bird answered. Not with words, but by materializing out of the thick leafiness of the forest and landing on a branch right above me, where it perched.

It peered down at me.

It was no more than five or six feet away. I could see the bird so clearly: the robin-like shape of its body, its soft breast buff with dark spots, and its eye, large, gentle, brown. Looking at me–looking into my eyes with its own.

Curiously.

And then it flew off.

Of course, you could call the entire thing a coincidence.

But I believe the bird felt my question and responded to it.

And I have replicated this experience multiple times. Not this exact experience — not with the wood thrush, not with the same question.

But with other questions. Or with internal motions, motions of the soul that aren’t even questions exactly, at least not questions that can be put into words, but more like questions about what is.

great horned owl

Who are you?

What are you?

The books I’m writing now, my Marion Flarey books, are once again set in my beloved Upstate New York. The rural bits where I grew up.

And as these books begin to take shape, I’m realizing how much I need to write about nature.

But not the nature you see on television, or learn about in a class on environmentalism, or even see when you go on a hike.

It’s a nature that is part of you–that is part of all of us.

And it’s dying. Quite possibly.

Which means that we are dying.

And many of us are aware of this, and are responding with fear and fury.

But we need a different sort of response, as well. One that is not political, because it’s ultimately not a political crisis, but a crisis of the soul.

There are bugs in your room, right now. They have blundered into your home.

They talk.

Do you hate them?

Why?

Scarab bracelet mystery … the “hieroglyphs”

What are the markings on the backs of scarab bracelet stones? Hieroglyphs? Kanji? Or nonesense?

Drawings of the markings on the backs of my scarab bracelet cabochons. They’re supposed to be hieroglyphs, but I’m not so sure …

One of the things I mentioned in my first post about scarab bracelets is that on many of the bracelets in my collection — which are typical examples of 20th century pop culture bracelets — the underside of the cabochons are marked. What I’d heard (chatting to antique store proprietors mostly, but you also see it online) is that the marks are “hieroglyphs.”

The stones are intended to function as charms; the inscriptions confer luck or blessings on the wearer.

Cotinis mutabilis figeater beetle

There are 30,000 species of Scarab beetles worldwide. I came across these (deceased… RIP pretty green beetles!) Fig Eater beetles a few weeks ago on the sidewalk by my house.

There’s some merit to the idea. The scarab itself is symbolic of pretty powerful stuff, although it’s not quite as straightforward as “it’s the good luck beetle.” Per this paper published by UCLA,

The scarab was used by the ancient Egyptians as a symbol of the rising sun being pushed across the sky (just as the beetle pushes balls of dung across the sand), exemplifying the notion that the sun god can create his own means of rebirth.

Bit of a leap from a symbol of the god Khepri/divine self-regeneration to “hope you win the lotto/get laid/avoid catching the flu this winter.” But the general idea is there: Wear scarab! Can’t hurt. Might help?

So what about the inscriptions?

“Genuine” scarab amulets — meaning museum quality / ancient Egyptian — had inscriptions carved on the back. There are some images in that UCLA paper of some of them, with translations. One inscription commemorates the building of a lake. Others are names. Here’s an edited version of a translation of an inscription that conferred a blessing; the inscription is the

… throne name of Thutmose III … [and] “the good god Menkheperra,” and below this an anx sign, meaning “may he live.” Menkheperra can also be read cryptographically as the name Amen-ra (sun disk).

“May he live” is a solid blessing to carry in your pocket for sure.

Scarab bracelets

Three of my scarab bracelets.

But fast forward to bracelets like the ones I own.

These aren’t ancient Egyptian amulets. They were made and sold in the 20th Century by costume jewelry makers.

People that bought them probably assumed that the markings on the back were hieroglyphs. But are they, really?

I did a bit of poking around the interwebs.

Logical first step: do an image search on Egyptian hieroglyphics to see if any of the symbols on the backs of my stones are obvious matches.

One of the things that seems pretty obvious, to my eye anyway, is that hieroglyphs are a completely different type of mark. They’re more pictorial, generally.

For example, here’s hieroglyphs from this online image next to my drawings of the marks on my bracelets. They really don’t look anything alike.

real Egyptian hieroglyphs don't look anything like the marks on the backs of my braceletsI combed through pages of Egyptian hieroglyphs. I didn’t find a single one that resembled the marks on my bracelets.

You’d expect, if the bracelet manufacturers were really trying, that they’d at least put an ankh on a couple of the stones, or an Eye of Horus. But nope.

Here’s another example, this one of cursive hieroglyphics from The Papyrus of Ani:

Cursive hieroglyphics from the Papyrus of Ani compared to marks on my scarab braceletsArguably a little bit closer — but still a huge stretch to imagine any of the marks on any of my bracelets is a 1:1 for a mark on that piece of scroll.

In fact, to my eye, the marks on my bracelets look more like kanji (Chinese characters) than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Japanese kanji are the closest to my eye. Here’s an image of Japanese kanji that I found on this site. There’s a pretty strong resemblance between these words and the marks on my bracelets — or anyway, stronger resemblance than to hieroglyphs …

Kanji image from https://awordfromjapan.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/why-learn-bushu-building-blocks-of-kanji/Which led me to Hypothesis #2:

Maybe the stones were sourced from Asia, and maybe the people that carved them inscribed messages in Chinese or Japanese!

Oooh!!!!

Well. As it turns out, there are tools galore online that let you draw kanji and then display the English translation.

Here’s one.

Tell you what, go play, if you have a scarab bracelet and think maybe the marks are kanji. But for my part, by the time I was done messing around on those tools for an hour or so, I started to feel a little foolish.

I wondered if I should even blog about this. I wondered if people who read and write Japanese wouldn’t find it laughable.

“Really? You thought the marks on my bracelets might be real words???”

So let me go out on a limb, here, with Hypothesis #3:

The marks on the backs of these bracelets are nonsense symbols.

They are random marks carved by stone workers who mass produced cabochons for US costume jewelry makers. They made simple marks, because simple marks are easy, and these were being mass produced after all.

The same marks show up on jewelry from different makers because makers often sourced their stones from common suppliers.

If you see any holes in my logic — or know of any evidence that either supports or refutes my latest/greatest hypothesis — drop me a line or leave a note in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

(And if you haven’t read my other posts on scarab bracelets, here is my first post, and here is my second.

Pssst. Are you a reader?

Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen

Meet Marion Flarey.

She’s out of a job.

Buried in school loan debt. About to be homeless.

And she’s no Rapunzel.

She doesn’t even have long hair.

But she just found an apartment.

And it has a Tower…

Once Upon a Flarey Tale.

Available on Amazon for Kindle or print, or click here to select from other e-formats.

Book 1 of my Marion Flarey Series.

Winner, 2020 Incipere Award for Women’s Fiction, Clean.

About online romance scams…

I happened to come across an article in The South China Morning Post (global media yeah) titled “Huge explosion in online romance scams in Hong Kong in 2018.”

If you’ve read my online serial novel The French Emerald, keep going.

If you haven’t, this might spoil things for you, so if you are at all fond of #chicklit or light readin’ fiction in general, click here to read the novel first (it won’t take long, it’s really more of a novella) then come back :) Continue reading

New Dark Chemistry cover + which teaser blurb do you like better?

Dark Chemistry

He’s her worst enemy–and he’s got a drug that controls her. Now he can do his worst. Dark Chemistry. Because evil can take the shape of love.

I admit it. I made a mistake.

When I first released Dark Chemisty, I let myself be seduced by the cliche that “sex sells.”

It does, of course–but it was a bad idea for this book. Dark Chemistry is a plot-driven novel, but it’s also got a bit of concept to it. Putting a woman in a bustier on the cover didn’t really reflect the experience I’m trying to create with this novel.

(This business takes a lot of work to figure out…)

Anyway, I’m working through all my titles to do new covers, and my hunt led me to Jennie Rawlings, who agreed to do a new cover for Dark Chemistry–and I LOVE what she did.

As I said on Twitter, I finally feel like my book has a face that fits :)

But now I have a question and you can help. I’ve got two different drafts of teaser copy, one for the Kindle version, one for the print version.

Which do you like best?

Here they are — and please scroll down to the survey below so you can let me know your choice. Thank you!!!

KINDLE VERSION

She’s been drugged.

She doesn’t know.

It feels so good. Like love.

But it’s a trick. He plans to control her. Rob her. Maybe kill her.

A web of evil.

Will Haley realize that her feelings are not her TRUE feelings?

Does Donavon have the strength left to fight for the woman he loves?

Will the two of them uncover Gerad’s plot to use powerful synthetic pheromones to enslave the world?

And even if they do – can they stop it?

 

PRINT VERSION

If Haley Dubose wants to inherit her father’s fortune, she has no choice. She has to leave sunny Southern California for a little backwater town in Upstate New York, and run a chemical manufacturing company he founded — for two whole years.

But Haley soon wishes her only problems were of the spoiled-rich-girl variety.

She finds herself entangled in a web of evil, spun by men who use powerful, synthetic chemicals to manipulate people.

They can drive their enemies insane.

They can manipulate them sexually.

They can even kill.

And they are preparing to enslave the world.

 

[poll id=”5″]

The French Emerald. My (free, for now!) serial novel

Serial novel. Sweet, funny, fast-paced — perfect to read with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine!)

My serial novel, The French Emerald, launched on March 4th.

I am enjoying this project so much. I love that my readers are enjoying it. I love it when I get emails saying, “help, I missed a week, where’s the link again?” I love finding new readers who read through all the past chapters to catch up :)

If you haven’t joined the fun, click here to get started.

The book has 43 chapters in all, and there are plenty of new twists to come. Enjoy and drop me a note to let me know what you think :)

UPDATE: All chapters are now online and free for you to read — just click the link above :)