SeaHeart

- While I'm getting ready to post the Fable Tribe update, Jenn is doing something we've been trying to get set up for months: she's posting the first update in our vintage Etsy shop, A Clover and A Bee! <3 It's going to be filled with 80s paper ephemera, toys and antiques--the first update is from Jenn's childhood and teenaged sticker collection, and it's filled with utterly adorable stuff. Take a peek! <3

ACloverAndABee.Etsy.com


- We spent the weekend down with Jenn's parents, celebrating the annual Cancerian Birthday Party (I'm a Cancer, and so are both of Jenn's parents. <3). It was awesome and wonderful, though came right on the heels of another incredibly-almost-catastrophic health related issue concerning her dad. :/ So it was really wonderful to see him okay.

- The Bone Girl is being released August 28th, my first anthology Love Devours is going to be released earlier in the coming month, and Project Unicorn is starting to get a lot of press and notice and OMG EXCITEMENT, WHOAH did people want this. :D I had hoped, but really, the amount of support has been absolutely staggering. <3 So that launches not next week, but the week after it. Holy crap, you guys, it's going to be INTENSE. I love the Project Unicorn themes, but one of my FAVORITE ones is for this first month, "The Dark Woods." It also somewhat ties in to what I'm wrapping up with Love Devours, and what I've been working on with Follow the Wolf, which is part of Sappho's Fables (it's the "Little Red Riding Hood" retelling). So, in short, not surprisingly, and--as always--we're knee deep in stories and words, and there are so many exciting, shiny things coming. <3 Viva la story! <3

- Jenn and I are heading on our yearly pilgrimage to Salem/Gloucester/Rockport in two days. <3 This year, as many things in our lives have, our trip has changed. This is the first time that Jenn and I are going by ourselves (Maddie's going a week after, with her mum! <3), so there's a real feel of second-honeymoon-ness going on. <3 Also, we wanted to have the most inexpensive vacation known to mankind, so we're not staying at a m/hotel. We're camping at Winter Island in our GLORIOUS! PALATIAL! SPARKLE-TENT! We're so hella excited about camping there, words escape me. Every year, we experience the place more and more like the locals do (our hearts belong there, after all!), but this year, we're diving even deeper in that. We're not going to use the car at ALL while we're there, instead simply walking, and taking the train where applicable. We're going to spend hours and hours in coffee shops as we outline our upcoming novels, discussing stories together. We're going to spend hours and hours and hours on the beach at the campground, cavorting in the water like the mermaids we are...it's going to be an easy, relaxing vacation with absolutely nothing to do but spend time with each other, create, and be in love. <3 <3 <3 I'm over the moon. I think this trip is going to change our lives. I have a feeling.

- That's where my mind is. Stories, and going home to the most precious place in the world, to us. Being together, exploring some of our favorite haunts, inventing new trails, being embraced by the perfect blue waves. <3 Finally, going home as a free woman--it holds more meaning than I can describe, that. <3

Salem was everything it needed to be--and more. I am refreshed, rejuvenated, filled with passion and constant and consistent energy. I had this week off from work, so once we got home from Massachusetts, I did a complete rehaul of my Temple Room (I do this about every six months or so--it keeps it fresh, and I get so reinvigorated in the sacred space!), sat down in it and finished "The Witch Sea," came up with the storylines for the rest of my anthology, Love Devours: Tales of Monstrous Adoration, created the cover...

(I THINK IT SHINY. <3)



And then I wrote down the outline of the final re-write of Twixt. And began it.

If you have been with me from the beginning of Twixt, you know what this book is to me, what it does to me, how deeply and passionately I have loved and hated it. It is my muse of a book. It is my ultimate book. It has taken me through the worst depression writing has ever given me, and the most ultimate of highs that writing has ever given me, and it is my magnum opus of creation...

And, this last re-write, literally years in the making, has begun.

I am ecstatic beyond words. And I feel so fucking satisfied, I could burst.

It's about time, Twixt. You were worth waiting for. <3

We're going home~ <3

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, Jenn and Maddie and I embark on our yearly pilgrimage to the North Shore--Salem, Rockport and Gloucester, Massachusetts. I've been walking on cloud nine all day--my excitement knows no bounds.

For as long as Jenn and I have been together, we have had one deep-seated goal: move to the North Shore. Going there isn't a vacation--it's a home coming. I know every street of Salem, every nook where you can curl up with a book of magic, every boulder along the shores of Gloucester to climb and rest yourself like a mermaid. My heart is singing, home is calling...

I hope your weekend is beautiful~ <3

The Rockport sea, 2008

A wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels,
I am tired of brick and stone and rumbling wagon-wheels;
I hunger for the sea's edge, the limit of the land,
Where the wild old Atlantic is shouting on the sand.

Oh I'll be going, leaving the noises of the street,
To where a lifting foresail-foot is yanking at the sheet;
To a windy, tossing anchorage where yawls and ketches ride,
Oh I'l be going, going, until I meet the tide.

And first I'll hear the sea-wind, the mewing of the gulls,
The clucking, sucking of the sea about the rusty hulls,
The songs at the capstan at the hooker warping out,
And then the heart of me'll know I'm there or thereabout.

Oh I am sick of brick and stone, the heart of me is sick,
For windy green, unquiet sea, the realm of Moby Dick;
And I'll be going, going, from the roaring of the wheels,
For a wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels.

~ John Masefield

~*~

We're back. I'm heartbroken. I miss it more than I could ever say.