December 2007

The World Tree stands in my living room, its roots buried in the underworld, beneath a quilted blanket of psuedo-snow.

It stretches, reaches, strains upwards, laddering to the heavens, green needles catching divine star-fire. 

It is the green and burning tree, the burning bush of legend, consumed but not devoured by the lightning strike of divine inspiration-conception. Held timeless between the worlds, the altar-cloth skirt defines the sacred circle, laid out with offerings. 

Talismans hang from the branches, fetishes and footholds and treats,  tempting the saints and spirits to descend with their sparks for the need-fire. It is the path of Prometheus’s gift, brought down from the heights, the rebirth of the Sun in the dark winter night, the Cross before its harvest.  It is the Medicine Wheel, the Axis Mundi, the Sacred Mountain, the Crossroads and the Shaman’s Ladder, bridging dimensions, beliefs, time and tradition, connecting all that is, has been, and will be.

Angel or star-topped matters little - both are bridges between the realms, heavenly Light descending. A lightning bolt would be equally appropriate, if less traditional. So would Rudolph’s nose — reindeer are historically a shaman’s steed, flying between the realms carrying gifts of spirit.

But I flick on the lights, all of that intellectual knowledge falls away.  The glow carries me not to the heavens, but to childhood wonder (which is a heaven in its own right).  The symbolic esoteric knowledge of the Tree only serves as an excuse to climb on Rudolph’s back, and time travel to that place… laying under my family’s Christmas tree, staring up through the branches at a forest of green, glitter and glass. 

The World Tree stands in my living room, as it does every year at this time… and every year,  I am awestruck.

So, once again, I’m in danger of becoming a blogging statistic, one of the millions who have abandoned their blogs to the empty ravages of cyber space. But with a final, great effort, I’ve found the strength to offer my valiant, faithful and stubborn readers a fresh bit of advice on how they, too can excuse any blog post lapses they may be having.

Should they decide they’d rather not be a blogosphere statistic, I’ve also provided answers to the excuses, along with repetitive orders to get on with it. So without further ado…..

Ahem.

10. I’m busy writing the next Great American Novel!

Yeah. Ok. Um. So NaNoWriMo was a good excuse during November — but unless you’ve written more than that measly 300 words of yours in December, start posting, and start posting NOW! [click to continue...]

*Skip to the important part…
why YOU should WriMo.

For those of you with the puzzled looks on your faces (yes, I *can* see you; nice coffee cup, btw, where’d you get it?) I’m talking about National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo.

The premise is simple; draft a 50,000 work of fiction during the month of November. It started in 1999, with a few friends in the San Francisco Bay area, and has now grown to about a gazillion participants from around the world.

If anyone was wondering what happened to all of the words that were supposed to be on MindTweaks this month, well… they were busy over here, laboriously collecting themselves into a 50,000+ word document that supposedly resembles a first draft of a novel. I’m not entirely sure they were successful. I mean, there ARE 50,000 of them, and there is a beginning, middle and an end (sort of), but it’s not in order and much of it reads more like an expanded draft/scrapbook than something you’d find on the shelves at Borders.

You may have noticed an .. ahem.. decline in the number/quality of my posts during this month of noveling insanity; Nano ate the portions of my brain formerly devoted to blogging, leaving MindTweaks in an eerie Zen-like silence. Having subjected readers to this non-consensual denial of service, I thought the least I could do to make up for it was to tell you what I learned.

Ahem!

Step by Step, Word by Word.

Enormously big accomplishments happen one infinitesimal little accomplishment at a time. String enough letters together, and, tada, you’ve got a novel. Basic lesson, I know… but still valuable every time it’s reinforced through experience. [click to continue...]