I’m not a very Stars and Stripes kind of girl. I can give you an antler and a stick star that wants to be a pentacle.
I believe in the principles of the Constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights. In that way, I am a patriot.
Do you know how important the ring finger on your left hand is, if you’re right-handed?
Or, to take another tack: Have you ever looked up cat-bite infections on the internet?
I love my Miss Onion-cat, and I have to say she is a hothead and an extremist. I heard her having a fight Saturday morning. I thought she might have caught a rat.
She had caught that deadly creature Crateribus plasticus, the plastic crate. Her claw was hooked into one, and she couldn’t get it out. She was growling and hissing.
Saturn is central to my astrological chart—ruler of duty, constraint, control. Saturn conjuncts my moon, which books will tell you makes me melancholy and my emotions hard to express. Saturn also sits highest in my chart, nearest the zenith, making it the ruler of my career.
Despite Saturn’s reputation for constriction, he also rules the Saturnalia, when everyone trades places, servants become rulers, and we exchange gifts amid revelry. Saturn is king of the Golden Age, when no one needs to work and fruit falls from the trees.
I’m about halfway through the septet’s book two, which has the working title The Deer-Slayer, and I’m about to throw my characters off the edge.
There’s a dictum in fiction that you have to get your characters in trouble as quickly as possible. That’s the inciting incident—something that disturbs the life of your protagonist so that person takes a different track. This disruption falls at or toward the beginning and starts the mechanism of the narrative.
But there’s also that point where a trouble brewing all through the story finally boils. This isn’t the climax, but rather where the rising action (in terms of the five-act structure—exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement) kicks into gear.
Hekate was said to have saved Byzantium from Philip of Macedon by showing the Byzantines a great light in the sky, so they erected a statue of Hekate Lampadephoros, Hekate Light-Bringer.
It’s a blustery first of November. All morning, the cats have watched out the window as leaves fly by, wondering if the leaves are birds.
Hekate has been calling me back for reconnection. The mother of witches, she’s been with me since I was a young teen.
I didn’t know it then. I drew and painted then as often as I wrote, and one of my first big projects for my seventh-grade art class was a woodblock print. I made a traditional witch’s workroom—skulls, books, candles, cauldron. Out the window was a waning moon. In those days, any time I drew a moon freehand without thinking, it was waning.
Today is Samhain, the witches’ new year. Like any new year, it’s a time to notice change, and a time perhaps for resolutions.
My parents are dead. They were pretty fucked-up people, a drunk and a codependent. My dad wasn’t a high-functioning drunk, either—he never conquered alcoholism.
This is Potato, my witch-cat. She’s not a familiar, not the receptacle for a helper spirit. She is a fully participating member of our coven, though she hasn’t taken the coven class yet.
Potato came to Samhain. She noshed with us beforehand as we noshed. She sat by the scrying mirrors as we scried. She took part in the divination.
This Samhain, we had a visitor who brought with her a pendulum and divination cloth that said, yes, no, maybe, and don’t want to answer.
Last night, we had our coven Samhain ritual. One of our members led; she made tea from hawthorn berries. Hawthorn is associated with both the big spirit-gates of the year, Samhain and Beltaine.
Another coven member made a couple of black mirrors for scrying. She got picture frames from Goodwill, cleaned the glass well, painted it on one side with black high-gloss paint, then put the frames back together. Voila!