the mystical power of moonlight

ravens and a yellowstone moon

I am obsessed with the moon.  I love it when it's a thin, crisp sliver cupping a ghost-gray orb.  I love it when it's transparent, as though the evening sky were punching through.  I especially love moonrise when the sky is still light, as it is in this shot.  Then there's moon set after dawn, when the atmosphere balloons our satellite the four times its usual size.

Fabulous!

This week Painted Boots tours with Reading in Twilight.  I love the title page for her blog -- maybe because I'm a sucker for anything connected with the sky.

BEING inspired

sunset

Sunset, and our home star makes way for the countless, fabulously distant home stars of other worlds. The atmosphere grows translucent and everything beyond it feels so attainable it's as if I could reach into the blue and grab hold. But I wouldn't find anything new; not really. So much of what we are is stardust, carried here by solar wind and in the icy stones of comet tails. It's easy to forget, when caught up in the routine of a mundane work day, that we are inseparably part of things much bigger and more infinite than ourselves. But whenever I need inspiration, I simply dwell on where I came from ... and where I might go from here.

Sunsets, stars and all things universe, inspired my upcoming story, Being.  It releases in February but in truth, I can't wait.  I've labored on this story for years -- at times setting it aside -- at times so lost in it I can't bear to eat dinner or go to bed.  It's such a great story!

a Yellowstone raven

Hi y'all,
I'm in over-drive this week, juggling three Halloween parties, my upcoming blog tour with Goddess Fish, my day job and readying my story Being for my beta-readers before it goes to my editor.  I must not have felt the pressure this morning because I took a long walk, got a fabulous hair cut then spent the day planting ninety-two tulips and six bushes in the front yard before raking all the leaves from the grass. 

I love to be busy in autumn ... but I'm not alone.  All of nature is prepping for winter.  A cool thing about autumn are the ravens.  I see more of them this time of year than any other.  Their fleeting shadows drift over me as I garden.  They settle on the flowerbed stones, hoping for a hand-out (popcorn to chicken bones, they aren't picky).  I know many artists and writers have branded ravens as emblems of death, doom and evil, but I like them.  They are beautiful birds -- shiny blue-black from beak to feet.  They are insanely curious, greedy as all get out and surprisingly huge.  Some stand almost two feet tall.

I'll admit, I do have to be careful not to think of Alfred Hitchcock while I'm outside this time of year ....