Slaying the Dragon: A Walker Papers short story

December 24, 2016

Once in a while I manage to have my act together enough to present a holiday short story to my readers. This year’s story was inspired by visiting North Carolina for the first time, and driving some of those twisty twisty roads that Joanne is so fond of. Slaying the Dragon is set five years after the end of SHAMAN RISES, and as such, contains, if not outright spoilers, certainly spoilers by association. :) Slaying the Dragon (pdf) (turns out wordpress won’t let me upload epub or mobi files, sorry.…

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a live blog of the solstice

December 21, 2016

9am: #ThinksToDo: wrap gifts put tree together hold my head still so snot doesn’t swirl around & make me dizzy work on leah’s comic 10am: so far i’ve: emptied dishwasher cleared wrapping table gotten laundry going fetched wrapping paper located indy’s gifts 11am: have now: wrapped, if not ribboned, indy’s gifts must now: store them find ted’s gifts wrap them shower eat something besides sugar cookies 12pm: have now: found ted’s gifts disovered i hadn’t [redacted] proceeded to [ redacted ] wrapped MOST of his gifts despite delay did not…

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no time for your unexamined patriarchal party line

December 20, 2016

Indy had a dentist appointment today. The dentist, who is a woman, and who keeps up a pretty constant stream of chatter to reassure her child patients, made no fewer than four separate comments to Henry about how “girls talk a lot.” By the third I was livid. What I do not need is a woman–perhaps ESPECIALLY a professional woman, A DOCTOR–reinforcing stereotypes that my six year old son has *certainly* never come into contact with from me, and which I wish him to be armed to resist when he…

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Bridge_Dancer_by_mizkit

oh god my shoulders

December 16, 2016

I have terrible knots in my shoulders, and a perpetually over-stretched subscapularis nerve under my right shoulder blade. I mean, like, this is a decades-old injury. My friend E, who is a massage therapist, used to tell me she wanted to spend some quality time with her fingers in my armpit, which I always thought was a joke until she got her hands on me and spent some quality time with her fingers in my armpit. Turns out that, since the subscapularis is entirely covered by bone, the way you…

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An open letter to the electors

December 12, 2016

I’ve written an open letter to the electors via DearElector. There’s a copy of the letter posted here, where you can add your name as a signator, if you feel I’ve said anything worthwhile, but the body of the text is also replicated in this post. Dear Elector: These are the things I can probably safely say I know about you: You have deeply held convictions. You are politically active. You are a Republican. That’s it: that’s all I know about you. I know those things because you’re a Republican…

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