the Tarot of events

I've been studying the Tarot for years. I'd love to make a living being the exotically draped crone telling and making fortunes on a vine-dripping, candlelit veranda somewhere. Terrified that it will come to pass. When I have been so bold as to give a reading (something about getting paid to do this is frightening) I tell people that the cards are just a way of shining a light on possible choices. Choices we all have, moment to moment. Pointing out options that one might not have considered. Signposts...cue the twilight zone music.

It's like this.

I'm deep into revising, rewriting actually, the novel I've been working on for three years. It's really two, possibly three, books and there's been a full-time job and a lot of life along the way so I don't feel bad about the time span.

I've come to a place in the story where I have to acknowledge Anna's profound loneliness, and as the dudes say, I am unmanned. Can't get it up. Can't go there. Have no map, no plan, no words or way to feel. Looking at a brick wall. Blind. Deaf and dumb.

Ahem. A well of personal issues is open in front of me and there is no remedy if I go there now.

So, like all writers, I've found a dozen ways to avoid the whole issue. The best would be to write around it. No, instead I'm doing all the stupid shit. Configuring a new-to-me laptop (bless you sister), driving a new-to-me car (with whom I am perversely in love), deep housework that hasn't been done in too long, starting with the studio.

Somehow in all the stuff shuffling, my notebook from WUUCON with a lot of notes from the WIP has been lost. I'm pretty sure it's here somewhere. It's been accusing me, Slacker, for a month, as I move it and a stack of revision notes, from one place to the next and now it's poof. The cloth on the cover was creation I hoarded until using it this way. Gorgeous, it is.

I did find my beloved storks that Jimmy gave me years ago. They were about to slip down into the innards of a chair that will probably be put out onto the curb before too long. I've been doing a lot of fiber stuff lately too, dyeing and the like, so finding these has significance.

More avoidance activity included setting up Kindle on the laptop and "The Emotional Craft of Fiction" by Donald Maass floated by and I snapped it up thinking I selected "free sample". Instead, somehow, saints preserve us, it's whole and my credit card was charged.

The spread has been dealt. It's time for the reading and for the reader to take heed and act.