So Long, Farewell

After 5 1/2 years, it’s time for me to stop updating this blog. It’s been great, and I really appreciate all the people who’ve followed me over the years. Thank you!

I’ve not stopped blogging, though. You can keep following me over at my website: www.celiareaves.com. See you there in 2020!

A Holiday Break

I’m taking it easy during these holiday weeks, and I hope you are able to do so as well. Whatever winter holiday you hold (Christmas, Hanukkah, Solstice, Yule, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or just Let’s Get Together), may it bring you joy, peace, and strength as we go into a new year and a new decade.

---

This post marks the last time I’ll be updating the blog here on WordWacker. It’s been a wonderful 5 1/2 years, but now it’s time to move things over to my own site: www.celiareaves.com. If you’ve been enjoying my content here, I hope to find you over there, but either way, thank you for visiting me over the years. My followers are awesome and I value each and every one of you. Blessings on you and yours, and peace out!

A Half-Dozen Reflections

This is the last of my looks back at 2019. The winter solstice, the point where the days are shortest in the northern hemisphere, occurred last night. This is often considered the turning of the year, the point where the world begins to shift from darkness to light. In honor of that event, I’m looking at some key aspects of my life to explore how they did and did not change in 2019.

1. Family. There’s nothing more important than my family. I’m happy to say that things are good for us as a group, and that this has been a year of maintaining a strong steady state. My husband and I are still together after 44 happy years, our adult children live nearby, our son is a functioning, independent adult (something that was occasionally in doubt over the years, as he has Asperger’s Syndrome), our daughter has a job she likes and she and our son-in-law have a happy home with two cats. We all get together for birthdays and holidays, and enjoy each other’s company. For all this, I am enormously grateful.
2. Life. Focusing more specifically on my own life circumstances, I see a couple of changes. The biggest one is that I retired six months ago, after 31 years as a college professor at the same institution. I loved teaching, and have always thought of myself as a teacher, but it was time for me to step aside. I find that I also love being retired! I have time to do the things I choose to do, which is wonderful. The other change in my life is that one thing I choose to do is to work out much more regularly. I joined the local YMCA, where I attend classes and use the machines, and I also use a treadmill and weights in my basement. I will never be a fitness champion, but I’m serious about increasing my strength, flexibility, endurance, and balance.
3. Blog. PhoThe really big change here is happening now. I’ve had my own domain (www.celiareaves.com) for years, but haven’t done much with it. I posted regularly on my WordWacker blog (www.wordwacker.wordpress.com) instead. As of the first of the year, though, the blog will be housed entirely on my own site. I’m going to miss the old blog site, and especially the 358 people who follow me there. I hope they follow me all the way over to the new site, but I’m resigned to losing some of them. The only way to keep followers, of course, is to provide content people want to read. That’s on me! Over the years I’ve experimented with various kinds of content, most recently the Something for Sunday posts, including this one. They’ve been a lot of fun to do, but have not been wildly popular. I don’t expect to continue them as an every-week thing on the new site. What will I be posting? Whatever I think people will be interested in reading about, including the other items here on this list.
4. Photography. I’ve posted photos regularly on my site for years, and those have been my most popular posts. I participate in two separate challenges at this point: Lens Artists once a week, and Squares, daily for a whole month four times a year. This is exciting and fun, and these are some of my most popular posts, so I will definitely be continuing with them. I may also jump in on some other photo challenges, including Cee’s Fun Photo Challenge or the Tuesday Photo Challenge on Dutch Goes the Photo. I’m a very basic photographer, taking snapshots with my phone, but it’s something I enjoy and occasionally produces something worthwhile!
5. Haiku. I post haiku on the blog every April as part of the A-Z Blog Challenge (I’ll be on there again in 2020 with my ever-popular haiku puzzles), but most of the haiku I post are on Twitter. I’m very slowly getting better at the whole micro-poetry thing, though I still don’t really understand morae, the Japanese phonological units on which haiku are traditionally based, so I just count English syllables instead. Perhaps I’ll figure that out in 2020!
6. Writing. Yes, I’m still writing the book. I’ve made great strides in 2019, including two nearly full reviews by my local writers’ group and another review by folks from an online beta group. My best estimate is that I will have one more beta review in 2020, getting critiques on the nearly-final version, and will get a revised, proofed, and polished version ready to query. That will be a huge step, when it happens, and it’s something I would be sure to post about. In other writing news, I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time (working through the latest revision) and reviewed a draft of a novel for one of the other writers in the beta group.

So that’s where I am right now, at the cusp of the year. There won’t be much more from me in 2019 (the weekly photo challenge is on hiatus in the last week and I will just drop short greetings). Look for more in 2020!

---

Time is running out! If you wish to keep finding my content in 2020, you need to switch to my site (www.celiareaves.com), because starting in January I won’t be updating here any more. I hope to see you there!

Displays

The Lens Artists this week ask us to share images of displays. The first fits with the season: it’s a small part of the collection of Christmas trees I set out on my mantle at this time every year. I love their bright colors and the huge variety of materials they are made of.

The second couldn’t be more different, except that it also contains many different colors. I wanted to get a 20-sided die to give to a gaming friend of mine as a thank-you for a small favor she did, and spent some time ogling the huge variety of polyhedral dice available at my local gaming store. Each little box contains seven different dice identified by the numbers of sides they have: four, six, eight, ten, and twenty. (There are two with ten sides, one marked 1-2-3-etc. and one 10-20-30-etc. You roll them both when you need a percentage.) All those who love tabletop role-playing games (Dungeons and Dragons and its many descendants) also love dice. Aren’t these lovely?

Posted in response to Lens-Artists #76: On Display, with thanks to Amy for posting this week’s challenge.

---

Remember that starting in a few weeks, I will be posting only on my official website: www.celiareaves.com. I hope to see you on my new site!

A Dozen Haiku

Now that we’re into December, I’m taking time to look back at 2019 in various ways. This week I’m taking a look at the haiku I’ve posted on Twitter. There have been hundreds of them, so winnowing it down to just 12 proved quite a challenge. I’m going to cheat by first listing some of the categories I won’t include in the final dozen.

The newest haiku challenge I’ve joined is #ReelKu. It invites people to post haiku based on a particular film, chosen each week by @deft_notes (Jonathan Roman). It only began on 11/17, and I’m proud to say I gave it its name! The current film we’re examining is It’s a Wonderful Life. Here is one of my contributions:

a tiny bell rings
skin tears, muscle and bone shift
white feathers unfurl

I’ve been participating in #SciFaiKuSaturday pretty much since it launched. It’s sponsored alternately by @­_Irene_Dreams_ and @HawkandYoung. They post a prompt, and we write haiku in a science fiction vein based on the prompt. Here’s one I did this year:

robot uprising
not born out of secret lairs
but algorithms

By far my largest set of haiku, though, was written for the #HaikuChallenge, hosted by @baffled. It’s daily, so I’ve written 349 of them so far this year! Looking over them, I see there are some themes that come up again and again. One is words, unsurprising since I’m a writer. Here’s one:

humanity’s first
virtual reality
tales by the fire

Many of them relate to the realities of modern life, good and bad. This one, for instance, is especially relevant now that the holiday online shopping season is in full swing:

we’ve come to expect
our dreams delivered on time
in cardboard boxes

For some reason, lots of the haiku I wrote had to do with birds, including this one:

a seagull sails past
how sad that it’s not aware
how I envy it

The dozen haiku I’ve chosen for this post, though, reflect the changing seasons as I followed them through the year. Here they are. Enjoy!

the cold winter sky
a blue so hard it makes clouds
shatter into snow

as the snowflakes fall
they perform a wild ballet
pas de millions

we turn toward the sun
green leaves, flowers, bees appear
earth’s great magic trick

on the summer blooms
bees bumble, tumble, fumble
prospecting for gold

honey on my toast
every golden drop distilled
from sun and flowers

I sit on the porch
in a sweater, sipping tea
and watch autumn fall

the year grows older
dry leaves are caught in the fence
I am not ready

The big tree out front
dancing in the autumn wind
paints the lawn yellow

on a chilly night
a lone tree takes a bite from
a Halloween moon

leaves blaze and fall
earth draws up her white blanket
and lets her scars heal

in the frozen night
trees filter moonlight through nets
of tangled branches

ice on the sidewalk
hear it crack under my feet
I step carefully

One final note, about the headline image for this post. It is a detail from a painting we purchased in Tokyo in 1984. I’m sad to say that I don’t know the name of the artist, but to me it fits well with the elegance, simplicity, and focus on nature embodied in haiku.

---

Please note that all starting in a few weeks, I will be posting only on my official website: www.celiareaves.com. I hope to see you on my new site!

Ornamental Nostalgia

The Lens Artists photo challenge this week is about nostalgia. Since it’s the time of year when we’re decorating for Christmas, my thoughts went to one particular holiday tradition at my house: the little blue ornament.

This is the only ornament that survives from the first set my parents bought when they got married in the 1940s. It’s nothing special, just an unadorned blue sphere a couple of inches across, except of course that nostalgia makes it special to me. When I hang it on the tree, I have a warm, settled feeling of connection with my family’s history.

Posted in response to Lens-Artists #75: Nostalgic, with thanks to Tina for posting this week’s challenge.

---

Please note that all starting in a few weeks, my images will only be posted on my official website: www.celiareaves.com. If you want to see the pictures I post in the future, you’ll have to follow me there. I hope to see you on my new site!

A Dozen Photos

Now that we’re into December, I’m taking time to look back at 2019 in various ways. This week I dug through more than 100 photos I posted on the blog this year and pulled out 12 of them that I especially liked or that meant a lot to me for some reason. My photos were all taken with my trusty iPhone camera (not the Nikon my husband uses, which graces the headline image for this post). The reason I love my phone camera is because I always have it with me, so I can grab a shot wherever I am. Here are the images I picked, in the order in which they appeared. (Click the link in each entry to see the original post.)

1. New Life: This one is special, because it was the first photo posted this year. I took a couple of months off from the blog, regrouping and trying to find my path forward. This image represents me getting back in the groove.
2. Get Back Up: This is the first image I posted in my Something for Sunday series, in which I talked about an important way humans differ from many other animals and how this related to the movie Captain Marvel. I’m not going to call out any more of them, because they aren’t simply photos, but have been highly edited and altered and have text on top. I wanted to include this one, though, since it’s the first.
3. WordWacker is 5: It was fun to take this photo out in the back yard, and then to share and eat the props! It’s bittersweet for me, though, since I’m retiring this blog at the end of the year. I’m not getting out of blogging, though. I’m switching it to my own website, and will keep the posts here for the future.
4. Berries in the Rain: This was the first photo I posted in response to the Lens Artists photo challenge. It’s been going on for more than a year, but it took me this long to find it. The people who run the challenge, and those who participate, are amazing photographers, and I love seeing what they come up with every week. Many of the images in the rest of this list were posted for this challenge.
5. Charlotte Pier: I love this dreamy, atmospheric shot, posted for a Lens Artists challenge.
6. Sunset friends: Another Lens Artists photo, one of a set of silhouettes.
7. Lamp: Another photo challenge I discovered this year was the Squares Challenge, which four times a year gives a theme and invites a photo on the theme every day for a month. I posted my photos in batches, one each Sunday. This was one of the photos in my collection featuring straight lines.
8. Leaf Closeup: This was one of the images for a Lens Artist challenge inviting people to fill the frame, getting close to their subject.
9. Snowy Branches: One of the images posted for the Square Challenge, this time part of a set of photos featuring natural lines.
10. Cloud Layers: One of the images for a Lens Artist challenge about images showing layers.
11. Creepy Tree: Another image for a Lens Artist challenge near Halloween, asking for creepy photos.
12. Wires: This was in my most recent set of posts for the Lens Artist challenge, so it serves well to round out the collection.

I have to say that taking and posting photos has been one of my great joys on the blog this year. I’m happy to share a few of them with you.

Please note that all starting in a few weeks, my images will only be posted on my official website: www.celiareaves.com. If you want to see the pictures I post in the future, you’ll have to follow me there. I hope to see you on my new site!

 

Down Below

The Lens Artists photo challenge this week is to post images that are abstract. That is, in the words of Patti Moed who set this week’s challenge, it is an image that “goes beyond what we normally see in the real world. It makes viewers ask questions and use their imagination.”

I wandered around a lot looking for photos that made me question what I saw or look at things in different ways, before I finally wandered into the foundation of my world: the basement. I looked around at the disorganized shelves and the stacks of stuff, and saw things I hadn’t noticed before. This is some of what I saw that I don’t normally see.

Ducts carrying warm air throughout the house (and pumping some of it into the basement)

Heavy electrical cabling coming out of the main junction box

The plumbing going into and out of the geothermal furnace and water heater

One last shot that includes all of the above: ducts, wires, and plumbing, receding into the crawl space behind the basement

Posted in response to Lens Artists #74: Abstract, with thanks to Patti for posting this week’s challenge.

---

ON ANOTHER NOTE: Starting in January 2020 I’ll be posting only on my official author website. If you enjoy my content, please start following me there: www.celiareaves.com. I value every one of my followers, and I hope you stick with me!

A Dozen Books

Now that we’re into December, I’m taking time to look back at 2019 in various ways. This week I begin by listing a dozen books I read this year that I really enjoyed. I found I couldn’t rank them from most to least favorite, so they’re in the order in which I read them.

1. All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault (James Alan Gardner) In this world, Superheroes and Creatures of the Night (vampires, ghosts, demons, and the like) don’t mix well together. This delightfully geeky story throws them into a pot, stirs in a pile of snarky humor and a dollop of pop-culture references, mixes well, and makes it all work. I love characters who are sometimes unsure or confused but always smart and determined, and I give props to the book for featuring a gender-fluid Asian Canadian hero.
2. Blackbirds (Chuck Wendig) Miriam Black has a horrible magic power. When she touches someone’s skin, she immediately sees a vision of their death. She initially tried to prevent those deaths, but concluded that it was impossible. As you might expect, this made her emotionally unstable, and she’s a difficult character to like: vulgar, violent, and self-destructive. Though her story took me into some uncomfortable places, it was compelling and pulled me right along to a conclusion that was satisfying to a degree but leaves loose ends that pull me into the next volume in this series, where there is now some hope for her redemption.
3. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (Beth Macy) This is detailed, exhaustively researched look at the opioid epidemic that’s killing thousands and tearing apart families and communities. You can’t read it without becoming depressed and infuriated, which is right and proper. You also leave it encouraged by the tireless work of those trying to fight the menace.
4. Angelmaker (Nick Harkaway) The son of a legendary small-time gangster in London is trying to live a quiet, upright life as a clockmaker, but he gets dragged into a web of intrigue dating back to the 1950s and a near-mythical doomsday device. I loved the humor and the characters, who were simultaneously quirky and realistic. It sometimes slowed down a little too much, sometimes felt a little too tricky, but it always managed to pull itself together in the nick of time, rather like its protagonist.
5. Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) In this lyrical fairy tale, two women from opposite ends of their social world must learn to navigate the treacherous magic they’ve been drawn into, to save not only themselves, but those they love and two kingdoms besides. Though it focuses on these two women, each strong and capable in her own way but facing tough challenges, it’s populated by a whole stable full of other characters, with chapters and scenes from a variety of points of view, so that occasionally I lost track of whose head I was in for a moment. It was worth that small degree of fumbling, though, for the rich, deeply explored worlds and compelling characters.
6. Flex (Ferrett Steinmetz) This is the first of a fantasy series with a fascinating magic system. When someone becomes completely obsessed with anything, from anime to zoos, their passion can grow so great that it deforms reality, and they become ‘mancers. However, the universe objects, and something somewhere else in the fabric of reality has to shift to compensate. For this reason, using magic in this way is forbidden, and ‘mancers are hunted down and “corrected.” This book is a galloping, fun ride through this alternate world, where ‘mancers fight for survival. It’s packed with pop culture references, especially relating to video games, and some wonderful characters who are not stereotypically white, thin, and rich.
7. An Unkindness of Magicians (Kat Howard) This fantasy about a society of magic users hiding in plain sight in our contemporary world is dark, twisted, and lovely. It explores the nature of power and what some people do to collect it and keep it, and how each person has to decide how far is too far. This world is intricate, with families that intertwine and compete, and by the end of the first chapter I’d gone back to create a web giving all the many, many characters and their relations with each other. It was packed, almost overpacked, like a whole season of Game of Thrones in one book, and rushed through the end, but I loved it.
8. Spoonbenders (Daryl Gregory) A complicated but ultimately very rewarding story about several generations of a family of people with paranormal powers. They start out as carnival acts, complete with an appearance on Johnny Carson that goes badly, and things go downhill from there. Their powers are the class example of a blessing that’s also a curse, and their attempts to work through how to use them and live with them in the real world is touching, heartbreaking, and hilarious. Some of the reveals I figured out early, but nothing fully prepared me for the stunning three-ring circus of a finish.
9. Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (Kory Stamper) The author is a long-time editor at Merriam-Webster, and digs deeply into how dictionaries reflect language. She give an intimate picture of what it’s like to think deeply about how a word is used, the kind of person who spends a life doing that, and what dictionaries do and do not tell us. Stamper is brilliant, funny, and down-to-earth. Recommended for anyone who loves words and English.
10. Fall, or Dodge in Hell (Neal Stephenson) This is a sprawling story about many aspects of how people relate to technology, focusing largely on a future technology that will allow people to have their brains scanned on their death and uploaded into a virtual system where they can live on in a digital reality. It takes a lot of detours getting there, including a gripping but ultimately unrelated side trip into a future of social media and information feeds, and makes some unquestioned assumptions that don’t always work for me, but it still had me turning pages to find out what happens next.
11. Omaha Beach: D-Day, June 6, 1944 (Joseph Balkoski) This nonfiction book details in gripping detail the events of that historic day, starting from the planning and preparations and up through that night and into the following morning. It is a closeup look at one small but pivotal piece of the Normandy Invasion that marked the turning point in World War II, focusing on the mostly-American fight for this one particular beach. I’m not a huge fan of military history, but this story was fascinating.
12. The Curse of Chalion (Lois McMaster Bujold) This is the first in a Hugo Award-winning series of fantasy novels, set in the World of the Five Gods. I loved the world-building, the realistic and distinct characters, and the sense of humanity struggling against great odds to do the right thing. I will definitely read the others in this series.
    

    ---

    ON ANOTHER NOTE: Starting in January 2020 I’ll be posting only on my official author website. If you enjoy my content, please start following me there: www.celiareaves.com. I value every one of my followers, and I hope you stick with me!

Winterland

The Lens Artist photo challenge this week is to share images of the cold. Winter hasn’t fully hit where I am.The high temperature today is expected to be 55°F (13°C), which means I can’t really get good cold pictures right now. Instead, I’m pulling a few out of my archives.

Here’s a really old shot of a visitor in my back yard doing some last-minute stocking up for the season.

This boulder on the campus where I taught wears its winter coat well.

The holly outside my door, with the red berries popping against the green leaves and white snow.

Finally, my husband, my hero. Before we both retired he worked for a company in another state, telecommuting each day from our basement, but he still got up early in the snow to clear the driveway before I left for my own commute.

Posted in response to Lens-Artists #73: Cold, with thanks to Tina for posting this week’s challenge.

---

ON ANOTHER NOTE: Starting in January 2020 I’ll be posting only on my official author website. If you enjoy my content, please start following me there: www.celiareaves.com. I value every one of my followers, and I hope to see you over there!