Haus of Rhi

  Haus of Rhi Newsletter Monthly Updates Craft Chats make a better Writers Group Every writer struggles. Many times, usually, in the process of a single book. A critique group that only reads what you've already got written isn't going to necessarily be useful in helping with plot structure, character dynamics and consistency, or a million other details that aren't restricted to a single story.  So when I took over a group that was losing its leader, I discussed with the other members what would help them the most in their writing process. Since none were previously published, we settled on a structure that didn't focus on line edits, but would hopefully be more valuable. And that's how our Craft Chat began. We have focused discussions on dialogue, plot structure, character POV, conflict, antagonist forces. Helping new writers feel brave enough to keep going also inspires me to hack through the underbrush and push on with my own works. I'm giving them what I wis...

No, This Isn't A Cooking Blog, But...! Look at that chocolate babka with butterscotch chips. Sourdough . ON A PIZZA TRAY. I shit you not, I cooked it on a parchment lined pizza tray and it was almost too big. Next time I'll remember to split the dough in half and make it a reasonable size. As it was, I had to cut it in pizza wedges and store half of it in the freezer so it wouldn't go bad before I could eat it.  Alas, my pre-existing condition of carb addiction aside, the brain needs sugar to sustain it. Sugars are the only thing capable of moving through the brain's barrier or whatever. *waves hand* Science things. So I try not to judge myself too harshly, and I cook most of my carb craving satisfaction in my own kitchen (using sourdough) to keep it as healthy and preservative-free as possible. I tend to use almond milk and kefir a lot as well. (Hang the recipes, they're more like guidelines anyways.) Side Projects Are Great This lovely dragon-eye pillow has been b...

  Alright. So I bumped into a couple articles on Literary Hub, and it got me thinking. I needed to do my morning pages anyway, so I grabbed my journal and figured, "what the hell."  We're all artists, the way I see it. Some of us know our optimal medium and some have yet to find it or are still exploring because their poly instead of mono (like with sexuality, it's whatever). I think as humans "Embracing Doubt" is a part of claiming authority not just as a writer/author but also as an artist in general -- and as a human as well, come to think of it. There will always be some measure of self doubt. There's mental insecurity in the unpublished artist as well as fear -- of failure, of success. of judgment and rejection. The immortal self doubt that, even my book pubs later, will still burst from the thorax and rear its anxiety-riddled head. The beast will declare the authorship line in the sand has shifted and you didn't cross it after all; it's now...

Once upon a time (stay with me here, because it was A Dark And Stormy Night, as well, let me tell you)... I sat down and wrote the beginnings to half a dozen stories, all set in the same world. A few of them had a single recurring character. One of them was set over two thousand years into the future from the others. 'Then' Me became concerned by the horror aspect of this latter story. I distinctly recall writing the scene where one of the characters calmly turns to the MC and says, "Run." And the MC doesn't immediately register what's going on. And then they look up and freak out and have an understandably visceral prey response to what they see, reek of fear from every pore, and bolt . Apparently between that scene and the schizophrenic high-functioning sociopathic serial killer human spliced with unknown alien genetics who's another of the POV characters, this story was just too much for the feeble psyche of 'Then' Me to tackle finishing. 'T...

The Writer's Tool: The Eclipse Tarot This month was a fortuitous one for me to get to know my Eclipse Tarot. I created the deck with the intent of using it as a writing tool, exclusively. Yet I still needed to spend some time getting to know it, to grasp the nuances of its voice, the currents of its energies, in order to successfully and efficiently employ it for its purpose. After all, any craftsman must invest the time in familiarizing himself with a new tool before setting its edge to precious raw material. Tarot Rebels' August Challenge employed a series of questions, one each day for the duration of the month. Silly questions like, what restaurant would you prefer, what kind of pet would you have, what's your musical taste, that on the surface seem flippant and out of place. Yet through the course of the month I found my way to hearing this deck's voice, to understanding its insecurities and immaturity. It doesn't mind clutter, for instance, understand...

The Sacred Manda Grove It was in drafting a spiritual system for Piaffe's world that trees became a major player. I didn't want there to be religious structure, per se, but I did want to create a measure of spirituality in the form of respect for the planet and all its inhabitants. A sharing of resources and space. Filtered Sunlight Because their language system is heavily Latinus influenced, I opted to transform Gaia into Ommat, literally "all things are," from om mat , which means "mother of all." She began not so much a specific goddess entity as she is a communion with nature. The sacred groves were space set aside for rites in which the dead were returned to the earth, the final embrace. I was in the throes of working these details back into the story, trolling the internet for images of what these groves might look like. How old were they? What kind of trees were mandas, beyond being old, dense, and dark? That was when my longtime friend Am...

Once upon a time, tanks could dance. One of my favorite parts of creating the world in Piaffe revolved around the insigni. I'll admit that my inspiration was born in Vienna, Austria at the Spanish Riding School where, at the age of five, I had the pleasure of straddling the back of a Lipizzaner mare. She was huge. Enormous. Fluid. Exploring the abilities of the mundane horse, the years of training required to perform complex maneuvers which the Spanish Riding School teaches, and extrapolating the possibilities of combining those with a sharp intellect and an aware mind, led to the evolution of the equine soldier. Forging that image in the reader's mind was a bit of a challenge. I see their towering presence in my head, but how could I convey it? I could see them moving in my head, but how does one describe it?

(This blogpost is part of the Tarot Rebels' Alternative Tarot Blog Hop. This month's theme is "The Thirteenth Card." Click the icon for a full list of participating blogs and their related content.) Call me when you need me, Call me anything you want. ~Florence + The Machine, "Remain Nameless" Most readers who've been following me for a while know who my writing mascot was. A Blue Heeler and Australian Shepherd cross, he came into my life thirteen years ago as a bright-eyed two-month-old pup in a year when, fortuitously, my soul path card was The Fool. We parted ways earlier this past summer when his tumors finally got the best of him. My soul path card this year -- XIII. The original Tarot de Marseille called this card L'Arcane sans nom, -- the Arcane with no name. Later iterations included the label LA MORT, yet naming the thing doesn't give us power over it. Or does it? In the archetypes, XIII is a point of transition, wh...

Is 2016 over yet? It isn't!?.... Fine then. I know I'm not alone in saying it, but it's been an extremely rough year. For all of us. I've struggled to find creative energy and inspiration for the greater part of this year. I've shown up, and I've been writing, but it's all been of a non-fiction nature. Tarot studies, shadow work. I haven't shirked my daily spreads, and sitting down to do that each morning, and the associated writing, is admittedly a huge part of what's kept me going long enough for the juices to start flowing again. The trigger point that tipped me back into writing earlier last week was an album that Aleks shared on Facebook -- the soundtrack from a video game, Mirror's Edge: Catalyst. Never mind that the character on the game cover looks suspiciously like a muse of mine, from a futuristic spec-fic I've been toying with, which will likely be my next-year project. Image link takes you to the full soundtrack on Youtu...

In which resolutions are not made. (Because aren't they made to be broken or something?) Last year, around this time, I made a decision to get to know my recently acquired tarot deck, the Mary-el, with daily card readings. It worked, and with every passing week and month, I fell more in love with Marie White's artistry as well as her positive interpretations and applications of traditional and conventional meanings and associations. I guess one could claim it was a resolution. If so, it's gotta be the very first time I've followed through for the entire year, to the very end. Sure there were days when my interpretations were little more than a few sentences. And I think that, somewhere along the way, I actually missed a couple days here and there. It's the intent and follow through that matters. Even when I faltered, I didn't give up. Mostly because it was something I was doing for myself, something I was interested in and moderately passionate about, and a...

I wanted to preface this impromptu discussion born of a stream of tweets churned out on my Twitter feed. This is not about inexperienced writers snubbing their noses at any sort of editorial effort on their work. This is about knowing the rules and knowing when to break them, and breaking them in a specific sort of way as an artistic technique. Let us not confuse the two, for we have all of us read unedited stories published on Smashwords or Lulu or Amazon that made our brains bleed with the urge to claw out our eyes. This is about the presence of prose poetry in fiction as a writing technique, and about how much of it is damaged or lost in translation through the course of the editorial stage of the publishing process. Prose poetry is a recognized form of art, in that it is  a recognized form of poetry . Sadly, it is not wholly recognized as a form of prose. Or at least, it is not recognized as a form of  fiction  prose. Had an interesting conversation about pro...

Literal and figurative, mind. The past couple weeks have been rife with research, exploring and developing writing tools. Resurrecting old projects, that sat incomplete and untouched for too long, is a large contributor. Foremost on my mind lately has been Red's story, the sequel (of sorts) to Blacker Than Black.  Many of the dangling threads from the end of that tale have provided anchors and, if you will, belay lines, for the skeleton of what Red's story will become. It's been almost three years since I touched that 150k word tome. And I'm going to have to reread it because I never did finish fleshing out the timeline and character references as I intended. Red's character is very easy to slip into. It's the plot that, as usual, will offer the greatest obstacles for me. I lean heavily toward character-driven stories. But there's means, motive, and opportunity floating around like flotsam and jetsam and it needs addressed. And also, nothing in the live...

With a story as short as my piece "Blood & Peyote," I don't really feel comfortable actually offering an excerpt. Even a small one offers up too large a chunk. I've seen a few readers comment that they don't want to spoil the surprise and pleasure of reading the anthology when it comes out. So I've devised a substitute. It offers a bit of the mood, tone, and flavor of the story and the characters without divulging anything of the actual narrative. Behold, I give you the soundtrack to "Blood & Peyote." Each song was chosen to coincide with a specific scene and section. The exception is the twelve-minute "Blackfoot Fire" which is included for the sole intention of conveying something of Apisi Howling's culture, as well as his weight in the story. In the event that Spotify doesn't work for you, I've created an abridged Blood & Peyote from rhi.e on 8tracks Radio as well. There are a couple songs missing from...

Perfect porch perch weather is perfect. It's something I have to do every time I start a new project. The right atmosphere to encourage the muses. The right music for white noise. Rarely does the same music work for more than one project. This time, I couldn't even stay in the same genre of music. Perhaps because this project is in a different realm than my most recent works. It strays back into the universe of the Doctrine and Alliance, political foes constantly at each others' throats, though its cast of characters is entirely removed. It has no name just yet, and it's shaping up to meld together a couple ideas that had been gestating on the back burner. One based on a dream I had decades ago about the reclamation of a military base by the indigenous locals, and an unrelated story about a genetically modified assassin whose xeno-genetics overload its psyche--the ensuing bloodbath of a killing spree lands it in a maximum security intergalactic prison. It seems ...

The wolf, it mocks me with its laughter. As a kid, I was a nerd. I loved learning, and the scholarly aspect of my formative education was far from a burden -- with the exception of that damned section on quantum mechanics during Physics 2AP my senior year. Anyway, I used to look forward to going back to school. It was a relief from the endless doldrums of summer, for one. Granted, I usually found plenty of time and energy to invest in writing, and going back to school sort of cramped that. And the actual interactions with my peers? No thanks, I could do without that. But all the school supplies. Notebooks, and pens, and erasers, and mechanical pencils...it was enough to make me drool. And yep, it's that time of year again. I really didn't intend to go buy anything. I seriously didn't. I'd splurged on a hoard of writing utensils earlier this spring, actually, and didn't need anything. Really. Plenty of space left in the notebooks I've got. I certainly d...

I forgot how exuberantly "puppy" actual puppies are capable of being. I was reminded, yesterday, when I was introduced rather unexpectedly to a yellow lab pup who was all legs and paws and bright blue eyes. I remembered, almost immediately, the entire pack of yellow labs my riding instructor kept at her ranch. They went everywhere together, it seemed, a teeming mass of golden tawniness, happy friendly energy bumbling everywhere, wet noses and slobbery tongues and solid bodies nudging enthusiastically into legs and knees and whatever else was within reach. This puppy was precisely like that, came barreling toward me with no bark of warning or malicious intent. Just a huge pile of happiness as though he could instantly detect that I was someone he wanted to sniff and lick and share his energy with. He came racing after me not once but on four separate instances, which thoroughly baffled his humans because he'd never done anything like it before. Ever. Ah, the innocent ...

As though winter isn't rough enough most of the time, this year Mercury went into retrograde for the entire month of February, and of course, oriented in Pisces. That's my constellation, the one that resonates with me the most--I'm technically an Aquarius/Pisces cusp, but when it comes to art, and writing, the Piscean in me comes to the fore. (The Aquarian side I save mostly for forced social interactions.) At any rate, February was a big fat bust. The most I managed to write on any given day was 100 words, when words came at all. Oftentimes just that much took hours to accomplish. Yet life is cyclic in so many ways, and Mercury relented at last. I could almost feel  the floodgate giving way, the surge of words scourging away the residue built up by weeks of frustration and headdesking. Of course, the parameters of my upbringing demanded this sort of pagan resonance receive disbelief and an "evil" label, so despite the years and distance between us, I still dou...

It's come back to me, and I am so, so very relieved. Back in October, the anthology piece I was writing just...stalled out and died on me. I was struggling with the relational dynamics between the characters, how best to proceed with constructing a believable interplay that would engage some emotional investment from the audience. This project has been excruciating for me on a number of levels, but what I've struggled with most is the faint undertones of questionable consent. Not on a sexual level, but a relational one. The power play between the main characters, the dissonance that occurs. I still don't know if it will have a "satisfying" resolution. But then, I didn't go into this WIP with the expectation of a positive or even satisfying climax taking place. I think I've worked my way around to that much--a satisfying climax, as the case may be--but the resolution that takes place in its aftermath is unlikely to leave the audience with more than the b...