Haus of Rhi

For July, the Tarot Rebels Blog Hop focuses on the task of reading with a deck you've not previously used before. I had a few sitting around, actually, and I felt inspired to try each in turn. The exercise became quite revealing, both of the decks and of me as a reader and toward what sorts of decks I intuitively gravitate. For each deck, I employed a different spread, in each case one I'd not used previously. In hindsight, it's entirely plausible this created too many variables and adversely influenced my perceptions of the decks. Spiritual Task, Sevenfold Mystery My first attempt employed Place's Sevenfold Mystery. I'd acquired it for reasons wholly unrelated to actually using it, much like my Hermetic and Azathoth decks. Despite that, I've had others tell me it's a solid performer for them, so I decided to give it a chance. The spread is called Spiritual Tasks, but to be perfectly blunt here, I struggled to take the interpretation seriously be...

I'm thrilled to be taking part in the very first International Tarot Day Blog Hop. For Strength, I've chosen to share an excerpt from my in-progress sequel to Fragile Bond, a military scifi featuring a sapient alien species of bipedal humanoid felines, and a population of humans traveling the stars. XI, Strength. Wildwood (L) and Mary-el (R) tarot decks. "I'm concerned, Zachary. Maybe this isn't such a great idea after all." Cirrus slowed to a halt, his words echoing in my head as his voice rumbled at so low a register it resonated through my breastbone. His whisper didn't bounce off the walls though, unlike the soft thump of our footsteps in perfect cadence. I turned back to grab his arm and drag him in my wake, second thoughts be damned. My fingers slid along the fine white and black stripes of hair on his forearms, and I tightened my grip, finally catching hold of his wrist. "I refuse to let you back out of this at the last possib...

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...

American Crow mobbing Red-tailed Hawk. Source: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/american_crow/id While driving yesterday, I saw three large crows circling above a winter-bare tree. They took turns dive-bombing at a dark shape in the branches. They were persistent, calculating, and energetic. Thankfully traffic was sparse enough to let me slow down a good bit as I got closer. That dark shape was a red-tailed hawk. It didn't seem terribly disturbed by the mobbing crows, but then, even bare the branches kept them from getting too close so it's possible they'd treed it out of the sky. This time of year, with no nests or juveniles to protect, it's rather curious to see crows being hostile. Defending hunting territorial lines, perhaps. Or did the hawk steal their roadkill, maybe? Or they were just being the intellectual assholes that's earned them notoriety in the avian world. All equally possible. Strange omens. It hasn't been that rough a winter, really. ...

Today marks the halfway point for NanoWrimo. Bringing Red's story to life has not been an easy journey thus far, nor is the path likely to become more forgiving in the weeks to come. I've felt more like Frankenstein than a parent. Fashioning from the death, despair, and destruction a miracle of science, not some fresh gift of nature to be molded and formed like wet clay. Largely this is because the first portion of Red's story has lurked in the back of my mind like a ghost limb in the years since Blacker Than Black  came to fruition. She was there, loitering in the shadows, sharp gaze following every shift of inspiration, the ebb and flow of creative energies. Waiting for her time to come. And in the end, she isn't the one telling her story. The task of narrator falls to someone else. She approves of this in ways I cannot begin to describe. For her, it feels like a relief. The pressure has shifted. The performance anxiety no longer exists. She can breathe, and be...

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...

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...

Or, Rhi's Nano-Adventure Begins. Terribly fascinating, the way these things happen. Since I initially began writing this MHT anthology short story, I'd been planning to hammer out the last of it during Nano and have done with it. I desperately want to do a story for this project and despite the obstacles that are arising, my plans to finish it have not changed. However, just as I sat down to write today I read a note from a reader asking about the potential for a sequel to "Blacker Than Black." And in the course of penning my response, Red woke up. No, no. Red didn't just "wake up." Red came roaring to life like a soldier shaken awake by incoming mortar sirens and impacts. It's a good thing that she and I are so familiar with one another or I might have backhanded her into Alpha Centauri. As things stand, however, my Nano-Adventure is off to a roaring, energetic start (which is how these things usually begin, is it not) with 3k already dumped...