moon, mutable orb
pitch ceaselessly waxes, wanes
tides ever tuning
~
I love to revisit old work and see what I might tease from it. Is this an improvement or something entirely new? I’ll let you decide. The original:
light, vacillating
orb waxes, fills, wanes, renews
still, daily moves tides
~
Play on, fellow wordsmiths.
~ Tanya
as always: photo and words©️2024 Tanya Cliff
A photo share:
Photos ©️2024 Tanya Cliff
With a novel being queried to agents and a half-dozen short stories on submission to various lit mags, I find my mind drifting too frequently to that part of the writing business that exists outside of my control. The successes are exciting and exhilarating. But rejections are a part of this journey. Knowing that fact only lessons the sting. It still hurts.
I’m managing my anxiety through time with family and friends—laughter is truly the best medicine—and yoga. Yoga is a practice that melds body, mind, and soul through breath. It is calming and restorative, building strength and balance. Even a few minutes of yoga practice can be centering and grounding, refreshing and reinvigorating.
Yoga also serves as a reminder to me to focus on the part of the writing business that I do control: the daily practice of putting words to the page. The greatest achievement here is simply showing up.
In that spirit, I am diving like a dolphin into my next novel draft. It’s a project I’ve been churning around for a long time. The characters are compelling and keep pulling me back. The plot, as it’s developing, is thickening…swelling. I’m swimming in words. Making waves. I feel refreshed and reinvigorated. I’m writing…a new book.
Tanya
Thrilled to have my story named to Fractured Lit’s Anthology Prize Longlist. The titles alone have me excited! Congrats to all the anonymous nominees.
https://fracturedlit.com/fractured-lit-anthology-volume-4-longlist/
For the second year in a row, I’m a judge for the BookTube Prize in Fiction. Pictured is my current group of books, which I can’t comment on until the judging is completed. This year, I am striving to read all forty-eight fiction entries. It’s a great list and contains some authors and titles I might have otherwise overlooked.
Coolest of all, I’m joined in judging this prize by several hundred book-obsessed people from more than thirty countries. It’s exciting!
You can learn more at BookTube Prize’s Instagram here (link in bio to the YouTube channel)
Baba Yaga, her house ever spinning, casts dizzy spells: multiplies weeds’ thorns, exterminates unicorns, allows toxic fungus to fester, boils it in her tea. She piles her human-boned boundary sky high, ten thousand eye sockets blazing.
None can enter.
She’s grown weary of peasants’ petitions: food, shelter, clothes, cures. Endless. (Although, if pressed, she’d confess to finding revenge requests amusing.)
But now, her garden rots, unweeded. Her tunic needs mending. Her chicken-toed shoes stir up her floor’s thick dust. She coughs, covers her warty nose with her head scarf, exposes her balding crown.
Deprived of tender company, Baba Yaga starves.
words and photography ©️2024 Tanya Cliff
Inceptive thaw sensed
Embryos shed old seed coats
then, naked, ascend
words and photography ©️2024 Tanya Cliff
A newly divorced portrait painter retreats to the abandoned and secluded mountain home of a famous artist in hopes of healing and rediscovering his passion for art. Seeking the source of a strange noise in the attic, he discovers a masterpiece wrapped in paper and inexplicably tucked away from the world’s view.
As he unwraps the painting, he reveals a mystery and sets in motion a series of strange happenings. His journey to discover the truth will lead him on a dangerous journey to the underworld.
In this brilliant novel translation, released as two books in Japan, Murakami transcends narrative expectation (if there is such a thing) to envelop the reader in a world that is literal in its loneliness, palpable in its characterizations of person and place, and yet deeply haunting and surreal. The novel weaves subtle threads of suspense, gradually pulling them until the tension, taut as the strings of a highly pitched guitar, bind this reader; I can’t look away. I don’t dare. Following the first-person protagonist, I must travel deep into the netherworld. I must know how it ends.
In Killing Comendatore, Murakami lures his readers to a spellbinding place. It’s easy to convince a reader that the sky is blue. Murakami convinces me that the sky is a gateway to an alternate reality, one as expansive as the universe, as dark as death, as bright and tiny as the tinkling of a small bell.
This is what I am reading this Wednesday.
What’s on your read pile? I’m always looking for a good, next book suggestion. All genres welcome.
Best, Tanya
Snow slowly melts.
Frigid rivulets
form dangling daggers.
Moonlight, through jagged reflections,
flashes pointed warning—
rising temps release nature’s knives.
©️2024 Tanya Cliff
It’s been a while since we’ve seen this much snow in the Driftless Region. The husky is happy! It’s also been too long since I’ve connected with my WordPress friends and family.
In case you were wondering where I’d run off to, I’ve been working full-time on my MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. That, and balancing work and family responsibilities. Thrilled to announced I crossed the thesis threshold in December and have graduated 🎓. I’ve learned so many things about writing, life, and myself on this journey, some of which I hope to share as we get caught up over coffee and maybe a good book or two.
For now, I’ll express my gratitude toward my family, mentors, and amazing Emerson cohort, without whom I wouldn’t have gotten to the finish line. Of course, it’s really the beginning of the next adventure. Glad to have you along for the journey.
Tanya
