Under the Surface

Remember when  I shared some of the cinquain poems  I've been writing? Well, that grew into a collection of 42 poems!  (The cover of the collection of poems by LK Nesse titled Little Things . A purple background with the title, author's name, and three outlines of star shapes in soft white.) You can get the collection as both epub and pdf  through itch. io , or for the same price from  my ko-fi .  The few poems I shared before are included in this collection. Obviously, that's not 42 poems, so what else is in there? Most of them are about things like communication in relationships, frustration when people don't follow directions, love of lakes and oceans, and thoughts about deciding to release a collection of poems into the world. It starts, though, with explanations of the formats written as poems. For example, here's the explanation of the butterfly cinquain: Just two syllables in the middle will attach a line of eight to another line of eigh...

I want to tell you I'm taking the winter off from working on anything other than promoting what I've already put out. I want to make it sound like life is so luxurious that I can just take several months off and do that "picture perfect holidays with family" thing. But I think one of my cinquain poems gives a more accurate expression of what winter often is for me.  The earth sleeps. Families prepare to celebrate. The neurons in my brain say we are doomed. Winter is most definitely not  "the most wonderful time of the year" for me. Holidays add stress to it, and I don't even have a mountain of social obligations piled up with the gifts. (I'm thankful for that. Please do not send me your social obligations. I'm good with what I've got.) Writing is work, but it's also therapeutic for me. I will keep writing through the winter. And, seriously, maybe I don't want to make it sound like everything is so ridiculously luxurious. I'd eithe...

Have I ever told you the pirate story? If you know me outside of the Internet, there's a pretty good chance that I've pulled a deck of cards out and told it in person. If you've been following me long enough, you may have seen me go through it on one social media platform or another over the years.  I don't do videos, so we're going to use photos for this. Grab a deck of playing cards and follow along so you'll know I didn't just lay out whichever cards I wanted to! Maybe you'll even decide to tell the story yourself at some holiday gathering. If your deck has Jokers, take them out for this. You'll want the cards put in order for each suit. If you're looking at the stacked up, the Ace should be on top, then 2 through 10, Jack, Queen, and King. I guess the King has to carry the weight of everything in his domain. It doesn't matter what order you put the suits in, but I like to alternate the colors. A deck of cards with one suit spr...

I'm knitting a blanket. Again. I don't mean that I'm knitting another blanket, but that I've gone back to working on a blanket that was put away for a few years. I'm going to talk about sports for a minute, but stick with me. It all comes together.  I'm not a sports person. I've always been that one person in groups of family and friends that just doesn't care about any sport. I at least understand baseball. Okay, I understand the basics of it. I figure not caring about sports fits in with not caring about watching gamers streaming games, and being mostly immune to doomscrolling and Fear of Missing Out. I've got my own stuff to do, so I don't want to watch other people do stuff and can walk away from what everybody else is doing if it isn't my thing. With sports, I've never been able to understand team loyalty, or "we won". We? You weren't playing! The people on the team won! That's been my whole life until this year. No...