i feel an enormous sense of relief. today, as i've finally finished my folk tale, Be Our Guest, and run it in the amazon kindle machine, where it should be published shortly. it's possible that it will run up against copyright infringement, since i borrowed song lyrics freely, but to me that is fair game - even the title of the book is a song title, but though i'm borrowing the feeling of the song, and using it with all the associations it has for most people, i see it more as a cultural icon, like saying the word imagine. is this not just part of the culture we share? should i get disney's permission to print one of these lyrics (not to mention, about 22 lines more or less). i decided it wasn't necessary. i might have been wrong. in that case, i'll write them right out of the book.

given that the book took months to write, and that it was an enromous ordeal, and that it put me months behind in house projects not to mention other things i've been trying to write - well, all this leads up to the idea that i need to take a little break. maybe not, in the big picture, a break from writing, but more a break from my usual routine. i have done absolutely no marketing in a while, except to respond to comments on the author train which are essentially i-read-one-someone-reads-mine. these are good for me because i spend a lot of time out there waiting for one boy or another, with my phone; i like indie writing; i get ideas from the variety of things out there. it is bad in the sense that it detracts from the projects mentioned above. my total final basic time to write is actually quite limited. i am now figuring out how to allot time better, so that i can do distractable things when i'm likely to be distracted, and undistractable (if there is such a word) - my most precious time - in carefully planned little blocks early in the morning, etc. the problem of course is that i'm not always at my best early in the morning. and also, that i tend to get distracted even when i think i won't.

in some ways i'm disappointed by the latest book. i didn't have the guts to throw myself full-fledged into the many-lovers or LGBTQ trends. I have a really good friend who writes a lot of mixes - fairies have power, yet are gay, etc., and i've read some reverse-harem romances that one could say are at the cutting edge of the genre. you have powers, magic, a coven, lots of steamy sex, empowered women, and soomehow of all their men lovers, some of whom are shifters, none of them ever get jealous. well, that's a fantasy, as one of my characters pointed out. i actually had a main character who wrote shifter novels. it was fun - i like including writers with all their angst - but i just couldn't bring myself to write in that direction with my own folk tale. i had too many other things to say.

i think karma and reincarnation are important topics, so i said my piece about them, or at least had my characters do it. the one liberty i took was that the main characters always understood whatever the animals said. i consider this not so much to be magic, but rather just to be a case of heightened sensitivity, which we all could cultivate if we really wanted to. at one point a monkey berates a guy for behaving in a certain way when he's married. what does a monkey care about marriage? i'm kind of laughing at the traditions here, even without blatantly going against them, but i'm not sure if the amazon censors will pick up on this or not. in fact, i'm fairly strongly doubtful about the whole project altogether. but hey, if it passes through the bowels of their censoring machine, you'll see it here. soon. and on many of these 29 blogs.