Category Archives: nature
Kill Me, by Alex Owens is now available on iTunes!
Finally! The first book in the new Blood Chordseries, Kill Me, is available on iTunes via the iBook store. I’d post a link directly to it, but I can’t figure out how to snag the link 
If anyone knows how to snag a direct book link from iBooks, I’d sure love to know!
Hope everyone has a fabulous weekend! The Hubs, Kiddo’s and I are off to an extended weekend of relaxation in the mountains of VA! I’m going to sit by a waterfall and zone out… even if it kills me 
Source: alexmody.com via Karen on Pinterest
Book Review – Happier Than a Billionaire by Nadine Hays Pisani
After seeing this author and book on various sites for writers and indie authors, I went on a mission to track it down over on Amazon. My journey was not in vain.
Happier Than A Billionaire is one womans story of chucking it all and moving to Costa Rica. I mean, come on, who hasn’t considering doing something equally zany? I certainly have, though lately it’s become something more of an obsession than a crazy notion.
Let me just say, I adore this author, who writes with moments of clarity and wit, bracketed by comedic timing. She spins an entertaining tale, while calling out others to reconsider the way they are living. If something makes you miserable, why on earth would you continue to do it? Exactly.
Even if you’re not considering a move to a tropical locale, I’d still reccomend Happier Than A Billionaire to just about anybody. It’s quirky, fun, and well worth the tiny price tag!
Margaret Fuller – A Woman Before Her Time
Born in 1810, Margaret Fuller was one of the most influential personalities in early American literature. As a writer, lecturer, and editor of The Dial, transcendentalism’s premier publication during it’s first two years, Margaret influenced the transcendentalist movement and is noted as being one of the earliest founders of women’s liberation.
Forced through her education by her father, Margaret’s health floundered, but did, in fact, give her a broad knowledge of literature and languages. Margaret held conversation classes in Boston, for society women on social and literary topics. As an ardent feminist, Margaret published her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845, which dealt with feminism and its relation to economic, intellectual, political, and sexual ideals. As a forerunner of transcendentalism, Margaret edited the Dial, for its first two premier years, during 1840 to 1842.
Other writers, who were her compatriots and contemporaries, used Fuller as characters in their own novels, so thought-provoking was she. Fuller has been identified as Zenobia in the Blithedale Romance, by Hawthorne and she is easily recognizable as Miranda in James Russell Lowell’s the Fable for Critics.
In response to her favored Summer on the Lakes in 1843, Horace Greeley called Margaret to New York City, and she became the first literary critic of the New York Tribune. Her Papers on Literature and Art (1846) were later reprinted from her work there.
In 1847, Fuller went to Rome, fell in love, and married the Marchese Ossoli, who was a devoted follower of Mazzini. Fuller joined her new husband in the Revolution and corresponded to New York, describing the situation for Tribune readers. Sadly, while traveling home from abroad in 1850, the ship that her and her family (for by then she had given birth to a baby boy) was on sank off of Fire Island, N.Y.
The entire family drowned. Her incomplete works were later republished by her brother. How sad it is that the world lost a great progressive thinker so early in her prime!
Some of my favorite quotes of Fuller’s are:
-What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.
-Humanity is not made for society, but society is made for humanity. No institution can be good which does not tend to improve the individual.
-Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
-Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
And while Fuller had such notable published works, such as At Home And Abroad Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe, and Woman in the Nineteenth Century,one of my favorite passages can be found in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, as Margaret so poetically describes visiting Niagara Falls in the moonlight:
“It was grand, and it was also gorgeous; the yellow rays of the moon made the broken waves appear like auburn tresses twining around the black rocks. But they did not inspire me as before. I felt a foreboding of a mightier emotion to rise up and swallow all others, and I passed on to the terrapin bridge. Everything was changed, the misty apparition had taken off its many-colored crown which it had worn by day, and a bow of silvery White spanned its summit. The moonlight gave a poetical indefiniteness to the distant parts of the waters, and while the rapids were glancing in her beams, the river below the falls was black as night, save where the reflection of the sky gave it the appearance of a shield of blued steel. No gaping tourists loitered, eyeing with their glasses, or sketching on cards the hoary locks of the ancient river god. All tended to harmonize with the natural grandeur of the scene. I gazed long. I saw how here mutability and unchangeableness were united. I surveyed the conspiring waters rushing against the rocky ledge to overthrow it at one mad plunge, till, like toppling ambition, o’erleaping themselves, they fall on t’other side, expanding into foam ere they reach the deep channel where they creep submissively away.”
Fuller had a certain poetical love of nature, and found the most intriguing ways to paint a literary picture. It is this vivid love and observation of nature, that I am sure help to make her one of the influential Transcendentalist of her time.
FOR MORE ON MARGARET FULLER
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Living Vicariously vs. Living
Okay, so I’m guilty of the above. Living vicariously, that is. I found this blog a few days ago and I can’t get the whole notion out of my head. You see, this woman, this mother of a young child, this brave, crazy, loving wife, is sorting through all of her possessions for the sole purpose of keeping only what she can carry. That thought alone just sends me in to a consumeristic shock.
But hold on to your shorts, there is a method to her madness. You see, she is removing herself from all that ails her and is relocating her family to the jungle, where meals will be months in the planning, and living in and of itself will become a an act of purposeful determination.
I have to say, my curious nature will keep me checking the blog for updates and in between, I’m sure, will see me daydreaming my way to Belize as well.
I was doomed from the beginning, with the blog’s opening quote, “Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
Yes, this mad woman has found a kindred soul in me. And I wish her well!
Fall on Your Knees
I had a poem published and wanted to share. It was one of those situations where I was minding my own business, probably surfing Facebook, when a poem up and wrote itself in my head over a matter of a few minutes. And this was the result.
The online literary journal, by BellaOnline was taking submissions for its publication Mused. Most of my fiction is not Pollyanna enough for the general public, but some of my poems are, so I sent in the aformentioned Manna-from-Heaven and what do you know? It was accepted. I guess the lesson her is to never look a Gift Poem in the mouth
On another note, perhaps it was during a similar excursion like this one, when I conjured those words via inspiration. Here, I’m looking down at a few of the wild ponies on Assateague Island, just few minutes from my hometown.
