Reclaiming Mother's Day is up at The Witches' Voice.
That one was so bloody hard to write - I don't know why. I had the idea, but chipping the image from the stone was very tedious this time. The prose felt....labored (pun intended). Still does.
I'm very pleased with the book lists, which I think will come as a help to some and a revelation to others.
It's too long. They are always too long. I try to do too much.
But I do like the section on Dysfunctional Family Feud. I'm going to return to that theme again in other essays and I'll feature that link to Anodea Judith's essay on dysfunctional Pagans and group energy again as often as I can. That unspoken, often unconscious issue of codependency, emotional baggage, acting out, and ego-run-riot tends to ruin more Pagan groups and cause more heart ache among us than anything else I know. It's not the outsiders who do the real damage, it's the unhealthy ones in our own circles we need to watch out for....
I'm happy with discussion of the Goddess Mother Paradox. The Goddesses here were very deliberately chosen for certain aspects. I brought the Reader to the shoreline. Swimming down to the depths is now up to them.
I also hope that people find Sandra Stanton's website from the link via her painting, Rhea. I like how powerful her women look, and it was very nice of her to let us use the art.
Challenges:
Dio and Fritz were great, as usual; patient and funny, very competent and kind. It's a privilege to work with people who care so much and who play at that level.
Even so, I found this last production very challenging. Fritz has, for every good reasons, put in a form that he wants people to use for essay submissions. The days when I could send Dio a Word doc already set to my specs are over. It's no longer "We few, we happy few" but a massing horde who submit essays to them now, (and good for them!). They have to find a way to deal with the overwhelming work load this site creates. The form works well as such because Fritz is a very good designer, but it doesn't work well for me. I think it's because the form is designed for Op Ed pieces, not for pieces like mine that have lots of links and books lists. So I found it hard going.
Dio was splendid. She helped me figure out the html to put in bolds and italics (I'm a Word Geek, not a Web Mistress) and this helped a lot.
I hate code. I'm dyslexic and find editing words hard enough. Code... code is just cruel. How can you find mistakes in something that makes no sense to the eye? My partner can do it - he reads it like another language. It's just so much gibberish to me.
I found that spacing on that form is also hard to deal with, as the form is narrow and not set up like a word page. I like form and function. My spacing is designed to draw the reader's eye a certain way, and to inhance the rhythm. It's hard for me to "see" the total flow on a smaller format. So it goes.
I also like embedded links, which is the professional way to offer this information. The new set-up at Vox put the links next to reference, which I find clunky, hard to read and amateurish looking. There must be a better way to do this - I'll ask Dio.
Dio offered to do that work for me, but we were running short on time thanks to me, and I felt that she had already done a great deal, so I set the links myself.
I will ask Dio if there is a way to fix that link issue on my end without creating more work for her. And I will order HTML for Dummies (yeeeeeetchhh!). (1)
The form also times out after 15 minutes. There is probably some good reason for this, but I felt a pressed for time - I didn't want to do all that set up, just to have it blow up in my face near the end.
But I got it down. I felt so good about finishing it that I treated myself to a five hour hike with Owl Moon...and now, I hurt. Much do I hurt. Owl may look like a Hobbit but she can hike me right into the ground.
Sia
(1) Thank Goddess someone invented DreamWeaver. I'm taking classes in that now, and I really like it. For non-coding types, it's a geat way to build a website.
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