Glow.

[mrissa]

yhlee asked for her friendslist (or, I suppose, other people reading her entry) to tell her something luminous. I talked about a moment from last evening. I felt like I just had to stick my hand out to find one, and if I'd put my hand in another direction there would have been another luminous thing there and waiting. Even when I'm exhausted, frustrated, having weird health crap, this is where I live. Not just the streets and buildings and parks from War for the Oaks but the light as well, the glow.

If you think I'm not profoundly grateful for that every day of my life, you're mistaken.

I didn't write much today, but I picked up The Mark of the Sea Serpent and wrote the sea giantesses coming out of the waves around the boat on Distingen, grey-green hair and hands and great booming laughs of frightening affection for their little pinkish sisters, and then I had to do the parallel bit with the sea serpent itself coming up, and I saw why the daughters of Ran had come into it in the first place. And it made me feel as though my entire writing career has been wandering around getting me to a sea voyage so I can do what CS Lewis did to me in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, because I don't think I've ever gotten over the sea serpent there, not for a minute of the last twenty-three years or so. Part of me stopped there transfixed and is there to this day, like the altered Sampo salting the sea.

Do you see? This is like breathing for me, the salting mill in the sea, the daughters of Ran out of the waves. This is how I think, and it all goes together with making sure the mortgage payment goes in on time and the fridge has milk in it, because by the time someone told me it was different stuff, it was already too late.

It was a good question Yoon asked. Where are you finding your luminous bits now?