Spring Music and Writing

Happy Spring!  It's that time of year when the mystery of new beginnings is upon us.  Or something.

I finally feel like I've got my brain back from this cold and sinus infection.  Now all I have to do is wait for the antibiotics to flush out of my system so that I can go out into the sun without worrying about being too photosensitive -- at least with all the rain we're getting, overexposure to sunlight hasn't been much of an issue.  I plan to hit the gym for the first time in about two and a half weeks.  It's funny how quickly the bicycle tire returns.

In my wanderings around Spotify, I've discovered a Danish band, called Heilung which is apparently pigeon holed into the Neofolk (folk-inspired dark ambient music) genre.  After listening to Alfadirhaiti , which I like, I decided I needed to make sure that I understood what the lyrics meant.   Because the title starts with "Alf", I thought it might have something to do with Scandinavian Elves.  But a quick perusal of a lyric site revealed that it was a hymn to Odin.  "Alfadir" probably translates to "All-Father."   Quickly zipping through their site, they have an artists' statement saying they are setting pre-Christian inscriptions to music and disavowing modern attempts to link their work to current political or religious movements (i.e. "we're not Neo-pagan Nazis, we're just using old Viking texts").   Whew.

On the writing front, I went through and collected a stack of  unfinished manuscripts.  Some simply need minor tweaks and then I  can send them out.  One is a fairy tale I need to look at  and cut out the excessive gingerbread and up some  stakes.   One is an  Arthurian romance  that loses steam and I need to up  the stakes; since I chose Sir Palamedes as a main character, I have to address his status as a Saracen (in the original stories, he's a virtuous Pagan knight who eventually converts), which means I have to be careful as a white-bread-Corvallis-boy, raised-Episcopal-turned-NeoPagan, Oregonian writer.   The more I research Sir Palamedes, the more I'm realizing that he's a complex character, and I'm not at the place where I can write from his point of view.

In other writing news, one of my stories placed in the "Space" edition of On The Premiss, so I took the family out for celebratory pizza.  Yay!