Tolkien Birthday Toast, IWSG Day, Writers on the Moon, and Story Snip from Larksong: Chapter 18

he Tolkien Birthday Toast!

"To celebrate Tolkien’s 132nd birthday on 3 January 2024, the Tolkien Society invites all Tolkien fans to raise a toast to the Professor.

 

The Toast

After Bilbo left the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo toasted his uncle’s birthday each year on 22 September.

J.R.R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein on 3 January 1892, and we invite you to celebrate the birthday of this much loved author by raising a glass at 9pm your local time.

The toast is simply:

The Professor!

All you need to do is stand, raise a glass of your choice of drink (not necessarily alcoholic), and say the words “The Professor” before taking a sip (or swig, if that’s more appropriate for your drink). Sit and enjoy the rest of your drink."

Today is also Insecure Writer's Support Group Day!

Insecure Writer's Support Group

A database resource site and support group for writers and authors. Featuring weekly guests and tips, a monthly blogfest gathering, a Facebook group, a book club, and thousands of links – all to benefit writers! 

Website / Facebook Group / Twitter / Book Club
Reedsy Discount / Past Issues

Fast Five Free Gift - Mobi / Epub / Pdf

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!
Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting!
Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!
Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the January 3 posting of the IWSG are Joylene Nowell Butler, Olga Godim, Diedre Knight, and Natalie Aguirre!
 

Every month, we announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say. 

Remember, the question is optional
January 3 question: Do you follow back your readers on BookBub or do you only follow back other authors?

This one's relatively easy -- I'm not really on BookBub! I should go check, see if my books have been featured on there. It's not easy to keep up with all of the different places to be; I'm only just beginning to get used to Bluesky and Mastodon!

And now, a new snip from Larksong!

Larksong is set in Montreal, July 1914.

In chapter 1, Alice, after her grandmother's funeral, arrived at the family cottage to take care of her grandmother's aviary, only to find that her parents had already leased the cottage to another family for the summer.

The only way she could have one more summer in her favourite place was to surreptitiously take on the role of governess to the two young girls...

In chapter 2, we met George, laid up at the hospital with a broken leg. Instead of joining his friends on a Grand Tour of Europe, he's being sent off to recuperate at a rented cottage in the country...

In chapter 3, we returned to Alice's point of view, and saw her bonding with George's younger sisters. Then she got a surprise -- George was arriving at the cottage that very day!

In chapter 4, we had a hint that Alice finds George attractive and interesting -- but also unbearably rude.

In chapter 5, they had their first argument.

In chapter 6, they argued once more, but the stakes were higher: war is on the horizon.

In chapter 7, George attempted a rapprochement. The chapter ended with him asking, "Why don't we both go sit in the parlour?"

In chapter 8, Alice had some feelings stirring...

In chapter 9, during their first evening together, they began to suss each other out over a card game.

In chapter 10, we reached the end of the evening, with harsh words from George, but a détente of sorts before they went their separate ways for the night.

In chapter 11, we started the next morning in George's point of view, with his dawning realization of his attraction to Alice.

In chapter 12, we saw that this realization did not lead to greater friendliness.

In chapter 13 (which I mistakenly also labelled as 12!), a new complication arose, in the form of the arrival of George's rather rude brother.

In chapter 13 (hopefully I won't make any further numbering errors!), George was busy with inappropriate (as he thinks) thoughts of Alice.

(I've skipped a scene where Alice takes the girls down to the lake and needs to pretend with a neighbour, Mrs Chase, that she is not a governess, but simply helping out with the girls. Then, while Alice is distracted, trying to spin her web of half-truths and discussing the threat of war on the horizon, Lucy gets up on a rickety boat tied up at the dock and fell off into the water.)

In chapter 14, on returning from the lake, Alice and the girls overheard an argument that ended with this outburst from George to his brother Albert: "I don't need your tales of self-pity. The question is, what are you going to do about it, now that you've f***ed it all up?"

In chapter 15, we witnessed the fallout from the argument, then shared a moment between Alice and George in the garden.

In chapter 16, Alice left George and resumed her governess role, and decided not to join George and Albert that evening in the parlour.

In chapter 17, Alice went out early the next morning, to find George rowing on the lake, and joined him.

In chapter 18, we view the early morning idyll from George's point of view and consider the age-old art versus artist dilemma...

Yesterday was a great weight on his shoulders.
He'd sat outside till full dark, still hungry despite the plentiful tray,
By starlight he'd climbed the porch steps, breathing hard from the cold.
Unwilling to scrounge for food in the kitchen with his unwieldy leg and even less willing to ask Albert – working out a patience in the parlour – for help, he'd held his breath and moved to his room as quietly as the crutches allowed, and collapsed.
Then woke early with a shooting pain up his leg.
Trying to keep his mind off that had led to this business with the boat. But pulling on the oars was not enough; there was just no way to work off his feelings if he couldn't get out on the ice.
"Not even a field," he muttered.
"Sorry?" Alice drew her gaze from a pair of loons by the shoreline and sent a piercing glance his way.
"Hockey. I miss getting out there, getting into a scrum. Working up a sweat."
"Your leg's on the mend. As soon as the cast's off, you'll have exercises in plenty. Not like TB."
"Were we talking about TB?"
She averted her gaze, this time staring down at the planks as though she could see straight through them, to the trout spinning circles below. "No. I'm sorry. My Gran–"
"She's poorly?"
"She's gone."
"Ah. My condolences."
"Thank you. What I meant...A broken leg isn't like TB. It'll mend."
"Apples and oranges," he snapped, and sculled hard, still seeking a vent for the uselessness that threatened to overwhelm him.
"It's not. I've–I've seen things, as part of charity work I've done. Down in Griffintown."
"You've thrown yourself into the slums?" He looked her over, considering. She seemed so clean, but perhaps she was one of those rare people that could see and hear despicable things, without letting them alter her core. A type he'd read about, but never met before.
"What about artists?" he said abruptly.
She tilted her head, not unlike one of the inquisitive birds in the aviary. "What's the connection?"
"If you're willing to help the outcasts, the down and out, well, I'm assuming some of them are thieves, rascals, what have you. Yet you help them. You, what, feed them? Clothe them? Find shelter in the cold?"
"No more than any person has a right to."
"Exactly! The fact of their being criminals–you can see past that. What about artists? Can you hate an artist but love the art?"
"What would he have done for me to hate him?"
Her questions goaded him to dig deeper. "Not hate, then," he conceded, shipping the oars. "Say he was a thief. Or had opinions you couldn't countenance. Yet his paintings..."
"Has he stopped thieving in order to paint?"
"Would that make it better?"
"It might," she said slowly, as if goaded by him in turn, to articulate her ideas. "He might have repented or redeemed himself. Though, truly, it depends on whether I had first seen his paintings. If I admired his work and only later learned of his personal habits, rather than the other way around–but why do you ask? Do you have a particular artist in mind?"
"Not exactly. I've met quite a few in the last year, and if there is any field in which the practitioners don't run true to type, it's painting."
"I've never met any. I rather thought they were all, well, geniuses." She bent and lowered a hand over the side. "Tortured and genius, like Van Gogh, or a family man and genius, like Monet."
"You give us too much credit," he said, laughing, and laughing again as she dipped a hand in the water then snatched it back with a shiver. "Most are neither here nor there," he added. "But you've only cited Europeans. We Canadians can hold our own."
"You said this past year." She cradled her hand in her lap and the fleeting notion that he might take it in his, to pass on his warmth, tantalised the edges of his thought. "Is that what you studied at university?"
"No. I'm in business." He lowered the oars and sculled them back to the dock, holding the boat close to the side as Alice looped the painter around the nearest bollard.
"I've been sketching here and there," he went on, when she made no move to climb out. "Maybe a painting or two." He downplayed his output, but she wasn't to know that. "I managed to have one admitted to an exhibition at the Art Association of Montreal–"
"Congratulations!"
"Eh? Er, thank you." He paused, savouring the sudden zest of her unqualified commendation. No demands, no commiseration about everything it had cost him to get so far, simply a pure, friendly expression of praise.
His first one ever, as far as he could recall. It tasted sweet, like a tiny bite of a new-baked dessert. He longed to find out how many more such bites he might coax from her–or be worthy of.
"You were saying, at the exhibition," she prompted, then added, "I visited, by the way, if it's the Jackson and Hewton show you're referring to."
"I am! What I was–Wait, what did you think of it?"
"I think you were right in what you said just now; we Canadians can hold our own."
"Most certainly," he said comfortably. "All right, what I was leading up to; artists don't seem to have a type. Good art or bad, they're all unlike. Some are cheats, some are liars, some are afraid of lacking talent, some study and study and never have anything more to show for it than a perfectly sketched hand." He waved aside all his colleagues and acquaintances, everyone he'd ever measured himself against. He'd wanted to know if she could strike gold in everyone and how, when so many seemed unworthy. Now, though, all he wanted was to share with her his most prized possession. "I didn't meet Hewton. But on the second night, not the vernissage but the night after, I met Alexander Jackson."
"What type is he?"
"Generous. His is 'a personality of strength and charm', I heard Krieghoff the gallery owner say and he's right. What you said about genius; I hadn't known genius could share the playing field. On the ice, if you're a cracker, the team rallies round and supports you, but you take each shot by yourself.
"In painting, you're also by yourself, but there's no team, no reason to have anyone about you. Jackson, though, if there was such a thing as a group of artists, he'd be in the thick of it. He talked to me about Hewton, about Harris in Toronto, about the work of others that excited him. He never had an unkind word for anyone and never mentioned himself. Did I say artists didn't have a type? Well, I've never met one before that combined both those qualities, of kindness and selflessness. He spent more time telling me about some old barn out where he lives."
He stopped and looked west across the water, as if he might overlay the woods before them with the paths he'd travelled in Jackson's paintings. "Over that way, a place called Sweetsburg. He drew me a quick sketch, a kind of map, but cartoon-ish, labelling his place, and inviting me down." He paused, and caught her eye for the crux of the matter. "And he talked about my art. Later, on the back of the sketch, I made a note of what he'd said."
"About your paintings?"
"Indirectly. He said, 'This country is glorious but its beauties are unknown, and but waiting for a real live artist to splash them onto canvas. Get off the car track. Chop your own path.'"
He never blushed, but had also never before received unqualified support from someone far ahead on the trail. The thought that Jackson believed him worthy heated his cheeks and he turned aside without waiting for Alice's reaction. He planted his hands on the dock and hauled himself up and around to sit on the planks.
Yet he could not keep from lingering on the wonder of it. "I have it here," he added, as Alice rose to her feet in the boat. "The sketch. I can show you."
"I'd like that." She pushed herself up as he had, but didn't sit beside him, standing a few paces off. "Only, we started by talking of the denizens of Griffintown. What made you think of Jackson and his kindness?"
Taken aback by her perceptivity, he blurted out the truth. "You."

h yes! It's moon time!

 

The Writers on the Moon are sending stories to the moon! Tentative launch date, 8 January 2024!

 

125 Writers on the Moon and 8 Official Stowaways!

Here is an update on the project from author Susan Kaye Quinn! And here are a few blog posts by Susan describing all the behind-the-scenes efforts that went into making this happen:

"The Official README file that went on the payload to explain the project to our future anthropologist

The Making of the Mini Paper Book

The Making of the MoonChip, our hexagonal metal medallion

And finally Shipping to Astrobotic! (and a bonus... we're on Astrobotic's Wikipedia page as an official payload!)"

Subscribe to the newsletter!

View of the spot from Susan's backyard!

Fellow participant Chrys Fey has a great page describing the project.

Writers on the Moon is also mentioned on Wikipedia!

Come join our Facebook group!

 

"Where There's Life", my story on the payload, is now available on Amazon!

You inherit a library card for the Library at Alexandria, and decide to try and visit.
What might you learn there, about your past—and your hopes for the future?

A story inspired by Calliope (Sandman #17) by Neil Gaiman

And here's the trajectory of the journey!

What new events are you excited for in the coming months?