Once in a Blue Muse

Friday, March 06, 2026

"Despite Everything, Create"

Button a gift from ZZ Claybourne

Being a writer, I meet a lot of other writers in the virtual confines of social media. Others, I meet on the rare occasions we gather in meat space. One of the writers I met physically before we connected virtually is ZZ Claybourne, AKA Zig Zag, AKA C.E. Young, C. Young, Clarence Young, and Thor MF Jones.

He was wearing the most amazing and lush purple great coat and had a fabulous presence and smile. Of course I had to talk to him and buy a copy of the book he was debuting at the time THE BROTHERS JETSTREAM: LEVIATHAN. (which I absolutely loved!)

I enjoyed the hell out of meeting him and have gone on to enjoy the hell out of all his subsequent books.

But that is not the point of this blogpost.

The button in the photo above is from Clarence and I have looked at it every day since he gifted it to me.

The one thing in this life that belongs to me is my creative imagination. For me, that looks like a few different things: but mainly knitting and crochet, ceramics, and writing. And what the pin's motto means shifts depending on the context.

One day, it may mean create the hell out of things, no matter who is watching/reading/participating. One day it may mean create your weird-ass corner of the world so you have something that belongs only to you, where you can dance badly and joyfully. Another day it means create your big old fuck you to the universe.

I'm crawling toward the finish line for the sequel to LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD. Some days it's a handful of words at a time. 'Cause if you don't know, creating is hard. And when the world is showing its cruelest face, it's even harder.

Sometimes, the thing you're trying to create is like a mean old bass on a line, refusing to be reeled in.

And sometimes it's both.

That's where I've been lately. Stunned nearly mute by the cruelty our species is capable of. And struggling with a story that is just plain difficult.

So at the beginning of the week, I deleted some social media apps from my phone and programmed in a hard limit of 30 minutes a day for others. What I noticed, almost immediately, was my head was full of story instead of dread or static.

I was able to sit with the characters when the writing felt hard instead of looking for an easy dopamine hit.

It feels a lot like magic when the words find their path to the page and snick together in just the right way.

This is me creating. Despite anything. Despite everything.

Come join me. Let's dance.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

Blue Musings is a low volume e-newsletter containing notifications about book releases, sales, recommendations, and free original short fiction in multiple drm-free formats. Your privacy will always be respected.

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

One Year Ago and Today: Why Bother Writing?

Happy 1 year book birthday to Litany

I was starting to make a packing list for this upcoming weekend's Boskone science fiction and fantasy convention in Boston when I realized it's been one full year since LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD was released.

Getting the manuscript from idea to finished novel was a long journey - over six years, in fact. While staying with a project that long can be frustrating, I don't regret the time and effort that went into its creation. Working on this book was, at times, so difficult I tried to abandon it. At other moments, the joy of telling these characters' stories was intoxicating. Ultimately, it challenged me to grow as a writer in ways I had not anticipated.

The story, itself, shifted and morphed in ways I hadn't planned. My initial notes have almost nothing in common with the completed story. They way I see it, this is not a bug, but a feature of the creative process.

This week, the writing internet was rife with critiques and hot takes about AI generated novels. (There was a story in the NYT business section about a romance writer using LLM/Generative AI to write whole novels in under an hour.) My feeling about LLM/generative AI is clear: No. Absolutely not.

As in no, I won't use it. Not in any part of my writing process. I won't reiterate all the ways the tech is energy and water wasting, the way it has been trained on stolen work (my own included), the way it cannot be trusted to output correct and factual information to queries, and many many more arguments you probably have already read hundreds of times.

Could I use LLM/Generative AI tools to write hundreds of novels in the time it took me to complete LITANY? Probably. Aside from any discussion of quality (a loaded word, and one nearly impossible to define), I can honestly say that no LLM could have produced a book as layered and complex as LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD.

Why not? Because this wasn't a story that could have emerged from prompts. Even the questions I grappled with didn't start to become clear until after I had written, deleted, and rewritten the beginning of the story nearly a half dozen times. They continued to deepen and expand all through the drafting process. I literally had to write the book before I could have crafted a prompt to capture even the smallest part of it.

No sophisticated mad-libs program could have found a short cut to that destination.

My main reason for writing is to discover the heart of a story. Sure, having my work sell, win awards, be read, be appreciated and enjoyed is all great, but none of that is possible or even of interest to me without the journey.

And if that journey takes longer than I planned? Well, that's where the journey gets fascinating. That's where all the best adventures and stories come from.

If you are looking for a very human tale, filled with emotion and hope, with earnest characters coping with loss and searching for connection, please give LITANY a try. I have always written the books I needed to read. Perhaps you need this story too.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

Thursday, February 05, 2026

"They may think it's a movement"

The first MTI cap fresh off the needles

Like so many of us, I have been watching - bearing witness - to ordinary citizens being subjected to brutality by their own government. Unlike so many times in history, this isn't happening in some far away country while we sit on our sofas in front our our televisions wallowing in smug satisfaction over our democracy. No. This is our crisis. This is our country falling into ruin before our eyes.

I live in a "blue" state - I put that in quotes because I think that classification of blue vs red states is a false dichotomy. Yes, our nation is fractured, but it's not so easy to delineate where those fault lines are. And it's certainly not purely geography.

And while there have been incidents of ICE disappearing people here in Massachusetts, we have not seen the militarization of our state by swarms of masked armed and booted thugs like Minnesota and Illinois and Oregon and Washington, DC and so many more have.

I feel powerless against this. What can one person do against an impending avalanche except stand there and wait to be swept away?

So, I write letters and leave messages for my elected officials. I donate to mutual aid, activist, and charitable organizations in places that need it most. I have invested my time, energy, and money into my small community because the old hippie saying "think globally, act locally" is still true. Still critically important.

It doesn't feel like enough.

I'm a 62 year old woman recovering from major surgery. I can't put my body on the line in a protest - at least for now. There are stand outs in many of the little communities near me that I have participated in and will go again. Being around even a small group of people who believe as I do that no one is illegal and constitutional rights are granted to all is energizing. These small gathering aren't going to make ICE leave Minneapolis, but they add to the chorus of voices all over the US saying this isn't right. And that's important.

This week, protest has looked like a lot of red yarn on knitting needles and crochet hooks. I attend a weekly knitting group made up of mostly other post-menopausal ladies with white hair. We are just ordinary women. Making items for our loved ones and ourselves. We bring in our works in progress to ooh and ahh over. I am working on mastering cables. Another woman, toe up socks knitted two at a time, Still another, stranded colorwork.

We are setting aside those projects and making the "Melt the Ice" red protest hat.

Does it matter?

I think it does. I think seeing a handful of woman walking around town wearing tasseled peaked red hats is a symbol. And when each of those women make several more hats (I'm on number 3) and more and more people walk around wearing them? Well, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie from 'Alice's Restaurant' well, "they may think it's a movement."

I understand why there are some criticizing this as merely performative. But for one thing, the pattern has been purchased by thousands and thousands of yarn artists with all the proceeds going to support immigrants in Minnesota. (You can buy the pattern here.) That's not nothing. Several hundred thousand dollars and going strong. But mostly, here's what I think: We need to show who we are and what we believe. Staying silent in the face of evil is evil. And if one person stops me and asks, "hey, what's with all the red hats," maybe that's a chance to divert the avalanche.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

Sunday, January 25, 2026

Radical Empathy; Fierce Kindness

Gigi - our dog who, like Aloka, brings peace to our hearts

The contrast between my internal life and the external world is stark. Painful. It's not as if I don't know what's happening in places like Minneapolis and all the other cities where innocent people are being terrorized by uniformed thugs. It's not as if I don't write my elected officials, make calls, go to local rallies, provide money to mutual aide. It's not as if I don't witness, horrified, as executions are taking place on our streets and we are being lied to at a scale that feels apocalyptic.

I live in a tiny, rural town on 50+ acres of woodlands. It is a place of profound quiet. The chatter of birdsong and rushing water. The wind through trees. The call of coyotes. On clear nights, the stars are intensely bright.

It's hard to reconcile that peace with the horror. How can both of those things exist at the same time in the same world? And yet, it has always been so. That is the terrible irony of being human - that we are capable of such beauty and such cruelty.

During the same weeks as Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered, I have been following the journey of a group of Buddhist monks as they walk from Texas to Washington DC spreading a message of peace. One of the aspects of their walk that has captured my heart is the story of Aloka, the Peace Dog. Aloka was a stray dog in India that began to travel with the monks, adopting them as his charge. The photos of him and the Monks caring for him illustrates some of the best of humanity. There is power in the simplicity of caring.

I weep for Renee and Alex. For their loved ones. Their friends. The lives they touched. She was a poet. He was an ICU nurse. Decent people trying to make the world around them a better place. Their passion and caring didn't protect them. It makes me want to rage in fury at the unfairness of it all. It makes me afraid.

I have two sons who are kind and lovely people. The type of people like Renee and Alex. They, too, have spoken out against fascism. They, too, have been to protests. I could see either of them doing what Renee or Alex had done - witnessing and protecting because it is the right thing to do.

Doing the right thing will not save us.

Empathy and kindness are not shields against bullets.

And yet.

Without radical empathy, without fierce kindness, we have no humanity.

I don't want anyone's child or partner or parent or friend in harm's way.

Doing the right thing will not save us.

And yet.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.
Blue Musings is a low volume e-newsletter containing notifications about book releases, sales, recommendations, and free original short fiction in multiple drm-free formats. Your privacy will always be respected.