Friday fortune: Transformation

I almost forgot my new weekly feature. The day is almost over, but the card I ended up drawing is the sort of card that's best to contemplate overnight anyway.

Card of the Day: The Hanged Man

It's interesting that I chose this card just now. I just finished watching this week's episode of Supernatural, which featured a phoenix. And here on the Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg's Hanged Man, the phoenix (or Firebird) is featured prominently, sitting atop the apple tree from which the hanged man is suspended. (And I just got done complaining on Twitter about how the writers of Supernatural used the phrase "hung by the neck until dead" in that episode, which is a pet peeve of mine. It should be "hanged.")

I love this kind of odd little synchronicity.

The traditional meaning of the card is the suspension of will, a period of inactivity in which the querent has no choice but to remain still and contemplate where she is on her path. As the Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg companion book puts it in one of my favorite phrases: it's the dark night of the soul, a period of doubt that precedes profound change.

The phoenix, too, is a symbol of profound change, experiencing the dark night of the soul in as profound a manner as possible: the total destruction of the self. But it also promises a glorious renewal, the phoenix rising from the ashes.

The other addition to this card, the apple tree, is a reference to the Russian folk tales of the Firebird in which a tsar's son proves himself to his father by watching over the orchard to catch the creature devouring his father's apples. Ivan Tsarevich faces a literal dark night, but stays faithfully on watch, rewarded by plucking a feather from the Firebird that ultimately allows him to defeat an evil sorcerer. The apples are at once a Christian symbol (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from which Eve ate) and a pagan symbol of the goddess, representative of Kore descending into Hades.

In another bit of synchronicity, the Firebird, or Zhar-Ptitsa, is a key element in the books I'm writing now in the Queen of Hell trilogy.  This mythical creature becomes a symbol of my fiery heroine, Ola. Ola is my version of Kore.

I can only say what the card represents for me. Each person has to experience the dark night of the soul for herself, and as writers we may have many such nights. We certainly have to give them to our characters. But I love that this spoke to me so personally about where I am at this moment. It's this kind of synchronicity that makes me wonder about connections and the nature of reality. It's very Philip K. Dick.

Jane Kindred

Weird science

One of the fun things about being a writer is the strange places research can take you. In editing a single page, I may fact-check anything from the name of a district in St. Petersburg to death rattles to whether bodies make noise after death. Yes, you read that correctly: whether bodies make noise after death. Google is my friend. I typed it right in there, and I came up with this:

Pushing 50 in the Death Car, Life's Blood: Dead Bodies Make Noises

Darn; I so wanted to embed that, but it said no. Anyway, it's a series of videos by an embalmer about what happens with our bodies after we die. If you're squeamish, don't worry, this particular video doesn't contain any dead bodies. But really, if you're squeamish you probably shouldn't be here, because it's only going to get worse. ;)

After learning about postmortem exhalations, I looked up "death rattle" and found this interesting page:

Pulmonary Breath Sounds: Actual recordings of various kinds of breathing, from normal to pathological.

What started all this? I wanted to describe a character's moan as being somehow like a sound from a corpse...or something well on its way to being a corpse. I ended up going with "stridor," the word I'd started out with as my placeholder. It may have been a complete circle, but as always it was a fascinating trip.

Like Lisa in Weird Science, I often find myself asking my characters, So, what would you little maniacs like to do first?

*Hey, look, another picture of Robert Downey, Jr., you little maniacs. (71% of the traffic on my blog is now from people looking for his picture. But I'm guessing they weren't looking for that one.) Or this one:

OMG, the 80s hair!

Friday fortune: Renewal

On Wednesday, I blogged over on Here Be Magic about using the tarot for plotting. It got me thinking it might be fun to feature a weekly tarot post here, so I've pulled one card for the day from the Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg.

Card of the day: The Star

Traditionally the card of hope, in the Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg there are additional elements that refer to the continuity of the cycle of rebirth of the soul (the empty clothes on the bank, the butterfly), and triumph over a seemingly hopeless situation (the Napoleonic army tents in the background). In this context, hope becomes the certainty of renewal. As Napoleon wrote of the Russians after his failed attempt to conquer them, "What savage determination! What a people! What a people!" Yes, Russians would rather burn their own cities to the ground than submit to a foreign invasion, no matter how relentless. Talk about murdering your darlings.

The Star follows the upheaval of The Tower in the tarot hierarchy. The message for today, then, is that though things may have been all atumble yesterday—maybe you thought that synopsis was going to be the death of you, or you fell in a plot hole so deep you couldn't see light—we've managed to survive the breakdown of everything we thought was important. Today we have a new vision of reality and a fresh start. We pour our souls into our writing, so let the words flow, and they'll return as something new that wouldn't have become clear without The Tower's disruption.

Write with savage determination.

Jane Kindred

Throwing Chora

So an interesting thing developed while I was writing the Queen of Heaven series. The beginning of The House of Arkhangel'sk opens on a card game. It was one of the first images I had of this world: a den of "iniquity" in heaven, where an angel of the ruling House of Arkhangel'sk, disguised as a local in heaven's ghetto, played cards with a demon. I thought my demons should have a deck of cards more suited to heaven than earth, so I invented one that used the angelic orders in four suits for the cardinal elements, and called the game "wingcasting." (Don't ask me where the name came from. It's lost in the primordial soup of the book's beginnings. All I remember is that I was looking for Victorian card games, and something put this combination of words into my head, and it stuck.)

The game is played much like poker, but to make it more complicated, I added a twelve-sided die with a different animal representing one of the four cardinal elements on each face. The play of each hand is preceded by a cast of the die, giving one's opponent the opportunity to call out a symbol before it lands. If that symbol appears on the face, the casting player must surrender a card. If it doesn't, the opponent must increase his bet to continue to play.

This was all well and good, and deliciously impossible to win. My naughty demon Belphagor became a master player—through both skill and tricks—and beat the pants off my little angel. (Or rather, beat the pants onto her...well, you'll have to read it.)

Little did I know, there were other demons hanging around the slums of Raqia who used the cards for something else entirely. One demon in particular likes to keep things from me until she springs them on me at the last minute out of the blue, and she was busy turning this harmless little deck of cards into a much more useful tool. Thus the divination system called the Chora (for the choirs of angels depicted on the cards) was born. More than just a device for fortune-telling, it became a means of communicating between the spheres, when such practicalities as the Internet and cell phones could not be had in my late-Victorian Heaven.

Why am I telling you all this? Heavens, I don't know. You're the one who came to the blog; don't blame it on me. What do you want, pictures of half-naked tattooed men every day? Well...okay, then!

Oh, and I'll be blogging over at Here Be Magic tomorrow about plotting with the tarot.

Of plum blossoms and body ink

Several years ago when I finished writing my first novel I started a tradition: each time I finished a book, I would get a tattoo. The first tattoo was my blue moon. This was for my novel Blood Maiden, and represents a carving on a dagger that one of the characters carried (though hers had a blood moon instead of a blue), as well as representing the (erroneous) popular definition of a blue moon as the second full moon in a calendar month.

In addition, it represents my connection with my mother, who died when I was 14. In college I chose "Blue Moon" as one of my performance pieces for voice class, and when I went out for dinner with my father for my 21st birthday, I happened to mention it as I was ordering my first-ever alcoholic beverage with Dad, my new favorite: a rum screwdriver. My father stared at me for a moment and said, "that was your mom's favorite drink," and then when I mentioned the song, "your mom sang that in college." Ever since then, the image of a blue moon made me feel connected to her, so the tattoo seemed fitting. I don't drink too many rum screwdrivers anymore, but the tattoo is forever. ;)

My second novel was Anamnesis, and for reasons too complicated to explain, Isis and Kali became symbols of the divine feminine for me during the emotional upheaval of writing that manuscript. So for Anamnesis, I created my own version of a tyet or "Isis knot."

The two Sanskrit characters framing it represent the bija "seed sound" mantras for Agni (fire): hum, and Kali: krim. With these three symbols together, I was invoking the ultimate in kick-ass goddess protection. After a thwarted assault by a stranger while I was walking home from the BART station one day after work, I felt I was in need of it. It has stood me in good stead ever since.

In 2005, I finished my first draft of The Devil's Garden. At the time, I thought a matching tattoo for the tyet would be appropriate: the djed. These are the two symbols carved on the pillars of pharaohs' tombs. I came up with a design for it, but was never happy with it. I even received tattoo gift money for my birthday from two dear friends who insisted I go and get it. But I just couldn't seem to get motivated to rework the design until I was happy with it, and it languished in a folder of "things to do."

After finishing up the final line edits for TDG last night, I decided to do an image search for Belphagor from the Arkhangel'sk books to go along with the Vasily images I found recently. While browsing tattooed models, I came across a tattoo of plum blossoms, and suddenly it hit me: the plum blossom sprig is the perfect symbol for TDG. It's the symbolic proof of the divine that Ume (whose name means "plum" in Japanese) receives from the Meer—and not just a plum blossom sprig, but one covered in snow. Like the symbols in Anamnesis that I later discovered were common in Middle Eastern mythology and religion, this detail was something I thought I'd invented, and yet while searching for plum blossom imagery, I discovered the blossoms often do indeed bloom while still covered in snow.

While I work on the design for my new tattoo, I've been looking at pictures of plum blossoms on the Web. Here are a few of my favorites:

[gallery link="file" orderby="ID"]

Hmm. The WP gallery insists on including the two tattoo pictures in this display. When I take them out here it deletes them from above as well. Ah, well.

With a Bit of a Mind Flip, You're into the Time Slip

Ever feel like you're living in a very odd, alternate reality? Sometimes it seems I've fallen into Frederik Pohl's There Will Be Time or Richard Bach's One, or anything by Philip K. Dick. I have the niggling suspicion that I took a wrong turn, or a thousand wrong turns, and every subsequent action further tangles the continuum. Eh. Maybe it's just PMS.

Whatever it is, it's accompanied by a sort of "waiting for the other shoe to drop" anxiety, as if at any moment the curtain will be pulled back (or the false skin on the prophet's mutant face) and the wrongness of it all will come spilling out like a pile of maggots on a sloughing corpse. Yeah, I'm in a mood.

I suppose writing until 2:00 a.m. and sleeping until 10:00 a.m. and waking with a massive sinus headache to a dismally grey fogged-in May morning hasn't particularly helped my state of mind. Also, the fact that I want to finish the novel I'm working on, finish my novella's pre-edits, and finish up three months' worth of work projects before I leave for my cruise next week may be putting a tad bit of pressure on me. Without pressure, though, I accomplish nothing.

Still, it isn't just today. It's that on days like today it's impossible to ignore the idea that everything around me is a prop in an elaborate farce. I used to think about that a lot as a kid. Sitting in church, where I got all of my weird, creative ideas as my mind wandered away from the pulpit, I would look around and think, "What if none of this is really happening? What if I'm not really here, not really doing any of this, and everyone else is in on it?" And then I'd think, "What if I'm just a memory of this moment?" And I am, now—or at least the ten-year-old me having that thought is. And that's pretty unnerving.

Bah. I think I'll go get some coffee and set off another hundred alternate realities, and leave the rest of this to Stephen Hawking.