With the release of "The Spiral and The Threads" fast approaching, now's the perfect time to start (or continue) your journey along The Nod/Wells Timelines.
Explore this one-of-a-kind speculative fiction reading experience today!
I am reading the cutest middle grade novel right now. It's called The Lost Library by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass and it's about a boy, a little free library, a couple ghosts, and Mortimer, the library cat. Highly recommend for readers age 8-12.
Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe you know what it's like. To compose a life of scraps and fragments. To live in jumbled lines. Between stitches and tight sentences. In the texture of torn out paper, crumpled and dismayed. All our dead darlings, balled up on the floor.
That's the funny thing about real life, isn't it? We're either always denied the things we want or discovering that we never really wanted them at all. Did you think it wasn't true? You can tell me I'm wrong, but you know it too.
Any moment is every moment. Any day is everyday. What you do with this one, how you hold it, how you view it, how you put it to use, says all you'll ever need to about how'll spend all of them, about who you are, about what'll do, about what you'll be. Whether you'll become something different, or whether you'll stay the same...
Any introvert worth their weight in cancelled plans will tell you, it's easier to slip out early when you've learned to sneak in late. The best part of every guilty pleasure, is the pleasure you get from not feeling guilty when you know nobody sees...
We tell ourselves that we're just one discovery, one uncovering, one goal, one task, one accomplishment, one thing, away from happiness, from contentment, from satisfaction, from rest, from peace. But it never comes, never arrives. We never meet the need...
We seek things. Not for the sake of attaining them. Not in the hopes of actually having them, but only in an effort of avoiding something else. We seek company to avoid solitude, to avoid loneliness. We want power to avoid impotence and vulnerability. Financial success to avoid the feeling of having less, of being less. We try to grab as much as we can to avoid letting go.
From threshold to threshold, we step through entry ways and rooms. Closets, doors, and walls. A residence covered in night. Present and estranged. Familiar and astray. We trace the edges of our openness. The grain of our enclosed space. The parts that have collapsed. Those that remain. The ones that can still be saved.
You sit at your desk. You read what's been written. You stop. You stare. And then, you start to wander, aimlessly. You start to wonder, purposefully. We let ourselves get lost. We "court digression", Judith Kitchen says. We look to be led astray.