My doctor’s office called last week with an update on my hysterectomy.

What started out with me answering the phone with such enthusiasm that I nearly sprained my finger ended with me wandering into the living room for a giant ugly cry.

While my doctor is still hoping to get me in before the end of the year, it’s looking more likely that my surgery won’t happen until February. Maybe later.

When I got off the phone, I had the strangest sensation. It was as if this information were a tangible thing, just sitting there on the desk, and here was my body and my brain, looking at one another, wondering who was going to deal with it.

It’s hard to get through an entire day right now, and the idea of doing this for another three or more months is…well, it fucking sucks.

It reminds me, actually, of getting sober.

I’ve been sober for many years now, but I vividly remember what it felt like to be sober for ten minutes. How ten minutes was literally all I could handle, and the idea of being sober for eleven was unbearable.

Until it wasn’t. And then here we are, a decade later.

There are many moments when I honestly cannot conceive of dealing with this pain for another ten minutes.

I certainly can’t wrap my head around three months. So…I’m not going to ask that of myself.

I’m going to focus on the next ten minutes.

I’m going to write romance.

I’m going to sculpt miniatures, like this little book-and-cookies scene I made for my book club.

I’m going to read a bunch of books. (I’m currently reading The Age of Innocence, and I just finished a biography of Emily Dickinson. I also recently read—and loved—this and this and this. Oh, and this.)

I’m going to write in my journal and draw tarot cards.

Speaking of tarot…

I tried a weird tarot thing.

I’d been journaling on financial stuff and my writing career, and I sensed the presence of more than one inner part, all of whom had different feelings on the matter.

A couple of parts were wary of letting my writing support me, while one part was downright antagonistic. I decided to draw a card representing each one, but the twist came in the form of an energy spectrum.

Allow me to explain. *rubs hands together gleefully*

First, I created a spectrum from Wary on the left to Antagonistic on the right. This wasn’t fancy. I literally just drew lines in the carpet with my finger.

I then shuffled the deck with the intention to connect with these inner parts, and I drew the first card, leaving it face down. Holding the card between the lines of Wary and Antagonistic, I slowly moved it to the right, feeling for resistance or attraction, and then to the left.

At a particular location on the spectrum, I sensed the card “locking in.” The energy no longer tugged me left or right; it wanted to stop right there, thankyouverymuch.

I repeated this process with two more cards, one for each part, leaving all of them face down until I was finished, because I didn’t want to see what the card was and unconsciously nudge it one way or the other.

The results were eye-opening.

The spectrum helped me see how these cards were interacting with each other, and the different ways each of them influenced my mindset and actions.

For instance, one of the wary parts thought I needed to put up a front of nonchalance, stuffing down any insecurities and certainly not showing how much I care.

The more antagonistic part was anxious about needing help from others, because, growing up, it learned that help always came with sticky strings. Better to do everything solo, even if that meant stalling out well before the finish line.

I feel like this example is just scratching the surface of this technique, and I can imagine all sorts of spectrums, tailored to specific situations, that would yield juicy layers from a card reading.

Plus, it just feels fun and witchy to play with energy. ✨

Hidden Connections

What I didn’t realize when I started drafting this essay was how interrelated the hysterectomy call and my weird tarot technique actually were.

Whether I’m faced with an ever-moving surgery date or an amorphous career path, no matter how many notes and stickers I add to my day planner, life is really just the next ten minutes—or really, right fucking now. This moment. That’s all we know for sure.

And whatever this moment brings, all I can do—all life is asking from me, from all of us—is to make room for it.

I don’t need to figure it out or fix it or freak out. I might have inner parts that believe otherwise, but I can make room for them too.

There’s space for all of it.

Whenever I sit down to write one of these essays, I have a Well-Thought-Out Plan™ and a Takeaway™. But not today, my friend.

What you’re about to read is My Blog Post: The Way TMI Edition.

In it, we shall discuss romance, werewolves, and my uterus.

Onward!

The (Somewhat Shitty) Situation

For the past four months and counting, I’ve been in round-the-clock pain. At first, I chalked it up to a probiotic experiment gone awry (seriously, my gut ​hated these things​), but even after ditching the probiotics, the pain persisted.

Fast forward to earlier this month when an ultrasound revealed two masses in my lower abdomen. Two nerve-wracking weeks later, I had an MRI, and the mystery was solved.

First off, there were four masses, not two, and they were uterine fibroids. Big ones. A few the size of Granny Smith apples, one the size of a grapefruit. (I mean, hey, if the romance writing doesn’t pan out, maybe I could open a fruit stand.)

In addition to an entire gift basket of fruit that nobody wants, I also got an incredibly flattering pair of shorts out of the deal. Is this view from the front or the back? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was thrown off prior to the MRI, because my previous adventures in Fibroidlandia (yes, me and fibroids go way back) had resulted in periods that were pretty much this, exactly:

Leaving my house was, shall we say, tricky, and if I did venture forth, you better believe I was dressed in all black. 🥷 (And wearing a tampon. And a pad. And period underwear. None of which was enough.)

But this time around, the fibroids were suspiciously chill. At least, until the pain started.

I’ve come to see my uterus as populated by a panoply of monsters. When I’m on my period, the pain is a real teeth-grinder. This is when my fibroids morph into bitey little werewolves, roused by the Full Moon of my cycle.

The rest of the time, I’m busy zapping them with electricity courtesy of my TENS device, rendering them gorked-out little Frankenstein’s monsters.

Maybe I can teach them to talk and read poetry, thereby averting Dr. Frankenstein’s wretched fate.

Or…

I can get a hysterectomy, which is what I’ve decided to do. (I’ve begun referring to it as my “pelvic exorcism” in honor of Samhain.) At the time of this writing, I’m waiting to get scheduled, but my doctor hopes to get me in by the end of the year. 🤞

I guess if there is a Takeaway™ to this email, it’s this: I am so fucking tired of having a uterus.

Well, and actually, there’s a second Takeaway™, come to think of it.

When I met with the gynecological surgeon, she remarked that my uterus is the size of someone who’s 20 weeks pregnant. She was astonished that I could function, given how bad she assumed the pain would be.

She also wondered if I was basically living on the toilet, given that one werewolf is stomping on my bladder and another is lounging on my rectum. Does my bladder feel roughly the size of a walnut? Yes. Yes, it does. But I’m only getting up once—sometimes twice, on a “bad” night—to go pee.

I found the doctor’s surprise strangely comforting.

It struck me that, even when my body is possessed by a uterine demon, it’s still functioning awfully well. (And if it can continue to do that until my hysterectomy, I shall be eternally grateful.)

The Healing Power of Smut

Truly, though, I don’t know what I’d do without romance writing. Look at that! We’re already on our third Takeaway™!

One of my main stressors is not knowing when the surgery will take place and how long recovery will take. November/December is my busy season with ​tiny food​, aka my day job, and the income I make during those months helps carry me through the first quarter of the following year.

Will I miss out on all or part of my busy season? I don’t know, but I’m certainly not in a position to postpone my pelvic exorcism.

Throughout all of this, working on draft seven of The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays has kept me sane.

As of this morning, I’m 70% done with the draft, and it’s hard to express how deep of a brain itch gets scratched when I polish a scene—and not with some vague, hand-wavy notion of “making it better.” I feel like the leap from draft six to draft seven consolidated a big ol’ stack of writing craft books and countless hours of practice into a tangible skill shift.

Rather than endlessly tinkering with the prose, trying to make it “prettier,” I’ve been tackling scenes with a much clearer eye. In fact, I cannot wait to write my 2026 edition of Writing Lessons Learned, because, holy shit, there are so many. (You can see ​2025’s lessons here​.)

I remember waaaay back in the day when I used to design websites, and I felt like I was perennially drowning in crap I had to learn. Coding languages. Internet Explorer patches. Syntax updates. Blah blah blah.

I often forget that writing is the same deal. There will never ever be a point when I’ve learned all the writing things, but rather than giving me a migraine, this makes me want to straight up cackle with glee.

I am so freakin’ grateful that I get to write romance. Even if, at the moment, it’s certainly not paying my bills, I’m grateful that my day job does, while still leaving me pockets of time to write.

I’m grateful that my spouse has great health insurance—ohmygod, so grateful!!!!

I’m grateful that my pain could apparently be insanely worse, but it’s not.

I’m grateful I only have to get up to pee twice during the night instead of, like, a hundred times.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t some “everything is happening for a reason!” tra-la-la. My uterus is a haunted house full of monsters, and that blows.

I’m scared of how much work I might miss.

I’m (really) sick of being in pain.

I’m anxious about my post-surgery recovery.

But also? Life is oddly kinda great.

And I guess it’s pretty cool that all those things can be true at the same time.

Last week, I mentioned a magical light bulb that flicked on while I was redoing the crystal grid on my altar. It’s related to something I call a keystone spell.

But first, we need a bit of context.

Earlier this year, I was feeling magically frazzled. Raise your hand if either of these sound familiar:

• I wanted to do magic, but I had approximately zero energy to actually do it.
• There were so many things I could do magic on that I’d waste most of my non-existent energy choosing an intention. (That I would never use.)

Spirit guides to the rescue!

After listening to me bitch for a solid fifteen minutes, my guides prescribed a radical focus protocol.

Rather than casting dozens of piddly spells (and frittering away most of my energy deciding what the hell to cast them for), I would focus all of my magical efforts on a single spell.

Not forever. I could switch gears whenever I damn well pleased. But as long as I felt frazzled and, as a result, disinclined to do any magic at all, I had one place to put whatever magical energy I did have.

🪄 My keystone spell.

Holy cow, did this ever work for my brain. I won’t be sharing my keystone intention here since this is an active magical working, but I’ll do you one better and walk you through setting up your own.

Craft Your Keystone Intention

While none of these suggestions are chiselled in stone, I’ve found all three to be quite useful:

1. Choose a keystone intention that’s specific enough that you’ll know, without a doubt, when it has come to fruition.

For instance:

“My freelance work consistently brings in $5,000 a month.”

Not:

“I am financially abundant.”

2. Your intention should feel meaningful 3-6 months (or longer) from now, even if your immediate plans change.

Compare:

“My freelance work consistently brings in $5,000 a month.”

With:

“I land the proposal I sent on Tuesday.”

“I book three new clients this week.”

If there’s a decent chance the intention could be fully resolved next week, it probably isn’t a keystone spell. A keystone spell should have enough depth and longevity that you can keep feeding it for months.

💡 A helpful distinction: a keystone spell should be aimed at a well-defined condition you’re building, not a single short-term checkpoint.

3. Once you’ve dialed in the final wording, the intention should be succinct enough that you can remember and say it easily.

You shouldn’t need to unroll a 50-foot Dead Sea Scroll every time you want to state your intention. Capiche?

Put that Keystone Intention to Work

Once you have your intention, now what?

The short answer is: Do whatever the hell you like. 🙏

That’s basically the long answer, too, but the point is to use this intention whenever you do anything the least bit magical.

Sure, if you have the energy, don your ceremonial robes, bust out the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and ritualize that shit into the next century.

🪄 But maybe you simply state your keystone intention three times before bed, as often as you remember to do it.

🪄 Maybe you say your keystone intention over your morning cup of tea before drinking.

🪄 Maybe you’re standing at the gas pump, and instead of hopping on your phone, you focus on your keystone intention.

🪄 Maybe you feel like ​making a sigil​ this weekend. Use your keystone intention!!

The point isn’t to do a one-and-done working. The point is to keep adding pinches of energy to the cauldron whenever you think of it.

Before casting my keystone spell, I already had a practice of standing at my altar first thing in the morning and right before bed. I place my palms on either side of my crystal grid and do my morning/evening check-in. Now, I’ve simply added my keystone intention to the mix.

And when I meditate in the evening—you guessed it. I spend at least 15 seconds meditating on my keystone intention.

On the rare occasion when I have energy to do a full-on ritual, you better believe I’m keystoning. It doesn’t even have to be the focus of the ritual; I just make sure to slide it in somewhere.

Your Magical Homework is…

I’ve been adding little pinches of energy to my keystone spell for months, and in that area of my life, I’ve noticed a serious uptick in synchronicity, along with diamond-edge clarity about what to do next.

Between the synchronistic wind in my sails and the dramatic decrease in time spent dicking around, I’ve made a lot of tangible progress. (Who knew!)

Then, while rebuilding my crystal grid a few weeks ago, something clicked. My sneaky unconscious mind had apparently been playing a longer game than I realized. 🤔

As part of The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays launch, I’ll be teaching a Jungian Magic ritual I’ve been developing alongside the book. And suddenly I understood that the keystone spell I’d been feeding for months has a special role to play in that ritual.

I’m keeping that piece under my witch hat until the launch, but here’s the nifty part:

If you craft your own keystone intention now-ish and start feeding it little pinches of energy whenever you can, you’ll be following almost exactly the same process I did.

By the time I teach you the ritual, you won’t be arriving with an intention you dreamed up five minutes earlier. You’ll be arriving with a spell you’ve been feeding for months, like a unicorn-infused sourdough starter.

And then, my friend, we’re going to turn the volume up to 11. 😀

---

Alrighty, I’m heading back into final-draft hibernation, but take a crack at that keystone intention. Feed it when you can, and let the cauldron bubble.

I can’t wait to see what you cook up.

Last week​, I ended with the question, What did I notice once my Busy Bunny part wasn’t throwing a fit over how long my book is taking?

Let’s start with my favorite thing: tarot.

After I set up my new crystal grid, I drew a tarot card for my downstairs altar. I used to do this every New and Full Moon, but I’ve shifted to drawing a new card whenever I’m moving into a different phase—of a creative project, a personal growth spurt, you name it.

In this case, the phase was: The Home Stretch of My Book.

🔮 What energy would help me reach the finish line without losing my mind?

Immediately upon flipping the card over, I jotted in my journal: “sleeping, dreams, borne by the unconscious, so many colors!!!”

Wow, did I ever love this imagery. This fish-riding king gave me major goosebumps.

What if slowing down isn’t the opposite of progress?

For decades, Busy Bunny and I lived under the maxim “let me just finish one more thing” before we were allowed to take a break.

Through some impressively acrobatic rationalizations, I’d convinced myself that doing so resulted in getting more done.

What I’ve come to see, though, is that my energy is like a rubber band. If I stretch it too far (“just one more email,” “just one more paragraph,” “just just just…”), the band snaps and cracks somebody in the eyeball. Usually me.

And when it does, I have to take a break, no matter how big a conniption fit Busy Bunny throws. Invariably, this forced downtime gobbles up more time than if I’d proactively let myself rest.

(Not to mention, slingshotting myself in the eye isn’t very kind to myself. 👀)

Nancy Drew and the Mystery of Lost Time

Ruptured rubber bands got me thinking about the six months I’d spent on my previous draft, Draft 6, which is an unusually long stretch for me to spend on any one draft.

So long, in fact, that I recorded a whole podcast about it: ​Will I Ever Finish This F%#king Book?​

When Busy Bunny is running the show, all I can see is: THIS IS TAKING FOREVER AND THAT IS REALLY BAD.

But when I shift into King of Cups mode, a different question bobs to the ocean’s surface: What if the time I thought I’d “lost” was actually changing me as an artist?

Draft 6 was an alchemical crockpot of a draft. Into the pot went four-ish years of fiction writing, dozens of writing craft books, and countless hours musing on craft issues.

What came out?

🔍 A much sharper ability to diagnose why a scene isn’t working—and the shot of creative energy that comes from knowing how to fix it.

🪓 A willingness to slash scenes or lines that are clever or swoony but don’t strengthen the story.

🚀 Some really cool fucking insights about propulsive pacing—and, just as importantly, the restraint to apply the biggest lessons to my next novel instead of blowing up this one in the 11th hour.

✍️ A number of useful craft case studies and copious notes for my future writing craft book.

📝 A much clearer plan for revising my previous novel, ​The Fool & the Threads of Time​ (as well as a clear, spirit-guide-sanctioned timeline for doing so).

I mean…how on earth could I consider this lost time??

I could not have become the writer who is revising Draft 7 without having spent all that time inside Draft 6.

Sleep Your Way to Success

Which brings us back to the rubber band. Rest isn’t merely a way to avoid burnout—although, hey! That’s a pretty big vote in its favor.

Rest is a vital mechanism by which artistic change (or any change, really) occurs, because those six months I spent with Draft 6 weren’t solely spent sitting at my desk, of course.

Sometimes craft insights came while I was journaling, or chilling with my spirit guides, or hiking, or dusting my altar, or reading something totally unrelated. Or sleeping.

There are forms of progress that only become available when I’m not grinding my conscious mind into paste. Something our barefoot, wave-napping king clearly knows a lot about.

I mean, just look at the guy:

Synchronicities on Tap

The second I pulled this tarot card, another insight rippled straight from my solar plexus to my third eye.

When I stop white-knuckling everything, I become more receptive—to unconscious insights, intuitive nudges, and beneficial unseen currents. Said another way, I become a synchronicity magnet.

This has happened to me so many times, it’s truly astonishing that I keep forgetting. ̄ \_(ツ)_/ ̄

Let me tell you what happened this time.

Right before heading upstairs to pull a tarot card and redo my crystal grid, I paused before a dollhouse pastry case, which is on display in my office. (Or at least, it was…)

I sculpted the dozens of teeny-tiny treats filling this case last winter, and it’s been languishing in my Etsy shop ever since. While admiring the sparkly gum drops on the sugar plum fairy bundt cake, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be so fun if this sold?”

Smiling, I went upstairs and busied myself with card pulls and crystals. Two hours later…the pastry case sold. For $330.

Can I prove a connection?

Nope. All I know is that it felt pretty darn magical, and that experiences like this seem to happen much more often when I’m resting before my rubber band rips in half.

A Tarot Spread for You

If you’re drumming your fingers, wishing you could magically fast forward to the “good part”—first of all, I feel ya.

And second, here’s a simple tarot spread to help you squeeze a little magical juice from your situation. If it’s going to take a while, there might as well be refreshments, right?

Card One: What energy/attitude would be most beneficial right now?

Card Two: What awesome thing is this slower season making possible?

Card Three: How can I use the resources of cards 1 and 2 to become a synchronicity magnet?

Next time…

I have one more magical insight to share, my friend, before I burrow back into my writing cave. Because while I was rebuilding that crystal grid last week, I realized something about working magic when your best-laid plans get fed into a wood chipper.

This one’s all about keystone spells.

See you next time.

If you caught ​my last email​, you’ll know I’ve been squirreled up in my writing cave, powering through the final draft of The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays.

I had the goal of launching on Kickstarter by Samhain (the book is set in a haunted castle, so the vibes are on point). But apparently, that goal was conceived by a part of me with a radically different conception of linear time, word counts, and, broadly speaking, reality. ̄ \_(ツ)_/ ̄

When I calculated a finish line based on my revision speed over the past two weeks, the math spit out a date closer to mid-November.

As in, this is when I’ll be done with the final draft. Not the multiple proofreads. Not the book’s layout. Not the spine and back cover design. (That said, I’ve already designed the front cover, and I can’t waaaaaaait to show it to you!)

This would put my Kickstarter in the middle of holiday season madness, which isn’t a gamble I want to take. Not to mention, my tiny food business can get pretty bananas in Nov/Dec, so adding a crowdfunding campaign to the mix sounds, I don’t know…less than smart? 🤔

Okay, so the weird part wasn’t that I was disappointed about the upended timeline.

I mean, I’ve been diligently working on this book since April 2025. Mentally, I’d already moved into that October launch, unpacked my boxes, and started picking out the drapes—haunted-castle Halloween romance, let’s gooooo!

The weird part was what didn’t happen next.

Meet My Inner Bundozer

I’ve written a great deal about my inner part who’s perennially rushing around, its little knickers in a knot over everything that “should” have been done yesterday.

More than any other part in my system, I’ve worked with Busy Bunny the most. It’s a very old part, one that I learned, in large part, from watching my parent Busy-Bunny their way through life at an exhausting clip.

When I discovered that revisions were going to take a long ass time, I braced myself for Busy Bunny’s patented Five-Alarm Explosion Tornado™.

But…it didn’t happen.

Instead, I looked inward to find Busy Bunny blinking at me, little nose a’ twitching: What now, human?

An Astral Field Trip

Without Busy Bunny riding my ass into the sunset, I had the mental space to feel my disappointment without becoming immobilized by it.

And then…I headed to the astral. (As one does.)

Next door to my personal astral sanctuary, I’ve constructed a temple dedicated to my romance series. I wish I could take a screenshot of my brain, because there’s a very rad room that I suspect is modeled after a third-grade field trip to the planetarium.

The space is soaring and domed with a Milky Way midnight blue glow, and around the perimeter are twenty-two doors, one for each major arcana card, each leading into one of my books. 📖

To enter, I knock three times and wait for the symbol on the door to light up. And so…I entered the realm of The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays. The spirit of the book and my guides sat me down, and together, we hashed out a revised plan.

What I won’t be doing:

• Grinding my brain into a paste trying to get revisions done by Samhain, linear time be damned.
• Finishing revisions mid-November and launching my Kickstarter in the middle of the holiday rush, just to release the steam valve on Busy Bunny’s nervous energy.

What I will be doing instead:

• Continuing to work on revisions at a sane pace, likely finishing mid-November.
• Launching the Kickstarter in February. Instead of the Halloween theme I’d planned, I’m going with…wait for it…Gothic Valentine! 😍🖤
• Using the time in between to rest and draft a companion short story I’ve already outlined (and maybe start the next book, but I’m trying not to go bonkers here).

When in Doubt, Give Cry-Eating a Go

As soon as my eyelids fluttered open following my astral foray, I had the urge to draw a card from my Spirited Away deck.

The question: What energy would serve me best through the home stretch of this book?

Which card did I get?

If you’ve seen the movie, you might recognize this scene. Chihiro has snuck out of the bathhouse to meet Haku, who’s taken her to the pigpen to see her parents. Chihiro must remember what her parents look like in pig form in order to save them before they’re slaughtered.

As Haku leads her back to the bathhouse, Chihiro bursts into tears. Her work at the bathhouse is grueling, she has no idea how this wacky spirit world works and, oh yeah, her parents could get turned into bacon any day now.

Haku comforts her and gives her a snack, and in a move I can 100% relate to, Chihiro stuffs her face while sobbing. And it totally helps! (Duh.) Her weary expression settles into a grounded determination.

This isn’t a card delivering a saccharine “Chin up, kiddo! Everything will work out!” Chihiro has a lot of tub-scrubbing and floor-mopping ahead of her—and a great deal of uncertainty.

All she can do is put one foot in front of the other, powered by bouts of cry-eating.

Well, shit. Message received.

The assignment isn’t to pretend I’m not disappointed or that the workload has magically shrunk. It’s about taking care of myself well enough to keep doing it.

Putting Busy Bunny to Work

Spirited Away card in hand, I returned to my altar. Immediately, my crystal grid jumped out. Clearly, it was time to refresh it, using the card as a focal point. I chose new crystals and set up my intention, and thanks to my spirit guides’ suggestions, I did something a little different: I asked Busy Bunny to help.

Remember, Busy Bunny has a lot of energy:

When I let BB run the show, it’ll use this energy to fling us straight off the Cliffs of Burnout. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Energy is energy. Busy Bunny could just as easily help me stay on track with revisions, so that I actually finish them by mid-November. Otherwise, there’s a good chance Parkinson’s Law will rear its annoying head. This is the law that states: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Nope. I am not wrapping up revisions, midnight, February 13, nanoseconds before my Gothic Valentine launch, thankyouverymuch.

I shall channel my inner Chihiro, cry-eat as needed, and get shit done at a pace that bakes in plenty of time for self-care.

Next time, I’ll tell you what I noticed once Busy Bunny and I stopped bickering about how long the book is taking—something that completely changed how I view the past year of writing. ✍️

See you soon.

Perfectionism has no idea what it’s talking about.

Which is funny, because according to Perfectionism, the entire world would implode without its astute leadership.

Five years ago, my spirit guides told me that writing romance would change my life. They weren’t kidding. And one of the biggest makeovers has occurred in my relationship with Perfectionism.

But to tell that story, we need to talk about lentils…

A Tale of Two Lentils

You’re no doubt familiar with the Grimms’ version of “Cinderella.” In a nutshell, our heroine waits hand and foot on her asshole stepfamily, all while wearing the world’s shittiest shoes.

(They’re wooden shoes, folks = bring on the splinters and bunions.)

After months of cooking, cleaning, and sleeping on the floor, Cinderella finally gets a chance to cut loose: the king is hosting a festival so his son can pick the hottest lady in the land as his bride. Yay, patriarchy!

But—we all knew a night off was too much to ask—her stepmother dumps a bowl of lentils into the hearth (seriously??) and gives Cinderella two hours to pick them out of the ashes. If she fails, the festival is a no-go.

Honestly, a night at home, probably Cinderella’s first opportunity in months to kick off those wooden shoes and curl up with a good book, sounds vastly preferable to the prince’s meat market. But then again, I’m an introvert.

So what’s a soot-covered girl to do when the clock is ticking and the horny prince waits for no wo(man)? Call on her birdie friends, of course!

“O gentle doves, O turtle-doves, And all the birds that be, The lentils that in ashes lie Come and pick up for me! The good must be put in the dish, The bad you may eat if you wish.”

In through the kitchen window flaps a whole crapload of birds—“a crowd of all the birds under heaven,” to be precise.

Can you imagine the noise? Also, side note: I feel like this introduces an entirely new problem in the form of bird poop. So so much poop. But Cinderella gets a pass on account of fairy-tale logic.

And anyhow, the plan works! In under thirty minutes, the birds have handled the stepmother’s bullshit task.

We’re going to leave Cinderella here, because her stepmother has more shenanigans up her evil sleeve, and we, my friend, need to focus on those lentils.

Psychic Lentils

Cinderella’s task might look like nothing more than an annoying, unnecessary mess. But psychologically speaking, it’s about recognizing what’s nourishing and viable amid what’s dead or simply not useful.

The ashes represent the undifferentiated residue of experience: old emotions, inherited beliefs, defensive habits, and everything else that has accumulated in the hearth of the psyche. The lentils are the living material hidden among that residue—the parts worth sorting and hanging onto.

Cinderella’s feathered friends are significant too. She doesn’t check this task off the list through conscious ego alone. She has help from the instinctual and spiritual realms.

By separating the lentils from the ashes, Cinderella creates the possibility of choice. Unconscious repetition and all its frustrations depend, at least in part, on things remaining globbed together in the psyche.

Freedom begins when the psyche learns to say:

🫘 This belongs to the present; that belongs to the past.

🫘 This is intuition; that is fear repeating itself.

🫘 This desire is mine; that expectation was imposed on me.

🫘 This pattern once protected me; now it keeps me trapped.

Perfectionism’s Secret Weapon

You might assume that Perfectionism, with its reputation for being persnickety, would adore a Virgo-vibed task like lentil sorting. But Perfectionism often relies on things remaining frustratingly vague.

After all, if the objective were clear, Perfectionism would lose one of its most potent weapons: the Forever Moving Target.

Oh ho ho, you thought you were finished after preparing that forty-page presentation, reconciling quarterly figures, and obtaining approval from six separate departments?

Bwahahaha!

Cancel dinner, babe, because instead you’ll be redesigning the entire presentation in a slightly different shade of periwinkle, anticipating every question anyone might conceivably ask, and producing a supplementary report no one requested, needs, or wants. Yippeeeee!

“Just build a house!”

For years, Perfectionism had been giving me the same “useful” writing advice:

Be better.

Right. Got it.

Hang on—what? 🤔

When Perfectionism dumps the lentils in the hearth, writing looks like a monolithic skill, but this is akin to treating “building a house” as a single skill. Forget plumbing and wiring and roofing and painting. Just get better at house-building!

Uh, sure. I’ll get right on that.

While I was working on Draft Six of my forthcoming novel, The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, I began to notice that something significant had changed in my writing, but it wasn’t the blanket “be better” transformation Perfectionism demanded.

My ability to structure a story had improved enormously.

I was better at mapping character arcs, shaping a plot, constructing scenes, diagnosing why a scene wasn’t working, and figuring out what needed to change. Problems that would once have left me staring blankly at my screen until I had mercy on myself and got up for a snack now felt solvable.

And it’s not hard to see why. Over the past several years, I’ve read a teetering stack of writing-craft books and practiced applying what I learned over hundreds of thousands of words.

Let’s call all of that Lentil Pile #1.

My prose had improved too—this is Lentil Pile #2—but the difference wasn’t nearly as flashy. According to Perfectionism, this was a big honkin’ failure. But thanks to lentil sorting, I knew better.

Sort Those Lentils

Story structure and prose are related, but they aren’t the same skill. They don’t develop in precisely the same way, and it makes sense that they wouldn’t necessarily improve at the same speed.

All that structural stuff I’ve been learning? That can be taught fairly directly. I can pick up a book, and the author can explain how a character arc works. They can show me how to build escalating complications. They can teach me how to identify the purpose of a scene.

And then I, with my brain full of shiny new techniques, can scurry over to my computer and give them a whirl. I can troubleshoot the results and gradually get better.

Prose is slipperier.

Of course, aspects of prose can be taught. I can learn to cut filter words (and oh, how I love me some filter words!) vary sentence rhythm, and choose more precise verbs. I can learn to spot the 10,642 instances in my manuscript of characters with clenching stomachs, dose them all with Pepto Bismol, and reach for something decidedly less cliché.

But prose is akin to magic.

There’s a certain element of boil and toil: a bubbling brain cauldron that takes eye of newt and maybe, if you’re lucky, spits out a dazzling metaphor or killer opening line.

A lot of that learning comes down to reading piles of books, soaking in other writers’ word choices, writing sentence after sentence after sentence, and just generally being a human, alive in the world and paying attention. Sure, I can create the conditions for prose-skills to flourish, but I can’t pester them into growing overnight.

And you know what? This handy bit of lentil sorting was freakin’ liberating.

Instead of laboring under the useless edict, “get better,” I could finally see the separate piles of legumes on the kitchen floor.

🫘 Here were the structural skills that had improved rabbity-quick.

🫘 Here was the prose that had also improved, but more at a tortoise stroll.

🫘 Here were the techniques I could learn from a craft book and apply this afternoon.

🫘 Here were the capacities that needed time, immersion, and a certain amount of witchy alchemy to fully brew.

Lentils and…boundary setting?

This doesn’t apply only to lentils and prose! Take boundary setting, for instance. For years, my psyche had dumped the lentils of “expressing what I need” into the ash pile of “how other people respond.”

But once I called in all the birds under heaven to help me sort that shit out, it became forehead-slappingly clear that there were different legume piles at play.

🫘 There were the lentils of listening to myself and identifying what I needed.

🫘 Then there were the lentils of translating that need into a clear, kind statement I could express to another human being.

🫘 And finally, there were the lentils of how the other person chose to respond—and that pile did not belong to me.

Growing up, those lentils had been liberally sprinkled on my hearth, so it sure as hell felt like they were mine. But as all the birds under heaven were quick to point out, someone else’s response did not belong in my pile.

So we picked those lentils right out.

Maybe a little lentil-sorting could help you navigate a project or conversation that feels all thorny and tangled? I say call on the birds and give it a shot. 🙂

Meanwhile, I Have News

This brings us to a quick announcement, aka a chance for me to squee over something I promised myself I would wait to share.

But I cannot.

I’m too excited.

I’ve officially begun the final—FINAL!?!—draft of The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays. And last week, I sat down, lentil-sorted the unruly heap of scribbled notes I’d accumulated for the launch, and emerged with a (mostly) cohesive plan.

If you’ve been with me for a while, you know I treat book launches like spells. (Because they so totally are??)

After all, you’ve got an intention: Sell this whatseewhosit.

You’re raising energy: Let me write a whole bunch of emails and marketing copy and create images and make bonus goodies and and and…

And then you direct that energy into the world: I’ll send these emails to these people, at this particular time, for this particular reason.

🪄 Like I said: totally a spell.

Point being, I came up with a launch that is part story, part magical working, and part excuse for all of us to escape into a world of haunted castles and hot romance.

But—and here’s the key—we’ll use that playful energy as magical spellcasting juice. 🧪

I’ve spent years creating this fictional world and the characters within it. I’ve hand painted sigils, cast spells at sunrise, performed rituals while wearing my special sequined shirt, and poured hundreds of thousands of words into bringing this world to life.

All of that concentrated attention has strengthened the world’s presence on the astral.

Think of stepping into a cathedral saturated with generations of prayer. This ain’t an empty room. You’re entering a space that’s positively oozing with years—centuries, even—of emotion, devotion, and intention.

Granted, my books aren’t the Hagia Sophia, but they’re nonetheless a hub of sparkling, concentrated magical energy.

Before the launch begins, I’ll invite you to choose something you long for, something you yearn to manifest, and shape it into a spell intention.

Then, simply by following along—by letting yourself fully enter the story, imagining, feeling, playing, and participating—you’ll be raising energy and adding it to our shared cauldron. *excited squeal*

Together, we’ll use that energy to strengthen the spells of everyone who takes part.

And don’t worry! I’ll show you how, step by step, using a blend of Western occultism and Jungian Magic.

Thanks for reading this far, my friend. 🙏 I’m going to take some time away from these weekly emails so I can pour all of my energy into powering through Draft Seven.

Until next time…