I’ve always been a fan of finding wild blackberries in the woods and eating all the ripe ones I can. It makes me feel very fae, like a uncontainable force of nature.

There is a lot to blackberries magically. In my video I share two poems, one from the Druid Plant Oracle (so amazing for anyone interested in herbs) and one from Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs.

Blackberries ripen in cycles. Perhaps this abundant stockpile of ripe and almost ripe berries is why they are used for money magic. I suspect this cyclical growth is also why blackberries are feminine.

Not to mention the bear mama vibe the plant gives off with its scary thorns. To grab a berry you need to be very careful!

The power of these thorns must also be involved in the protection aspect that blackberries have, visitors beware.

Blackberries are very difficult to contain. As am I. In my video I mention a name you may only be familiar with if we’ve engaged in email correspondence. Sofia Wren is a name I intend to use in the next year to describe the creatrix behind the magic. I have two first names, as my Muse refuses to be boxed with one. I have decided to accept her terms. Sofia is my healing side, and Wren is the wild bear.

Guess who blackberries are sacred to?Another entity with many faces is the Goddess Brigit. I share an invocation to Brigid that could be swapped around for this weeks celebration of Imbolc. Its the pagan version of Groundhog’s day.

Blackberries are tenacious and rooted in case you needed some first chakra healing. The plants actually are used by herbalists—make a tincture with the roots and you can skip a portion of your medicine cabinet. Curious? Check out the video

Have you seen A is for Apple Magic?

 January’s Inspirational Guest Posts wrap up with Jeri Walker-Bicket, JeriWB to her friends. She’s a lovely soul, and I so enjoy getting an inside peek at her writing as her critique partner. I can tell you this lady is intelligent, elegant and methodical in her approach to literature and writing. 

Jeri thank you for telling us about your Muse and Inspiration!
-Wren 

Snap out of it! Only the least creative souls cannot find fault with such advice. Inspiration islike a drug, and when it fades, despair often takes its place. So many people slowly lose their creative spark by losing themselves to the mundane and incessant demands of daily life.Though I have always wanted to be a writer, a decade of devoting myself to teaching Englishzapped my writing soul.

Thankfully, opportunity knocked in the form of relocating to the other side of the country formy husband’s dream job. I guess it’s my dream job too, because I now finally have the time to pursue my neglected writing dreams.

I’ve spent the last year and a half reconnecting with that sense of wonder necessary to make me feel the motivation to write. Everything in life is a potential source of inspiration, but a person has to open themselves to the possibilities. I’m not the type of girl that waits for the Muse to find her. Like clockwork, I put my butt in my office chair and get to work!

In short, here are five methods I rely on to find inspiration:

Freewriting: I am trying to break myself of a bad self-editing habit, so freewriting to discover ideas helps. Specifically, I enjoy loop writing, which is a structured form of freewriting where the writer underlines strong lines and then starts a new prompt based on those lines.

Collecting Images: I used to collect photos from National Geographic and laminate them for use in classroom activities. Now I use them to get my creative juices flowing. An online image search can also accomplish the same thing, and my interest in Pinterest is gathering steam.

Overhearing Conversation: During a recent trip to NYC, while being herded like cattle to the top of the Empire State Building, an old woman gripping her walker cried out, “Is this the ride? I thought this was the ride! Is it going to start soon?” Immediately, I wondered, what’s her story?

Finding Objects: My grandmother’s collection of thousands of buttons is one way I trick my brain into wondering what type of character a button would belong to. An abandoned car, a ghost town, a lost baby doll. Everything is just a potential story waiting to happen.

Traveling: Going places is more or less my excuse to take photographs. Digital photos can be endlessly tinkered with, much like words can. I guess I find the world in all its infinite variety and my relative insignificance in it to be oddly comforting

Even with the gift of time afforded by a change in living circumstances, I still found myself at a standstill when it came to starting something new. Could I still write creatively? Would the sentences be clunky? I snapped out of self-doubt by rewriting five of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and publishing them in an eBook titled Popular Poe Stories in Plain English. I also wrote many blog posts, which surely helped whip me once again find my writing way.

I’m no longer in a big rush to publish, but I am releasing a collection of literary short stories titled Such is Life. The fiction I am most drawn to bears the stamp of literary realism, though my work in progress, Lost Girl Road, is a psychological suspense story set in the woods of northwest Montana. The most helpful realization on my path to finding inspiration again is an awareness that I tend to draw too much from real life at times. Make of my stories what you will.

Basically, after all the much ado about nothing, I’ve found myself feeling creative again when Ifinally managed let myself go.

Jeri Walker-Bickett was born and raised in Wallace, Idaho, a rough and tumble mining town with a checkered past. The storytelling urge struck at a young age, but an undergraduate degree in writing led to a graduate degree in English education. Between living the scholarship-laden life of an academic bum, she did seasonal work in national parks. Jeri met her future husband in Yellowstone and they later married in Las Vegas. This phase in their lives sparked an obsession with food and travel. Fate has intervened to allow her to take time off from the classroom. Her forthcoming novel, Lost Girl Road, is a ghost story that takes place in the woods of northwest Montana. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband and their pets.

Please visit her blog www.jeriwb.com for book reviews, editing services, and progress updates.

When approaching new goals and challenges, one of the most important obstacles is obtaining faith.

Without faith we go through the motions–we do the things people tell us is important, the things that have brought other people success, but all the while we question, “Will this work for me?”

Faith allows us access to our own direction. Faith allows us guidance from our intution, whether it be gut feeling, a dream, a vision, a message from a higher power. We notice the repitition of our needs, even though to sate them may result in less income, or putting other people off.

When I talk about faith, I mean having confidence in things that have not yet materialized, taken root, or demonstrated success. I mean believing in the things that you know must be present in life to be happy, even if on another level, it seems effing crazy or hard.

In my own life, faith has finally settled in. Of course I am still plagued by temporary doubts and worries. But I have never felt so clear about how everything is going to work out, how possible it is to reveal a portion of myself to the world and achieve success.

In order to get here I had to have faith through a quilt of insecurities that using my gifts and unique perspective I can be successful. And in order to get where I’m going, I need to have faith in my capabilities to complete every step there.

All art is an act of faith to create something that until now has never been. What we see now is not all that will be. We will learn more, we will build off our drafts, we will connect with the right audience.

There is a lot to be done, and much has been started.

My biggest hurdle has been to have faith that maybe this whole process is easier than I think it needs to be. That I don’t need to worry about the ones who can’t understand my message since there are so many wonderful people out there that I will find in the future.

And yes revision does eventually end…not yet, but it will!
How are you doing? What do you have faith in? What are you working on?

Image Source

Hey, there everybody. For the first time ever you can see me in the flesh on Youtube. I talk about the magic and traditions of using apples magically.

Magic has always been a huge part of my life. If you’ve taken a peek at my story of How I Became a Witch and a Writer, then you know that I fell in love with the magic of fantasy novels at a young age and quickly edged into the New Age nonfiction section out of curiosity.

Unfortunately, I found quickly that there is a lot of misinformation and judgement about magic, and the the people dedicated to it as a craft, i.e. witches.

 I share my knowledge in hopes of beginning conversation among all people about the deeper meaning we weave into our lives.

Magic is a feeling that something special is happening and bringing us closer to our dreams. It is how people access that feeling that is different, be it prayer, ritual, reading spiritual passages, myths, etc.

I learned a lot from my experience creating this video about Apples and even more upon further reflection. I had never realized that Apples are associated with water, although once I thought about it I realized that Venus/Aphrodite is the one awarded the Golden Apple by Paris in Greek myth. Her short story is that the goddess of love, beauty and sexuality is born from the sea foam of the waves.

Paris chooses (another theme of apples) Aphrodite as the fairest goddess because she offers him a love connection with the most beautiful mortal in the world, and thus starts the Trojan War.

Golden apples appear in another love story. The runner Atalanta outpaced all of her suitors—only when one beat her in a race would she consider his hand in marriage. A man Hippomenes prayed to Aphrodite and the goddess granted him three golden apples. He then threw them around during the race as a distraction to win the contest and Atalanta’s hand. This story embodies the success vibe apples also have.

Later, through my own personal meditation on the element water, I gained a deeper understanding. I realized how the juicy, loving, healing associations of the apple are a message to us to feel good in our bodies. Relaxing in our skin and enjoying ourselves honors the divine inside and out.

I believe we were made to enjoy life’s pleasures or they would not exist to torture us. This is not everyone’s view. One could interpret the story of Adam and Eve as the opposite. Personally, I have found that I prefer to be happy, and considering my natural Apply urges to be shameful makes me anything but. So I have chosen the feminine flow of the apple.

Check out the video to choose for your self:

P.S. Do you think mermaids would eat apples?

 For many months Stacy Green and I have been planning this guest post. Her romantic suspense novel has an amazing cover and has been out since November 2012. Already positive reviews have flowed in. Not to mention the positive vibes created by the Into the Dark Charity Tour. Let’s hear it for Stacy!

Thank you so much to Wren for having me today. I’m excited to talk about my debut novel, INTO THE DARK. 

The book is set in Las Vegas, a city most of us associate with glitz, glamour, and high rollers. As a relatively sheltered girl from the Midwest, that was my image of Sin City when I first started researching.

My original idea was simple and a little shallow: I wanted to write about a SWAT officer, because they’re pretty sexy and the entire operation fascinates me. I set the story in Vegas because the city has one of the few full-time SWAT teams in the country. So there I was, with my heroine, Emilie–who was pretty vanilla at that point–stuck in a bank with two masked men. One of them has no interest in stealing from the bank. He’s after Emilie. 

So I needed an escape route. I immediately thought of the founding fathers of Las Vegas–the mob. Surely there had to be stories of underground tunnels or escape routes somewhere. So I Googled “Las Vegas tunnels.”

That’s when I found out about the people who live in the storm drains beneath the city. The drains stretch over 200 miles, and it’s estimated between 100-200 people live in the system at any given time. Some make a living working the casino junket, cashing in credits they find. Some work small jobs that don’t pay enough to survive. Many are addicts brought down by their drug habit. 

The homeless living in the drains were first brought to light by reporter Matthew O’Brien’s book, Beneath The Neon: Life and Death in the Las Vegas Tunnels. I immediately ordered the book and read about Las Vegas in a brand new light. 

Suddenly INTO THE DARK was about much more than a SWAT officer with a hero complex and a tormented heroine. I not only had the perfect escape route, but I had an opportunity to talk about something real.

So I started writing, and over the months, created Nathan and Emilie. Nathan’s looks took a backseat and instead his true characteristics–loyalty, bravery, and festering guilt over his past–drove his character. Emilie went from being a stubborn woman to a strong female lead with ambitions and intelligence. Both characters venture into the drains, Nathan more than once. Both experience a life-changing reality down below. 

INTO THE DARK isn’t about the storm drains or the people who call them home. It’s about learning from the past and accepting the events that made us who we are today. But the darkness and desperation of the tunnels add a depth to the book–a contrast to the bright lights and tourists–that makes the plight of the main characters real. Without the discovery of the tunnels, INTO THE DARK would be a different story.

Because of the inspiration from the homeless, the Charity Blog Tour for INTO THE DARK is about giving back. Readers can enter my Rafflecopter Contest for the chance to win the grand prize: a $100 donation from me to the homeless charity of their choice. The contest also allows participants to donate to HELP of Southern Nevada, the organization that assists those living in the drains and others in need in Las Vegas. 

Into The Dark was a personal journey for me, and one that I’m very proud of. I hope you love it as well. 

An Excerpt From INTO THE DARK

By writing scenes based on memories I aim to capture an elusive something.

• A meaning, a purpose for going through it all. 
• The essence of the difficulty and the consequential growth. 
• The patterns that still haunt my present life, so I can change it. 
• Something to share to prevent distress for others in similar situations. 
• A healing, a closure.

This is a lot to ask of a jumble of rapidly fading memories.

There are so many emotions that pit the lifetime of a sensitive person like me, and so much to write about. 

But where does the story begin? And where does it end? Real life exists on a continuum that does neither besides birth and death. 

That’s a much longer story. I find that a year can expand over hundreds of pages. I certainly have the notebooks to prove it.

Since November I have been chaining memories down, circling around a plot I have constructed out of wisps of nothing, a thread of feeling.

The past resurrected. I open the closets I fear, though often I find the contents more palatable than expected.

And now I come to the crux of the matter. The heartbreak. As I mentioned in How I Became a Witch and a Writer, once upon a time there was a particularly hard year for me.

I managed to keep the house of cards up until I met one very particular person. Not such a great person, but I was heart deep by the time I found that out. And angry. 

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” William Congreve

As a woman scorned I have burned the hottest anger in my life. I have the emails, I know what I said, what I thought. Words sent that I never thought I could direct towards anyone. Not gentle spirit me.

When I’m mad like that, I’m a bitch. I’m not classy and cool. I know it when I read the words, and I war with myself. He deserved it, I deserved better. But my heated behavior didn’t demonstrate any superiority. 

And even when I directed all that anger at someone who wronged me so, even if I could rationalize that to myself—what I really didn’t deserve was my attachment to the situation. To step into the role of the angry scorned woman. It brought me no happiness.

When I cooled I realized the best way to step above is to move on, not waste my time.

I’m not perfect. And in my worst hours, I have done things I regret now. 

But hot damn did I express myself. I laid my soul open.

On one side of the coin is deep love, and on the other is real heartbreak. 

It’s real. It hurts. It moves. It disturbs. It’s terrifying. And it makes people do stupid things.

And that’s life.

Without those scenes, there’s no book.  

This month’s New Moon coincides with a major celebration—my two year anniversary with my love and now housemate.

Last year when he and I toasted our first year, or rather when I spilled the bubbling champagne all over myself and the floor, it was the first time I had ever hit that mark.

And now, having lived together for several months, see New Apartment New Moon, I can safely say this is going to last a while.

There are ups and downs, passionate arguments we engage in only because we care deeply about the other. Petty arguments about adding tomatoes or NOT, where to put the thermostat, and which TV show to watch, of course. My comfort zone has been challenged and will continue to be challenged.

As uber independent as I am, it’s still strange to have someone so opinionated about what I should and shouldn’t be doing in my life. Aha! So that’s what happens when someone really cares and is paying attention. 

Two years in I see gleams of how my love will continue to deepen more than I have ever experienced. It’s miraculous how trusting another person has allowed me to trust myself and my vision more, too.

This is a good thing. *Nods and laughs*

Before I met this one, I was seeking so much: love, companionship, appreciation, respect, admiration, a pedestal, a guide, someone as nerdy/cool/crazy/smart/rebellious/ridiculous as I am.

I broke my heart on shiny but unreliable men. I passed up some good guys. Maybe the chemistry was off or maybe I wasn’t ready. 

But I kept trying, through the hardest of times, I kept pushing myself to overcome my fears, to get out there, to strike conversations, to crack a joke even though the stakes felt high. Sigh, to write one more message to some rando on the internet. 

But eventually this Wren found a nest with someone who cracks her up and gives good hugs. And he even fuckin’ cooks! He drugs me with capsaicin against my will, but it has numerous health benefits.

To all those who are seeking, keep it up. Make yourself as happy as possible in the meantime and one day, somebody will *poof* show up to help. No one knows when. Or where (tho probably not at work, in your house or rrr at the bar).  

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a who.

And if you are a happy free bird, then rock on. ‘Nuff said.

But the one thing is–the who isn’t going to be perfect. Elements of importance will be there, yes, but there will always be something off. But the question is—do you feel perfect enough being together?

I do.

Love to all!

 

In his arms, her magic powers are on the rise…

Tessa, Etruscan Goddess of the Dawn, is desperately fighting off a malicious god, but her powers are weakening. She needs a hero and fast, because only sexual energy can give her strength. So she seeks out Caligo, whose sexual prowess is legendary…

And she’s the only one who can bring him into the light…

Caligo is a fabled Cimmerian warrior determined to stay away from spoiled goddesses who trample hearts after they’ve had their fun. But there’s something irresistibly hot and inviting about Tessa, and he knows he’s her only chance to escape the encroaching darkness…

A book about an Etruscan sun goddess battling darkness? Count me in. The title “What a Goddess Wants” drew me in as I assumed I’d find strong ladies, magic, and sexy scenes.

Overall I would say I’m pleased but by the end I found it didn’t quite jump out of my seat.

1. Tessa has a fresh fun attitude.

Tessa is more optomistic than Sookie Stackhouse but just as blond. She has a fierce side but as a goddess she is mostly powerless. She was called Thesan in the old days, with powers connected to sun, birth and (well) sex.

She can’t stand on her own but it’s because of things outside her control. Her roomie sends her out to the Boonies of Pennsylvania to find a guy to help. 

2. Tough alpha type.

If you’ve followed my blog, you know alphas are not my thang. Sorry. But the chemistry was good. I appreciate Caligo for being a smartass, which adds some flavor.

Caligo is a Cimmerian, in sum he can’t feel much and he’s really strong. Heals fast. Sun’s no good.

Tessa is still a feisty sun goddess and claims the spotlight some of the time. She demands her way. Not all of the time, and she definitely yeilds to what Caligo wants in their very first meeting. Caligo does come to see her as his goddess, but he resists giving in completely because of what his warrior tribesmen will think.

I’d have liked to see Tessa kick some more ass. She delivers babies which is cool, but I think something is missing.

3. Don’t try this at home.

There is a plot for the book but it is often broken up by sexy scenes. They are like Tessa’s power charge, and she’s running low a lot.

Public Service Announcement time—
One of my pet peeves is when characters do things in books that are bad ideas.

This isn’t a sex ed class, but here’s a whisper. (Even goddesses should use lube for anal sex. Just winging it is a really bad idea but common mistake so I hear.)  Emulating this book might seriously hurt.

BE WISE

Otherwise, the scenes are very steamy. It is unlikely anyone but the gods could copulate at such a rate. Perhaps I would have preferred fewer scenes with more buildup.

4. Awesome mythology theme and setting.

I love Philadelphia. As there is a huge Italian American population, it would kindof make sense if Estrucan gods hung out there and had secret sexy clubs. 

The characters and conflicts are based in Greek and Etruscan myths according to the author. 

I don’t believe Estrucans actually used the word Strega (Italian for witch), as the word was recorded much later according to  Old World Witchcraft by Raven Grimassi. Still, although obviously the book is fiction, I find it’s mythical inspiration fun to learn about. 

Looking forward to reading Book Two