When I Say “everyone’s On Their Own Timeline”, I Mean It.

Aleksey Tolstoy, from “It chanced”; A Book of Russian Verse (ed. by Cecil Bowra)

Wednesday, 28th July 2021

Love is more than the dream wistfully painted across torn pages in dripping ink and meadows of wildflowers, by writers and poets huddled by candlelight seeing love written in beloved faces. Seeing love in yearning clouds slowly chasing after the sun's fragile rays. Love is heartache and hurt and pain - a climbing river pushing back against everything you know. It inspires and challenges, it breathes life and ends it. It is everything we want and everything we do not dare to have. Love can bring just as much destruction to the harmony it creates. But it’s never about what love is or what it is not - it is how we shape its destiny within our own lives that counts. Love will always be with you, but will you let it stay? And sometimes we know that we just have to chase it away. 

I fought so hard to remain unseen, merely a shadow on the wall that could go unnoticed when I fell over my own two feet and into words that dropped like pebbles.

And now I fight myself to be seen again, pulling myself in from currents that I found first instead of drowning myself in shadows.

We are more than what we appear

layers of voices beyond a moonlit mirror

silver threads wrapping around your ears

a darkness light cannot make clearer

Changeling Child

I thought jewelweed pods were fairy peas and I picked them carefully so they would not pop and spoil my gift. I laid them carefully on leaf platters, along with berries my mother told me not to eat and colorful flower petals. A perfect feast.  I had a stone circle built, a fairy circle, a castle, an altar, and there I left my offerings. Sometimes I wanted a wish in return. Sometimes I needed the fae to remember that I knew how to take care of my own kind. 

Introduction

I’m Ruth (she/her) and I write a lot, mainly poems, but I am also a historian, proofreader, and tarot card reader. I don't want to spill my whole life story but I'm also dyspraxic and hypermobile. I’m currently studying dress and textile histories, and my research is focused on deliberately concealed garments in UK buildings. I’m going to list a few of my WIPs and projects so that you know what to expect from my blog!

WIPs and Projects: 

Substack - I now have a newsletter for my historical research if you are interested! It is about deliberately concealed garments and concealment rituals around clothing and shoes, the stories of the people who owned these objects and their emotional dimensions.

Poetry collection - Holly House. I need to go back over some of my posts and add tags for the poems that are part of this collection. Holly House refers to the name of the house that I first started writing poems in and that has been a massive source of inspiration. 

Mirror World WIP - a historical fantasy/magical realism book I have been planning for a long time

Tales and Stories of the Fairy Kind - I can't help but dabble in rewriting fairy tales, but with much more of a historical perspective. Right now, I am writing a seventeenth century take on Cinderella that focuses on domestic relationships and how romance and fantasy is used as a means of escape and freedom for many people surviving through abuse

Here are all my links:

My Substack

My Etsy

My Instagram

My Pinterest

Thank you for stopping by!

Ruth

I'd prefer to sit awhile

waiting for the storm to come

the heavens rush and clamour and sing

but the rain is kept hidden

beneath the canopy of this weeping willow tree

0903, O.L. / Tumblr: @3lsahart / Peggy Toney Horton / September Days, In New England Fields and Woods, Rowland E. Robinson / Unknown / Alexander Theroux / Memory of Water, Reina María Rodríguez / September, Helen Hunt Jackson / Wallace Stegner / Instagram: @kjp / H. Stuart / Unknown / Unknown / Henry Rollins / Margaret Atwood / Diario Cuatro, DC de Oliveira / Virginia Woolf / Unknown / September 1st, D. E. / Beginning and ending with my death, Zeina Hashem Beck / The Whole Word and Other Stories, Ali Smith / Turquoise Silence, Sanober Khan / Victoria Erickson

Writing Notes: The Story Circle

The Story Circle by Dan Harmon is a basic narrative structure that writers can use to structure and test their story ideas.

Telling stories is an inherently human thing, but how we structure the narrative separates a good story from a truly great one.

The Dan Harmon Story Circle describes the structure of a story in 3 acts and with 8 plot points, which are called steps.

When you have a protagonist who will progress through these, you have a basic character arc and the bare minimum of a story.

As a narrative structure, it is descriptive, not prescriptive, meaning it doesn’t tell you what to write, but how to tell the story.

The steps outline when the plot points occur and the order in which your hero completes their character development.

These 8 steps are:

You - A character is in their zone of comfort

Need - But they want something

Go! - So they enter an unfamiliar situation

Struggle - To which they have to adapt

Find - In order to get what they want

Suffer - Yet they have to make a sacrifice

Return - Before they return to their familiar situation

Change - Having changed fundamentally

The hero completes these steps in a circle in a clockwise direction, going from noon to midnight.

The top half of the circle and its two-quarters of the whole make up act one and act three, while the bottom half comprises the longer second act.

In their consecutive order, the Story Circle describes the 3 acts:

Act I: The order you know

Act II: Chaos (the upside-down)

Act III: The new order

Working with the Story Circle enables you to think about your main character and to plot from their emotional state.

The steps will automatically make your hero proactive as you focus on their motivation, their actions and the respective consequences.

Sources: 1 2 3 More On: Character Development, Plot Development

I am half finished, incomplete as the moon in it's phases, yet still I am curved into a crescent smiling at my shadowed half