Steampunk Fissure preview

Take a step into this mechanical , sometimes diabolical world, fraught with clockwork tensions and alchemical experiments.  Whether you fly on airships or board steam trains, you’ll be drawn into mysteries, high adventures, back alley intrigues and fragile loves. Prepare to encounter a host of characters, both strange and bizarre, who will tease, amaze, and inspire as they lure you into these altered worlds of the once was and could have been.  Mad scientists and airship captains, baleful ladies, Egyptologists and their finds, tinkerers, spies, mechanical beings, and lost souls.

Steampunk Fissure carries of a broad section of this exciting genre, nodding from time to time to steampunk influences and branching out in odd new directions.   

on Transparency & Ripping the Veil

While on one hand I am entering a period which requires me to be social, on the other, the subconscious calls again.  I will have to maintain balance.  I agree with John Fowles observation that "Time is not a road, it is a room," and as my time fills up with social activities, I am pulled away from the visions, concepts, poems, writing which is bubbling up form the subconscious. Some of it valuable information, it may have taken years to process. some of it which needs to be thought out, recorded in poems, the novels, art. I'm tempted to shut myself away again, become hermit like and create, but it's also a time of reaching out and sharing, meeting and learning from others. What will happen when these new influences converge with the steam of observations, with those little awareness moments?  Will I rebuild, transform, rebirth? As I read the journals of Anais Nin, go back to Fowles and The Magus, and feel pulled to rewatch movies like "Stay" and "The Libertine" (movies where the plot involves an individual who must live outside society, both in their personal extremes. And as society and some of its systems summon, I feel pulled to do just the opposite, retreat into the worlds I know, the second reality, the world behind the world, which so many other authors, poets and artists have seen, Salman Rushdie, Carl Jung, Thomas Moore,  Fowles, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keith Flynn, Anais Nin, Neil Gaiman, Umberto Eco, Brian K.Ladd.  More and more I see the mentions, the hints, the nods, in films, in contemporary novels.  I am just now noticing or are they trying to tell us something beneath the story lines and song lyrics?   
As I embark on my lunar moth series in the novel, poetry and art (the lunar moth as a sign of the veil's transparency,) I go deeper and deeper and like Jung discover even more layers, even after I thought I had gone as far as I could.

Lunar Moth Lessons

In emergence

from hermitage,

I hide behind costumes, hats,

names - run away to

sideways cultures

sub-societies,

only to learn

I’ve taken that first

hard-to-reverse step. Summoned

by yet another system.

I seek the awake moments, 

(as fragile as mist on an Atlantic breeze,

as it dissolves when I look away),

to reteach

me to avoid

such betrayal -

stay handbound

with the subconscious.

Remain aware

by looking in:

deeper than ether.

Reminder:

side step reality’s hypnosis,

indoctrination,

loss of self.

Become transparent

luminous

more illusive

than a lunar moth on a cloudy day.

Only then can one walk through

the glass doors of reality,

                       find the numinous self -

                                                    take wing.

November - on the road

Glorious November days - surreal, the air so clear you can see into other dimensions, the shifting shadows as I drive under red flamed trees, angled wind slashing away the slow pull. I spend many hours on the road these days with my job, and although viewed through a windshield, I feel back in touch with the natural order of things as the sky shifts and changes and the seasons evolve one into another. The cloudy days are reminiscent of home and it was great fun today as I joined friends and coworkers for lunch at Saffrons where we were pampered in the most elegant, unobtrusive way as we dined on a delicious variety of multi-spiced Indian dishes. The rose flavored rice pudding perfectly topped it off.  The afternoon was a treat, accompanying a friend to an art gallery and then, bringing back fond memories, helping him find just the right satchel at the army navy store.
Funny how things hit you sometimes.  And how often, it's the quieter, low key, subtle moments that resonate, the little synchronicities,