New Year, New You: An Experiment in Magical Radical Transformation

Yeah. . .She's not this classy.  Trust me.

My muse and I have an on-going disagreement of sorts.  Well.  I do.  She is indifferent as usual to my thoughts and feelings.  She clomps into my bedroom, heels in hand, cosmo and cheese fries on her breath.

She (poking me hard):  Hey.  Get up.

Me: What?  It's bedtime and we're not talking friends --

She: Whatever.  I have an idea.

Me: Your ideas are disorderly and often inconvenient.  I'm going back to bed.

She: No, you're not.  I'm going to keep poking you in your brain pan until you listen.  Are you listening now?  Are you listening now?  Are you listening now?  Are you listening now?  Are you listening now?  Are you listening --

Me: JESUS CHRIST, I HATE YOU!

She: So it goes like this.

So, you're supposed to be, like, magicians, occultists, witches in the woods and the kitchen and on the soccer field, right?  Workers of wonder.  Dream weavers.  People who get shit done.  Isn't this the year to make your own luck?  You're feeling especially awful with the nights that never end and run over by the holidaze and you can't drink joie forever before needing a meeting.  So now's the fucking time.  Don't wait until that stupid glitter ball drops and you're already making drunk and/or sentimental mistakes, start now.  Start now when it's hardest.  Start now when you feel so weighed down with emotions better left to glittery and not so glittery vampires and when you feel like you could sleep forever.  Now is the time you need to wake up.  Get up, get up!  Don't miss this moment.  Create magics great and small, mundane and mystical.  Find everything you've been looking for, mysteries revealed in every form of divination and song and when you fuck it up, when you are too tired to try, bring each other up from bloodied knees to get back up smiling.  You are all made of stars and you have stardust in your veins.  Do something about it.

Here is what you'll do.  You'll write prompts.  You'll explore.  You'll fall down.  Sometimes you'll lay there awhile, finding things under rocks that you never wanted to know.  They'll pull you back, using yarn, glue, cajoling and stern words.  You'll keep sewing yourself into who you'll want to be and you'll tell them, sometimes too much, because that's your way and what's needed.  You'll find how far you can really fly when you've made wings to carry you and be breathless from your accomplishments.  Besides your words, you'll give something made from your hands.  

Here is what they'll do.  Form a community of tealight hearths and stories high bonfires.  They'll whisper their stories, spirials of success and failure.  You'll learn from each other, make each other laugh, piss each other off.  You'll get things done together and alone.  You'll be afraid together, so knees up.    

Here's how it will work:

There's a prize.  Of course there's a prize.  I will do a random drawing and whoever wins can chose  one item from my shop and I will ship it anywhere in the world for free.  The Drawing will take place on Valentine's Day.  

I will put everyone's name in a hat and have Jow chose a name from the hat.  If you are a fiber freak (yarn, Dream Ambassadors, felted soap), I will even hand dye that item in the color of your choice.

You get one entry when:

* You add the "New Year, New You" button to your blog

* You blog about the "New Year, New You" experiment to spread the word about it

* You blog in response to any of my "New Year, New You" prompts (one entry each time you do so!)

* You blog about your own "New Year, New You" experiment (one entry each time you do so!).  You are captain of your own ship, if you're ass deep in your own experiments in making yourself stronger, faster, braver and more magical, that certainly counts.

You must leave me a comment with the appropriate link so that I know you have done these things.

More on Songs and Spells

I was going to try to write two entries for the next two weeks, but somewhere along the way on the way home to do so, I got distracted by Kings of Leon's Sex on Fire. I couldn't figure out the words but I really liked the beat and the voice, it was sexxxxy. So, coincidentally are the lyrics. Naturally, I was then curious about the video. Dear lordess! Why was I not sent the memo on how dirty/sweaty/sexy hot the lead is, all writhing around on a mattress? (I'm looking at you, Gordon, you're remiss in your platonic husbandly duties, they're super popular in the UK)

So, um, yeah let's pretend this is a legitimate magical entry and not an excuse to stare at my new pretend boyfriend. Right then. A while ago, I talked about Songs as Spells which also was totally not an excuse to listen to more Florence and the Machine. In case my entry titles and general rambling doesn't make it obvious, I'm obsessed with music which is sort of funny since I as only passable in playing the flute and my voice resembles my totem, Crow (which is why I think the story about the crow and the cheese I read as a child resonated and my first memories are of crows as well as my unrelenting desire for cheese, but that's neither hither nor thither). My senior druid noticed I seem to see ritual through popular music a lot. I thought everyone did that, but apparently it's weird enough to notice in a grove full of weirdos. I make mix cds for the gods and rituals (I know other people who do it too so that part is less weird) and significant others.

In my other sekrit life, I'm totes a smut riter (digression: writing the pr0ntastic parts after the first few times is totally a drag fo' real. People who don't write smut think that opinion is strange and means I'm in the wrong field. People who write smut Get It because basically it's like trying to have sex while whistling the entire time. Yes, it's still sort of sexy but it's also about choreography, making sure if the skirt came off it stays off, word choice, how many synonyms can you find for "hard" "vagina" "pleasure" "cock", do men wear buttons on their trousers at that time do women wear panties, etc., etc. So I dread writing them like a dreading thing and put them off like whoa but once I successfully execute it, I'm like, I'M THE QUEEN OF THE MOTHERFUCKING WORLD! I PWN ALL OF YOU! ALL OF YOUR ORGASMS BELONG TO ME! Like normal writers do) and I knew I wanted this scene to have a certain feel to it, like Florence's Drumming Song so I played it over and over again on repeat while writing it and now I have a completed Steampunk romantica (which is super popular right now for the curious) to submit for an anthology with plenty of time to edit again just to make it perfect before submitting it.

So if music can work as spellwork and getting one through porn writing, wouldn't it stand to reason that it could also be integrated into one's serial killer board/transformative process? I mean, Grant Morrison manifested some truly freaky shit when working on The Invisables even by freaky shit standards and now he has hordes of fangirls throwing panties at him, partly due to his work where he told himself he was as cool as James Bond. I've been trying to tell myself I'm as cool as Joan Holloway with only marginal success. So I started thinking today when I was inspired by another song, maybe for me, a theme song would be more helpful. I have decided on Cake's Short Skirt, Long Jacket because of these lyrics:

A girl with/ the right allocations/ Who's fast and thorough/ And sharp as a tack/ she's playing/ with her jewelry/ she's putting up her hair/ she's touring the facilities/ and picking up slack/ a girl with/ Uninterupted prosperity/ who used a machete/ to cut through red tape/ with fingernails that/ shine like justice/ and a voice that is dark/ like tinted glass. . . .

Which basically describes a modern Joan Holloway. So that's going to be my theme song and we'll see where that takes me. This is a Charmer experiment! Pick a theme song that describes what you want to be as a person, something you're trying to achieve, about rabbits, whatever, play it semi regularly and see what happens in addition to your other magical workings.

Which song are you going to use?