destination one: bright yellow daisies & candy cane morgues

There are multiple schools of thought on how to start a trip. Some cannonball into it, setting forth for the wilds of Albania or the dark side of the moon. And then there others, more cautious, who dip a toe into the water, wiggle it for a few minutes and then go inside to fetch a thermometer. I'll leave it to you to decide where on the spectrum this blog falls.

Setting aside philosophical schools of thought for the moment, welcome to Couer d'Couers. 

Couer d'Couers is a small town with an alarmingly high murder rate in the picturesque world of Pushing Daisies. As a general note of caution, I would stay away from: crash test dummies; RealDolls; dog breeders; scratch 'n sniff books; bees; candy vats; mimes; magic acts; and frescorts, among other things.

But the atmosphere of the world stands out among  all other psuedo-storybook and fairy tale adaptions currently on television. The landscape is striking in its vividness with brighter daisies, redder strawberries and crisper lines than exist any where else. Walking the streets here, you'll see architecture that ranges from a candy cane colored morgue to the striking pie crust atop the Pie Hole. The two most interesting and involved industries in the town, actually, are food and death.

Now, whether this means you'll enjoy your cup-pie from the Pie Hole at a picnic in the cemetery or if you'd prefer to keep your dining and funerary visits separate is up to you. But it's a feature of the area worth noting; life may be fragile and subject to get up and go at the touch of a finger -- and then return just as easily -- but the essentials of it thrive in every reanimated plum.

In that spirit, I hope you all take the time to really savor something sweet, wherever you are.

destination zero: sixty seconds of blog shout outs

So, today, after multiple days and weeks of not posting, I’m posting double. Someone, somewhere, most likely has a story with some sort of moral that would address this situation. Am I going to hunt for it? Yeah, not so much.

Instead, I’m making an unscheduled (and thus uncounted) travel post; all places mentioned here will migrate into the sidebar. Assuming, of course, that I figure out how to manage the damn thing. So, destination zero: blogs to visit; don't time me.

Living with Skyrim: I'm not a gamer. My friend, who is dying of the plague and/or organ failure, has spent the better part of two years trying to get me past the free trial of WoW. The only online game anyone has successfully gotten me to play is Wizard101. 

Yes, it's a children's game, move along. 

Having said all that, I'm enjoying Living with Skyrim, despite all evidence pointing to me never playing the game. The thing about the blog, is that it isn't a purely mechanical 'how-to' guide, though those are useful and have saved me ass in Wizard more than once. But following the blog, I get sense of the story and the greater architecture of the world. One of the features I enjoy most about the blog are the real life posts. Those are the ones that make me curious about the game. Rather than paraphrase (badly) Real Life: Werewolves and Vampires is one of my favorites from the blog. 

Through My Eyes: And now for something utterly different, a poetry blog. Poetry is the focus of my English major and I love both the premise of this blog, poetry about eye make up, and the execution which makes it more than poetry about eye make up. Water, Land, and Heaven, the newest post on the blog, is certainly my favorite to date. The make up is beautiful and the poetry embraces that; it's utterly feminine and unapologetically so. I'm interested in seeing what other forms of poetry the writer takes on, as well as what new techniques she'll use with her eye make up. 

Speaking of feminine and unapologetic, Anatagazem: the body gets the mind all hot. It's also a visual blog -- I have no talent in the visual arts, drawing or make up, so I'm entranced by people who do. This is specifically about the human body as inspiration for art and, extrapolating to my own life, that gets to include creative writing as well. Our bodies and why they are amazing is the latest post here too and it's the one that sold me on the blog. The writer is able to embrace her own body and the female body as something beautiful with its imperfections, not in spite of them. That's something that I think is a challenge for all of us, certainly it can be for me and her comment about fake versus natural seemed spot on. I could ramble, but this post is getting long enough as it is. 

There were several other blogs that caught my eye, but I think I'm out of time for this post. Coming soon: more blogs in far more than sixty seconds. Keep an eye on that sidebar for an idea of what all I'll be following. 

If I can get it to work. 

friday's fable: house hunting

Before I begin, I have to apologize for the delay in posts and the lack of an itinerary or, really, any sort of indication of the travel portion of this blog. Even when a trip is only through the pages of a book, life still manages to derail it. So the first destination is still a bit of a ways off and I won't post an itinerary for the blog until I'm certain of that date. However, these Friday fables will be an editorial feature going forward. Allons-y!

A good friend of mine is considering buying her first home after years of renting. She also may, or may not, be dying of a combination of the plague and organ failure; we're a bit unsure. However, in the process of her coughing up a lung and me trying to provide support and medical advice from several states away, we started to talk about house hunting. She found a condo she liked, there was a discussion of neighborhoods and what's really important in a home.

Baba Yaga's Hut

[image from? please contact me if it's yours]

Baba Yaga, a Slavic folklore figure, is an opium smoking, child-eating, fairy godmother type, who is also the proud homeowner of a cabin with chicken legs. More often than not, she's the villain and vanquished at the end of the story -- not that it stops her from appearing again -- but it's hard to deny the, ah, 'charm' of her home. For one thing, all the comfort of the house with the potential to pick up and go of an RV. And if her oven has seen more children than apple pies? Well, at least it's large enough to do all the holiday cooking.

The real magic, though, of Baba Yaga's hut is as a place of transformation. You can cross the threshold -- that's the easy bit, after all -- as anything. A child. A novice. An adventurer. But walking out? You can't leave the same as you came in; Baba Yaga forces a change, a challenge that you have to overcome and you carry the scar when you leave.

If you leave.

an introduction and a forward

Octoberknows is a travelogue of fictional places, cities and scenes only found in stories. This is a space intended less as a review and more as a walk through -- a tour, but without the relentlessly cheerful guide pointing out things of interest that are, without fail, absolutely uninteresting. 

Well, probably without the cheerful part of that description, anyway. 

But it's literature as seen from where it's set and with the expectation that a good book is like a destination, one that invites visitors and is never seen the same way. And so, this is not a guidebook. 

There will be exactly sixty-six places featured in this blog this year from a wide range of literature (a word that, in this case, means anything with words in it and some things without any words at all). There will also be scheduled distractions and meditations to keep company with the random ones. 

I hope that this space, whatever else it is, will be part of your itinerary.