The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

Today I went to my regular Toastmasters meeting. It was such a pleasant change to have 11 members attending rather than the usual 6 or 7 that we have been having far too often lately.

(Like so many clubs and social organizations, Covid turned out to be quite a wrecking ball.
In the first lockdown of March 2020, the club went online in Zoom mode. I am a bit of a Luddite and I just hate being in videos or photos so I went into hibernation and sat it out. About a third of our members never came back)

For once there was no last minute cancellations with the program manager trying to divide 12 speaking slots among 6 people. I have taken to calling our group "The 5 loaves and 2 fishes" club. Especially appropriate since our meeting venue is in a small hall that we hire from the local Catholic Church.

Shortly after the meeting started we got to a segment called Traveling Tales. Some one is assigned to start a story and it then goes around the room with each person adding a sentence or 2 to the story and hopefully ending on a cliff hanger before handing the story over to the next speaker.

Whenever I start the story, it often involves tea parties at Putin's palace, piranhas, vampires or other monsters.

Today it was a tale of a man going to the airport to pick up his daughter from a flight landing at 3am.

I thought to myself, how on earth am I going to get Putin, Boris Johnson, Clive Palmer or Alex Jones into this drama? I could see no opening at all.

As the story went around the room, it turned into a rather tame tale of delayed flights and power black outs at Terminal 4. Then suddenly out of nowhere all the people shuffling about the airport behind the locked glass doors turn out to be ZOMBIES and the story teller's daughter is locked in there with them.

I nearly died laughing because I had my own zombie apocalypse planned for later in the meeting.

( The Talking Dead )

But first the Fight Club





Some witches out there must have trump voodoo dolls because everything seems to have fallen apart all at the same time

I did not spend the solstice brewing up potions of rats, snails and trump toe nails. Instead I did rather more mundane stuff like coffee crawls and watching the sunset by the beach armed with a new novel thanks to Catness. It is always nice to save magical books for magical places. Much better than on the bus or in a queue or on the loo etc etc

( Magical Beasts and where to find them )

Thanks to the inspired guidance of Marie Kondo, I have got more tidying, sorting and decluttering done in the last six weeks than in the last six years
The Crawling Chaos is now slowly sinking back into its box where it will get locked away at least as long as Daisy Dursley is here visiting

It is only a pity that Petunia never got to see such progress. A place for everything and almost everything in its place. But somehow I suspect that the departure of Petunia from this mortal coil was precisely the trigger needed to get started on this stuff. Because when she is gone, that makes it more real that the serpent has moved just that little bit higher on the Grim Reaper’s visiting list

So now the tarot decks have all found themselves a home in one of two locations rather than scattered all over the Lair as previously. The same can not be said of the books since there are just so many more of those

For ages I had been meaning to consult the cards as a sneaky tricksy way of finding the long lost Rory’s Story cubes but somehow never got around to it. Like so many things, had put them in a place so safe and so secret that I had forgotten where it was. Same with the most recent python passport
So it was more than amusing that it wasn’t by consulting the cards but sorting them that I finally found those mystery dice. They were in exactly the location they were supposed to be but way at the back of the broom closet fallen behind a stack of tarot decks gathering dust.

Recently a supermarket had drastically discounted 20 pocket organizers. These are things you hang on the back of a door for putting knick knacks into. Stuff like scarves, ties or costume jewellery I suppose but they were the perfect size for decks of cards
With 2 per pocket hanging on the back of the door to the Big Mac, it would make them always easily visible and reachable so the inner serpent would no longer have an excuse to remain missing in action when it comes to squiggling time.

Before using the pocket gadget, I got a fresh new dusting cloth and rubbed lavender oil over the whole thing, both inside and outside the pockets in the hope that it would scare away nibbling, nesting creatures of all kinds.

It’s funny. It turned out that the clothes were the key to the whole process. Sorting those things meant finally facing the fact that Izzie really is TOO FAT. And sorting everything else also made it clear that there may be a rather large connection between storing so much stuff and so much fat.
I've got to let it all go when departing this mortal coil so I may as well get an early start and get to enjoy the benefits of the process.

Sort of suspected that years ago but could never quite get around to doing anything about it. But this time when the signs appeared to get started, listened more than usual and got cracking and in the process found long lost things often just as I needed them and also dumped old stuff that I realised was not the embodiment of particular memories but merely empty shells reminiscent of the experience.
No self respecting serpent needs any more than 6 horcruxes. And Izzie had a good 666.
All of them requiring so much space in the old grey skull that there was barely room for anything else

The sorting will come to something of a standstill during Daisy’s visit but still can be kept slowly ticking over. It’s overcoming the initial inertia to get the ball rolling that is the biggest and most difficult obstacle of all.

Also been reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic” and there’s lots of fabulous fairy dust to be found there too.
So here’s hoping that the next adventures in Nanoland will no longer be boring morning pages on steroids but a return to the old days of creeping crawling monsters and creatures of the deep.

Here in Oz, the only news is the results of the so called Same Sex Marriage Survey - a non-binding postal survey that cost a mere $122 million to conduct.
While 62% in favour is not quite Brexit, it is still not the sort of respectable 90% landslide worthy of Putin or Mugabe.

Especially amusing is that the whole thing was a sneaky tricksy scheme designed by conservative politicians to kick the SSM can down the road and hopefully avoid dealing with it forever. Well that blew up in their faces big league. And now they can’t turn around and vote against it because they will be gored to death by unicorns or sparkled by fairies if they even dream of it. But that won’t stop the Mad Monk and his twisted minions like Kevin Andrews from trying

While the rest of the country are still celebrating at the biggest party so far this century, Izzie has other plotting and scheming to do.

So it is the half way mark in Nanoland. Happy to report that the serpent is now just short of 32,000 words so well on target for reaching the magical 50,000 on time and even for the personal goal of 60,000 by the stroke of midnight on Thursday 30th November.

But not all of those words are proper story words. Found out from trial and error that when the muses are not lurking, the best way to invoke them is to simply write dribble about pretty much anything. Mind dumps along the lines of the so called Morning Pages are pretty effective. Usually after 10 to 15 minutes of that, the inner serpent realises that the Izzie means business and is then less hesitant about delivering the real goods

But still it has taken nearly two weeks before an actual story line finally took shape.
It was the good old Bohemian Gothic deck that came to the rescue. A certain evil scheming Red cardinal turned up who bears an uncanny resemblance to one Vladimir Putin even if the former is rather more modestly dressed.




That combined with a prompt from the very sick and twisted Michael Arntzen in his Inspiration Guide - Instigations concerning a serial killer who removes the tongues from his victims
Having followed the Snoops and Spooks on Twitter for the last year or so, it has not escaped this serpent’s attention that an unusual number of people who oppose one V V Putin seem to meet untimely ends in very peculiar and unnatural ways.

Strange suicides and accidents near windows. Even apparently innocent heart attacks.
All with possible sinister explanations. Still waiting for the poisoned umbrellas and hot pots of polonium tea to make appearances

I had always assumed that Alex Litvinenko was nuked for being a sneaking ratty double agent. Those folks are universally despised once they have outlived their usefulness to both parties. But the stuff coming out of the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers and especially the recent murder of a journalist in Malta implies that Litvinenko’s real crime was knowing too much about His Master’s Vices and even worse - threatening to tell.

Same with the famous Sergei Magnitsky who has turned out to be far more dangerous and disruptive in death than he ever was while alive. He was put on trial for fraud after he died. I don’t know if they dragged his corpse onto the stand or left his spot empty. I remember thinking at the time that Zombie Courts make the concept of kangaroo courts look totally tame
Of course I did not know then that his crime had been to uncover the grafting and shafting of the real mobsters.
Bill Browder then got Hillary Clinton on his case and that's when it got really personal for Putin

If you were to put all this crazy stuff into a story, folks would tell you to get real. No one would ever believe that BS. But we are now living in a reality TV show world and nothing can be too crazy or unlikely to be true. So why not have fun with it all?

So if the Devil and his Minions are hell bent on creating the conditions for the New World Order, then of course it would make sense to silence the pesky tin foil hat folks and nosy conspiracy theorists who threaten to spill the beans.



The other thing that I have noticed. Aside from Tarot cards being an especially useful device for getting into the Zone, the other almost guaranteed way to know that I have arrived is the appearances of quotes and stories from the Bible.
Some one out there has been asked to turn stones into bread (or rather the modern equivalent of turning words into $$$$) and has been offered all sorts of unearthly powers and privileges as far as the eye can see as well as wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
All he had to do is sign the dotted line…..

Then there’s still the saga of the Golden Calfefe and the Tower of Babble.
But back in the real world, it looks more like The Writing on the Wall

It’s just past the half way mark over in Nanoland.

I’ve got myself a cosy cushion of words and presently almost aimlessly meandering down the mountain to the finish line which is almost within reach.

It has been a very strange month so far. Never have I gotten to the starting blocks with so little in the way of inspiration. Like The Beast 66 himself, this serpent's planning and preparation for this year's event was non- existent - even less than for the very first year I joined when I signed up a couple of days before the start of November.

At first I figured that I could always resurrect and expand on a super heroes project done earlier this year as part of an online course

So that was the fallback position in the event that nothing more interesting turned up in the meantime.

But it was listening to a correspondent’s report from the election in the USA and the first of the three very nasty debates that the little green light went on in this serpent’s skull.

( Agent Orange )

A few days ago there was a fascinating story on the radio. An idea that makes so much sense and seems so blindingly obvious once some one else has thought about it.


Once we were Google

Years ago in my flobberworm days well before the World Wide Web, I had to resort to old fashioned libraries to find out stuff. Obsessed with brain training the way most folks my age were obsessed with music, beauty, sport or fitness, I used to borrow books about creativity, tricks for doing mental maths or how to develop a super power memory.
Most useful were the techniques for memorizing the calendar for any year this and last century which consisted basically of 2 sets of numbers and the rules for manipulating them and a phonetic system which made remembering those lists very easy.

But the one technique that appeared over and over again was the construction of a Memory Palace.
This involves a place or path that you are familiar with. Your house is a pretty good starting point. You pick locations such as doors, windows, tables and go from room to room in your mind always in the same order and link each place with one item from the list to be remembered. The more exaggerated and outrageous the connections are, the more easy it is to remember them.
The guest on the show has an example on her blog using this technique to remember the the Periodic Table

She then goes on to explain that this technique goes back a long way (50,000 years and still counting) and has been experimenting with it herself to see how much information she can store in her assortment of memory palaces. A lot more than she ever expected.
It is the first time that I have ever come across an explanation of Aboriginal song lines from a westerner that was not full of new age waffle. It was sensible and down to earth and definitely very deja vu.

Ancient Memories

I was particularly intrigued with how Lynne Kelly uses tarot cards. After all there is no need to stick to houses, rooms and roads to make memory maps. They can be portable too and decks of cards are perfect for this purpose since they have an inbuilt structure. There are so many symbols lurking on a single tarot card that it is likely that this is precisely one of the functions they were used for in the way that stained glass in churches illustrated the Bible stories before the days of mass literacy.

Of course in these days of Google and other distractions, it is that much harder to devote time to the dark art of memory making.

So another November in Nanoland is over and it's time for the ritual post mortem

There are two things I have learned and one that I have confirmed

( A Plodding Python )

The serpent is lurking a lot less lately due to the distraction of the annual ritual that is National - these days more like International Novel Writing Month.

It’s not like I am ever actually going to DO anything with the 50,000 plus words. Didn’t last year or the year before or the one before that etc etc so it seems most unlikely that things will be different this time. But in the end it doesn’t really matter.

( A big fat stash of words )

Camp Nano is a strange masochistic ritual. Taking time away from slinking around in Cyberia in order to dedicate sixty minutes or so to every day to squiggling and knowing damned well that all of it will end up gathering dust on some hard drive.

For while the serpent is disciplined when it comes to the word count, the stuff that comes after is just one enormous festival of procrastination. It’s been nearly five years now since first setting foot in the crazy place that is Nanoland.

( A Word Salad )

November draws ever nearer and soon it will be time to unleash the inner squiggler. There’s no excuse for lack of inspiration this time. Having spent April writing more than 50,000 words of brain storming and July plotting and planning and creating a rudimentary Snowflake outline, November should simply be a matter of getting those fingers clicking to finally come up with a first draft that does not end up on some hard drive gathering dust.

The annual ritual of recruiting nano noobies has started. This year the area organizer has got a whole bunch of libraries on board so there’ll be no shortage of spots for write ins
Turned up to one such event on Tuesday evening and met a few old timers and a lot of new faces. They even had showbags which was a very clever way to encourage those attending to fill in and return the surveys. There were book marks and quite a few leaflets about the library along with a nice notepad. But best of all was a spiral notebook with a pen so there’s no excuse for not writing down inspiration whenever it may arrive.

Last year’s Deck of Doom is providing the main inspiration for this year’s scribbling. The Zombie Tarot is not the frivolous fad that it appears to be on first glance. I shuffled the deck to supply some random plot points and the last card turned out to be Death. How inappropriate. For in any self respecting zombie tale death is most definitely not the end at all. It’s just the beginning

A state and federal election added more ingredients to the brew, along with the latest and most unwelcome addition to the cityscape. Where a gorgeous old grassy patch of land surrounded by twisted and gnarled Moreton Bay Fig trees used to be is now the site of an enormous hole in the ground. It will end up being just a giant cash gobbling mosquito infested swamp. It’s just the perfect place to start a zombie apocalypse while getting written revenge on the wankers who go trashing serpent sacred sites in order to build grandiose monuments to their egos.

The present state government is all circus and no bread. In fact they are destroying the city and everything they can get their paws on, putting up taxes, water and power and trashing the state credit rating in order to fund a bunch of useless monstrous carbuncles.

After the recent very short lived “Purple Reign” of one of the local football teams, it could be very tempting to let the zombies loose at a grand final played in the bright shiny brand new (but not yet built) sports stadium which is yet another one of the government’s grand projects.
The only thing they are not building is a nuclear power station but creative license can solve that particular inconvenient fact.

The only ingredient missing from this particular dystopian tale is some all powerful all seeing spy agency. But November changes everything