Tag Archives: fever

Dragons and A Brand New Year

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I hope you all had a lovely holiday break 🙂

I know I’ve been a bit absent from the blogosphere this past month – I’ve had a terrible virus that stole my breath and sense of smell and taste, so Christmas wasn’t quite the eating festival I envisioned. However, I finally seem to be on the mend and so, I thought, it might be nice to write a post and say hello.

I’ve had dragons on my mind of late. Part of my virus seems to stem from the fact that I am a watery person, and there were times I longed for flames and heat to dislodge the permanent feeling of being underwater – a pet dragon would have been most helpful, though perhaps left me a bit singed around the edges 😉

Now that I’m feeling better, I’m excited about the new year and the promise it holds. I’ve been working on a collaborative project with someone which should come to fruition this year, and my vampire WIP has been ripped apart and reassembled, ready for a fresh round of submissions. I’m also going to be exploring some different fields of study, walking another path. I can feel my wings unfurling, ready to roar.

Finally, I’ve been thinking about this post I wrote, almost five years ago, right at the start of my blogging career. A portent? Perhaps. At the very least, it’s a cool cloud formation. What do you think?

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The other week I saw a dragon in the sky.

Outstretched wings, a long curving neck, all gleaming golden beauty.

‘Do I need to build a windlance?’ I thought.

And then, as I struggled with cold fingers to get my phone unlocked, the dragon drifted and changed, the sky taking him away.

But I think, perhaps, I caught him. No black arrow required.

Wishing you all a powerful 2020!

Enjoyed this post? Want to read more? Find me on Twitter @AuthorHelenJ,  Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Plus my latest book release, Under Stone (Ambeth Chronicles #4), is now available on Amazon. Visit my Amazon Author Page to see more.

 

Kaleidoscopic Dreams

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Kaleidoscope flowers

I’ve been ill this past week or so, but am feeling better now. It was one of those bugs that alter reality, high temperatures and blocked head putting me in a strange, dream-like state where I wasn’t sure, at times, what was real and what was not.

My dreams were strange as well, lucid then spinning away like a kaleidoscope of images, as I travelled landscapes familiar and bizarre, the line between sleep and waking somehow blurred as the illness took hold. Kaleidoscope, I recently discovered, is apparently the collective term for a group of butterflies, and that’s how the dreams felt, blots of colour flying about, at once near yet untouchable, all around me.

I wrote some stuff, nonetheless. A little challenge for Sacha, some blog posts, even managed to do a little editing (once I’d completed my list :-D). I also had to keep on with most things I usually do, fortunate in that I work from home and so could take a break when needed.

But the interesting thing, the lingering effect, is a sort of loosening of words onto the page. As though whatever burned its way through my system last week changed the way I thought and saw things, and how I expressed them.

I remember reading Aldous Huxley’s Doors Of Perception years ago, about his controlled experiments with peyote in the 50’s, and the way it changed how he saw the world. While I’m certainly not advocating drug use, I wonder if I’ve just taken my own sort of fever-fueled trip through my subconscious, awakening ideas I might not otherwise have accessed.

Or maybe I’m still unwell and this is the last of my fever delusion…