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My Brother Orion once again climbs the skies, his faithful dog with him, and they run the course of night.
Have you wondered why some constellations are seasonal, others always visible? Consider the Big Dipper (also known as Ursa Major, the Great Bear). You can see it pretty much from the equator north year round. Perhaps the Bear knows he’s safe from Orion’s bow way in the north?
That, of course, is the secret. Some constellations are circumpolar, meaning they are so close to Polaris (the Pole Star, the Northern Star) they are always visible when you look north. The Great Bear may be “above” Polaris as you view it, sometimes “below,” and all directions are relative to the viewer because celestial navigators know all constellations are south of Polaris regardless of their orientation in the sky.
My Brother Orion and dog, Sirius, are closer to the equator (Orion’s famous three-starred belt is just “below” (south of) the celestial equator) , far from the north (okay, about 90°s), and we will only see him when our “night” sky faces the part of the sky where they roam.
Hold your right arm straight out to your side and make a fist. Your fist is the sun. Turn your head so you’re looking over your opposite shoulder. Your head is the Earth and you are staring out into a part of the heavens only visible the winter months of the year, where Orion walks.
Want to see the Spring sky? Keep your fist over the same spot and rotate your body counter-clockwise a quarter turn around it. Look over the opposite shoulder again, away from your sun-fist, and you’re looking into the Spring night sky. Ditto Summer and Fall.
All equatorial and near-equatorial constellations follow this seasonal rule; we can only see them when our night is facing the part of the sky where they live.
Still holding with your arm out and your fist holding the sun? Look straight up. Rotate a full circle around your fist. What you see changes little (if at all). Congrats, you’re seeing the circumpolar constellations.
I hope you’ve enjoyed our little tour of the place I call home.
Readers in the southern hemisphere, please read this section in reverse and you’ll do fine.
(laugh, dammit!)
November 2025 Announcements
Sister Fran Tabor shared some thoughts on last month’s Musings:
Dreams are more powerful than reality, if framed as possible reality. As are nightmares.
In America a frequently done experiment, different political stances when polled without labels, will have a 70% to 95% agreement.
When R’s & D’s are attached to the views (in 50-50 amounts), then and only then will the “Great Divide” appear. To keep label-blinded sheep in their place, it is important to make sure no one talks to anyone with the “wrong” label. Censorship becomes paramount.
The greatest censorship blockade runner is the fictional story that creeps under censorship both from outside and the insidious self-imposed variety.
We authors have an immense responsibility.
Fran acknowledges her authoric responsibility in her work. Give a look, buy a book, and enjoy.
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RoundTable 360° – Our 28 Nov 2025 RoundTable 360° session is The Interaction of Politics and Art: Expressing the Moment
Some creatives back away from all things political in their work and rightly so; unless a current or historical event provides a necessary plot point, why include it?
Other creatives include current or historical events as plot points, reference points, character elements, and still others make direct political statements. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still, many of the original Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes, are making social if not political statements. The Three Stooges made several Saturday matinee reels with heavy political messages during WWII as did Mash during and post Viet Nam, and a case could be made that without political messaging much of the music of the 60s-80s would be soulless pop.
If art bridges the mundane and the sacred, then how does what happens in the mundane impact what is seen as art? Does the good king encourage artistic freedom? Does the tyrant call creatives to heal? What, if any, is the political responsibility of the artist? To support, to oppose, and to support or oppose what? What is the responsibility of the creative to reflect and or comment on their times?
It would be naive to try and completely dodge current events since we are all constantly bombarded with the frantic 24 hour news cycle of chaos.
Join us on Friday, 28 Nov 2025, 7:30-9pmET, for a discussion on free speech, creative expression in response to politics, and how we see it has manifested throughout historical periods of drama in geopolitical moments.
Grab your seat at the table now. |
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Question for other indie authors – Do you prefer to publish your print books through Amazon, D2D, Ingram, or some other service, and the reason is…?
I’m running into something which perplexes me; the ISBN I use on one service is rejected when I elect to publish on another service. This week is the first time I’ve encountered this. Previously we published on multiple platforms to cover as broad an audience as possible, each book with its own ISBN (which we purchased and own. We buy in lots of 100), and used that same ISBN when publishing on different platforms.
Now we’re being told we can’t do that, and the issue is referred to as a Vendor of Record conflict:
“Unlike with eBooks, transferring a print book from one service to another while keeping the same ISBN requires a few more steps.
“When a print book is published, the distribution service you select whether it be Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, or even Draft2Digital, will be registered as the Vendor of Record or essentially the “lien holder” on that ISBN regardless of who the owner of the ISBN is. The Vendor of Record is a separate entity from the ISBN owner. Another way to think of Vendor of Record is like your Driver’s License. You own your Driver’s License, but it is registered to the state or country you live in.
“In order to use that same ISBN for your print book with a different Print Distribution Service, the Vendor of Record on that ISBN will need to be released, this way another print distribution service can use it. Again, similar to the Driver’s License thought process, you can move to another state or country, but you will need to re-register with the new state or country.”
An amazing lucid and understandable explanation, and checking for Vendor or Record must be something new because we’ve published across platforms since 2020 and have had no issues.
Anybody else running into this? Or something similar? |
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A Daily Gift of Friendship now available – Strange phrasing, that; “a daily gift of friendship is no available.”
Publisher and author Teresa Velardi asked me to contribute to A Daily Gift of Friendship and I am honored to do so.
Is there someone in your life who is a lifelong friend? How has that friendship shaped who you are today? Can friendship exist without shared values or beliefs? Are you and your best friend an unlikely match like “The Odd Couple”?
These are only a few of the questions that were placed before the contributing authors who said “Yes!” to the opportunity to share their experiences of friendship. The answers to these, and many other questions, are contained within these pages.
A Daily Gift of Friendship is the 5th book in the Daily Gift Book Series.
This collection of stories from people who have experienced short-term and lifelong friendships, some of which have been put on pause for many years for many reasons, and have been revisited with seemingly no loss of time.
Our hope for you is that you can relate to some of the many views about friendship and that the stories will touch your heart as you turn the pages.
For information on how you can be a part of this series, go to: DailyGiftBookSeries.com |
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Writers’ Month Long Workshop – November 2025’s writers’ workshop covers many if not all phases of craft and storytelling. The workshop is on Wednesdays, 5-26 Nov 2025, morning and evening openings available. Sign up here.
You can an idea of what craziness (and learning!) will ensue on my Experiments in Writing posts. |
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Sister and Freelance Editor Mary Jeddore Blakney want you to clean up your act – Or at least your writing and offers the following brain teaser as an example:
Q: Where can a person perform aeronautical stunts while birdwatching?
Fortunately, Mary also answers the riddle for us:
A: Where binoculars are used as fishing tackle, of course. Where else?
and explains in her own newsletter. You can find answers and explanations to many impossibilities in books that haven’t been edited yet. Follow, read and comment at any of maryjeddoreblakney.blogspot.com, linkedin.com/in/mary-jeddore-blakney (and you’ve gotta love her tagline), and marytheeditor.substack.com.
By the way, what inspired her riddle? “Swooping through the air at 50 miles an hour, I watched an eagle hunt for fish with my binoculars.” |
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Talk with the Editors – Wilderness House Literary Review EIC Steve Glines and I (Senior Fiction Editor) hold monthly open chats with authors interested in a) writing for us, b) improving their craft in general, and/or c) increasing their chances of being accepted by other markets.
Meetings are held via Zoom on the last Friday of each month from 9-10amET.
So, want to know how to write for us? Want to know what gets our attention? Want to know how to write better for whatever market you’re interested in? Join us for our next “Meet the Editors” Zoom session on 26 Sept 2025, 9-10amET. Seats limited! Sign up and talk with us. We’re relatively easy going and fun to be with. |
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Frank Torn writes from The Outlands – Aussie Brother Frank Torn’s debut novel, The Outlands, is a raw, lyrical meditation on trauma, survival, and the monsters we inherit. Gritty and hallucinatory, this is a story where every fear leaves its mark—and sometimes, healing means walking through the darkness hand in hand.
Frank got on my radar when I read his bio:
Frank Torn writes like a man who shouldn’t be left alone with his own imagination. Based in Brisbane, he’s spent the past decade penning everything from twisted memoirs that laugh in the dark to horror stories that probably keep his neighbours up at night. Now he’s turning his talents to survival and mystery, with a debut thriller arriving October 2025—because what better way to celebrate a Halloween birthday than by terrifying readers for fun? Drawing on his Scottish-Aussie bloodline (equal parts whisky and sunshine), Frank crafts tales thick with atmosphere, bite, and a sly wink at the abyss. When he’s not writing, you’ll find him in Brisbane with his dogs—plotting, observing, and pretending everyday life is normal inspiration rather than raw material for the next unsettling chapter.
You can get a taste of Frank’s The Outland at Frank Torn’s Outland (The Precipice) in The Rabbit Hole 8: AI and Other |
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Clarabelle Miray Fields’ Latest – Author, Publisher, Editor and Award winning poet Sister Clarabelle Miray Fields places in the 2025 SFPA Poetry Contest.
She writes on Istagram I’m excited to announce that my dystopian-tinged scifi poem “terraforming” was selected among the winners of this year’s SFPA Specpo Contest!
Included here is a picture (feat. my dog) of the precise moment in time and the desolate, Martian-esque landscape that inspired this poem.
Out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by shifting dust and with our only company being the shadows growing ever longer behind our footprints, I found myself thinking of the future, worrying about politics and the state of the our planet, and it was out of these thoughts, coupled with the otherworldly starkness of that evening’s sunset, that “terraforming” was born.
As I imagined one possible path for the future, I saw children having to make the best of the bad situations that adults have put them in, and humanity carving a way for itself, for better or for worse, on another world. I wanted to write a piece that was both cautiously hopeful for our ability to evolve and survive while also holding a realistic lens to humanity’s tendency to repeat the mistakes of our past, losing ourselves and corrupting the joy of childhood with short-sighted power struggles.
I want to send a heartfelt thank you to this year’s judge and chair and everyone else who made the contest possible, and many congratulations to the other winners! It’s such an honor to be included.
Pick up your copy of Afterworld. |
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A Little Game – What are the relative volumes of a triangular and square pyramid when all edges are equal length? Hint: find one, multiply by two, and you have it.
The first five people to get back to me with a solution get a signed Tales Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires Volume 2 ebook. The first person to get back to me with a solution which makes me laugh gets a signed print copy (and no looking it up on the internet, folks!). |
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| I’m Published Here – My Nov 2025 publications are
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That’s it for November. See you next month!
Enjoy!
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