Going…going…

Outgoing mail, in the company of my journal pages from Haiti, the Baron Samedi (His Purple Majesty), a goat’s skull I found on a city sidewalk in Darwin (waaaay more bizarre than if I’d found it in South America somewhere…) and our homemade Elegguá (in some ways, the star of my letter).

The letter “Cemetery Story” will no longer be available by end of day (ACST, UTC +9:30) on October 30, so if you enjoy slightly morbid stories about visits to cemeteries, or are famiiar with the Lucumí, Mayombe, or vodoun religions that traveled with the diaspora from Africa to the Americas via the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, then today is your last chance to sign up to Patreon and receive this issue of The Scarlet Letterbox.

{Become my patron for $9 a month…}

The letter is a little longer than usual, but I’m reluctant to amputate any more of it than I already have, so this letter will have an extra page of writing, so I can finish telling the story! The envelope has been printed by hand, using a homemade rubber stamp, in black and gold inks.  I’ve also slipped a postcard of my interpretation of Baron Samedi’s vevé, a design particular to Haitian vodoun, into the envelope.

On the Patreon site, patrons will have access to my favourite poem on the subject of death…(it’s not what you think—it’s a humorous, wonderful poem that totally celebrates the fact that life and death are yin and yang, each wrapped in the other’s embrace, both natural and desirable) as well as photos of some of the people, places, and things that I mention in my letter.

By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes.

I’m still waiting for my new phone (La la la…’nuff said…so boring) and so text and photos taken with my old DSLR are all I can offer on the Patreon site, for now. It’s coming, though…it’s coming…it’s very close…I can feel its presence…it may even be in Australia by now…

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¿Why can’t I do ‘back issues’, anymore?

The thing with Patreon’s set-up is that I can’t charge individual patrons for individual letters. These days, when I publish a “paid post”, all of my patrons get charged at one time, for the same letter. It’s too confusing to charge everyone, but for different letters.

“Oh, that way madness lies…”

When November’s postal train pulls away from the station on the 1st, that’s it; you may sign up for Patreon any time in November, but you’ll be waiting for December’s letter car to pull up.

If you want a previous month’s letter, I can make that “back issue” available to you, over in my Etsy shop (provided I have copies left) but you can’t get it as part of your Patreon patronage, anymore, because the only time I’ll publish a “paid post” will be when the next letter is ready for mailing out. Besides, I’m now ordering the minimum quantity of printed copies, just to cover the current month’s number of subscribers…

Serendipity Ink

An ink-soaked fountain pen made these random ink blots. Ecoline’s “Fir Green” bled from yellow green out to dark turquoise, as it soaked into a wad of tissue.

Half of the trick is to recognise the happy accident, rather than toss the tightly-wadded tissue into a bin.

Ecoline inks are very water-soluble and any kind of water-based glue or medium will make them bleed, so I used a quick mist of solvent-based spray adhesive on the journal page, instead. I lay the flattened tissue onto the adhesive, and rolled it down flat with a rubber brayer.

I just like having this bright splash of a page, in the enormous antique Register that I use as a journal these days.

New croc on the block…

Heavy clouds but no rain…the Build Up is here, and we’re all stewing in our own sweat like plump pomfrets.

Living on a houseboat, it’s sometimes really tempting to go for a quick swim…cool off in the water…but sightings like this one curb that longing. Between 10-12 feet long, or thereabouts; big enough to do some serious damage already. Curious about the surroundings, this lizard clearly has not learned to be wary, yet, so it will be in a trap soon enough. My personal first sighting of the season (though by no means the first in the creek! It’s the ones you can’t see that are the real worry…)

The leaves in the foreground are my own pot plants…so yes, it seemed to be stalking me, actually.

Cemetery story

Here I am, carving a rubber stamp for next letter’s hand-printed envelopes…this is the one and only test video I made for Patreon, before my iPhone went for a swim in the saltwater harbour (*sob*)

The motifs are directly from Ta Makuende Yaya, a key book about Palo Monte, the Congo religion that slaves brought with them to Cuba. It was one of the first books I bought and read while I was in Venezuela, learning Spanish (June-October 2015).

In Venezuela, Palo had been given a bad name because it was linked to a rash of grave robbing. Residents in the capital of Caracas claimed that many of the graves at Caracas’ Southern General Cemetery had been pried open to have their contents removed for use in Palo ceremonies.

The relationship between this juicy snippet, and my letter, is one of very loose association:

I write about my quest to a Colombian cemetery for a specific ingredient, and how a misunderstanding  with the gravedigger results in my coming home with something unexpected…

There’s still time to become my subscriber on Patreon, and be among the people who will receive this crazy story as a beautiful letter in the mail, along with a freshly-printed new postcard design: Voudoun’s Baron Samedi!

Cut-off date for this letter is October 30.

and what’s this button?…oops…

 

Hey! Heeey Everybodyyyyy!

✉I’ve launched my Patreon Page!*✍

Kinda by accident…I was hovering over the LAUNCH button, thinking, “I should read it through just one more time…” but oops, touched it, and ZING! A screen of confetti announced that the page was live. Darn. Oh well…no time like the present!

And guess what? There was already one patron there! Nine hours before I launched, somebody had signed up. HOW COOL IS THAT?! My very own personal Medici. I feel all warm and tingly! What a compliment! In Philippine culture, she’s the one we call the buena mano, literally ‘the good hand’, my Lady Luck. It’s awesome to not have to start from zero!

I couldn’t be prouder if I’d just got myself a snazzy apartment. Please drop in some time…even if you don’t want to join up, just have a look around and tell me what you think of the set up. Were you familiar with Patreon before this? Do you support some creators on there, already? Who are they, and what do they do?

Yeesh! I’m excited!

*  Launched much later than I had planned, because of a little accident today… I fell into the sea…with my phone in my pocket. It’s dead. Like, ‘dead’ dead… Pretty upset because I promised videos and stuff on Patreon. I am working on a replacement…luckily I have savings, but there goes the travel fund! *sniff*

The Potato (Peel Pie) Eaters

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

If you want to read and enrich both your time and mind, skip The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and read the authors of real literature, whose names are merely mentioned in passing by this pretentious novel:

• Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
• Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)
• Thomas Carlyle (Past and Present)
• Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)
• Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers)
• Charles Lamb (Selected Essays of Elia, and More Essays of Elia, and Selected Letters)
• Wilfred Owen (The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen)
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Seneca (Letters from a Stoic)
• William Shakespeare
• Oscar Wilde

I’m happy to find justification for disliking The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society  in this quote, gleaned from the pages of the very same novel in question:

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society