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My Link Tree

     I found Link Tree by accident through flutter Starlight. Yes, I still play; in fact, I just ordered a moth journal through Runaway. All of the proceeds benefit the Rainforest Trust, and I love my big luna moth sticker from them. I was trying to play their new word game when I found them on Link Tree. It is a place to gather multiple links which works for me, a chaos queen. 

My Link Tree 🌳

Updated ZAZZLE Shop

 

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by dollsandmagic

Inside Louisiana’s Grand Antebellum Homes *Marathon* | America's Castles

Thursday Morning

DOC is OUT! (Doc Holliday)

  Another musical satire DOC covers the life of Doc Holliday from birth till death. I've loved Doc Holliday since I was a kid. In grad school I took The American West as my elective because I knew nothing of it besides Doc Holliday. I often see my professor, Dr. Dixon, on The History Channel. I wrote my final paper on Doc Holliday. I got an A, but Dr. Dixon always gave me As. I was the only girl and English major surrounded by historians. Val Kilmer's passing forced this one out of me. What a great actor, he was Morrison. He was Doc. Historical fiction, I tried to stick to the facts in a sketchy world. What I could not find I filled in from my own life, so Doc and I finally meet. Yes, I romanticized him. No, he was not an angel, but he will always be an angel to me. Available for kindle as an e-book, it is soon to be released in all formats. 

Read DOC Now
 

Scarlet in Mourning '99 Cissy For Sale

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From DOC (Doc Holliday)

 Fourteen

Heading Home

Not marching, 

no.

More of a slink,

say it isn’t so.

But we are tired, 

full of woe, 

So homeward bound,

off we go. 

  1865, the war was over. You’d think it was a happy time. It was, for about a minute, the day we read the paper and all jumped up and down for joy. 

  Then the boys came home. Uncle Robert was the first to get back, which meant that Mattie and the rest of the Holliday clan went back to Jonesboro. The house was eerily quiet again except for the creaking floor and Mama’s coughs. I missed Mattie the most, but I missed them all. 

  Cisco was next. He was a ghost of the fellow who had left us. I almost didn’t recognise him. He knew where to find us from Daddy’s letters. I’ll never forget the morning that he slipped in from the fog. He must’ve lost a hundred pounds. He looked skeletal and coughed worse than Mama. Aunt Fawnie and Wanetta had stuck around, afraid what they’d find at Indian Creek. They put him straight to bed with a warmer and some broth. I sat at his bedside. 

  “Cisco, I missed you so. You missed a lot of shenanigans here with the Hollidays too.” He coughed, it was bloody, and I brought him a clean handkerchief. “Do you want me to read to you?” He shook his head, no. “Alright. Do you want me to stay, or should I let you rest?” He just stared off into oblivion. It seemed very bleak. Poor wretch! 

July, 5th, 1865

Dear John, 

  Thank God, thanks to Julie and June the house was spared from Sherman. There had been a bloody battle right here last year. Lucky we did not stick around for it. We lost Granny Bea. She was very old, you know. Has Cisco made it home? We are all praying for him and hoping Indian Creek fared better than here and Fayetteville. Uncle John is home. Amazingly his house is still standing although it has been raided and wiped clean. He mourns his books, but counts his blessings as do we all. He says he will be dropping in there on you as soon as he can. I hope you are doing well, and not missing us too much. We miss you. 

Love,

Mattie

 Mama, too, like Cisco, kept to her bed. She was very weak and tired. Unlike Cisco she liked me to read to her. Keats was our favorite. She liked “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn”, but I preferred “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “Lamia”. 

  Nobody saw a doctor during the war, they were reserved for the boys and amputees. Uncle John did drop in soon enough for his house call. He had quite a beard and looked like he had aged a hundred years. I thought him, Merlin. He brought good news from Indian Creek to my aunts. It had miraculously escaped the war and stood still. Uncle Tom had returned to an empty house. Even Ole’ Berner, the overseer, was gone. Nobody knew where. That was something. Then he looked in on Mama first, then Cisco, and confirmed what we already dreaded. They had consumption. 

Consumption

How long?

Bloody

White Plague?

Dreadful

Cough.

Cold

Sweats.

Shining

Brow.

We All

Know.

Not

When we go. 

Gray Day.

Chill Wind.

Dark Pall.

  Fearing that Mama could never make it to Indian Creek, my dear aunts stayed on with us. How a few years had changed their spinster lives into cooks, housekeepers, and nurse maids. God love them, they did their best. It was decided that Mama and Cisco would be moved to the sunporch where they could get some sunshine and fresh air while swaddled in blankets like caterpillars. I read them Journey to the Center of the Earth and Uncle Silas. Everybody was in awe of these stories although my aunts tried to act shocked about Uncle Silas. I heard them laughing about it later.

  “Ttt…” Aunt Fawnie would shake her head but I could tell she was amused. 

  “You see what drinking will get you?” Aunt Wanetta warned. 

  To hell with Reconstruction. I’d make the most of it and try to keep out the gloom. 

From DOC

 

  One

  It’s really a funny story. My mother grew up on a wealthy cotton plantation in Tinsdale, Georgia, called Indian Creek, with her brothers and sisters, my aunts, Fawnie and Wanetta and my uncles, Billy and Tom. My grandparents, the McKeys, were Scots-Irish. Grandma Jane had come from Stone Mountain; her maiden name was Cloud. Grandpap Bill had built her a big house that I thought looked like something straight out of The Iliad, with marble pillars and a statue of Dionysis in the orchard. He was smiling, and his hair curled up into little horns hidden beneath the wreath of vines. It was a charmed place, a fun place. 

  Mammy was in charge of the children, Grandma helped with prayers. They were Presbyterian, but the church was in town, forty miles away, so they only attended on holidays. Grandpap had a sort of folly, a chapel, beyond the herb garden where the roses grew, and the bees buzzed. Sometimes a breeze picked up and blew through there on hot summer nights when it was sticky hot indoors. The sounds of the bugs and frogs gave it an otherworldly feel. There weren’t just slaves, there were staff. There was an overseer, Ole’ Berner, and the tutors, Miss Mitchell and Mr. Leslie, who taught everything from embroidery to Latin. 

  It was a grand house full of music and dance. Mama and my aunts sang and played piano. Uncle Tom played the fiddle like a cricket. They held holiday balls in the great room where they waltzed the starry nights away. 

  It was a working farm complete with stables and a carriage house. There were gray and white horses, mules, goats, chickens, and ducks. Grandpap didn’t keep any pigs, said they smelled. He was most fond of his hounds and their pups. 

  My father’s family, the Hollidays, on the other hand, ... (Dream Time, TTYL)

⭐🌝⭐

Jennie Wade Doll: (Gettysburg, The Civil War)

  Pleased with my first Jennie Wade doll. Up to chapter twenty-nine with my DOC notes. Going to have to make a Doc Holliday doll as well as the cover portrait. Thinking DOC ought to be funnier than Fanging with Claude, longer too, there is so much to work with. He crammed a lot of living into his thirty-six years. There will be a chapter devoted to each year. It's going to be another musical satire. Stay tuned. 

 

Updated ZAZZLE Shop

 

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by dollsandmagic

Gettysburg Spring

   Available as an ebook, it ought to be released in paperback and hardcover soon. Purple Witch and I had such fun birthdays. Thank You! 

Gettysburg Spring

Gettysburg Three

Gettysburg Two

Gettysburg One

Bettas, Books, & Tarot

TAROT & DARK SHADOWS Easter Sale

 

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Dolls & Magic March Clearance

  While I'm on a roll, (Thank You!), and saving for Gettysburg I've spent the last hour going through and slashing prices in my Ebay shop. You'll find mostly handmade, one-of-a-kind art dolls and original watercolor paintings, but there are also dolls and books from my collection, you never know. Will I be listing more stuff? Maybe. I've been typing Minie' Ball Catch All, I've made it to page sixty-six already. We had Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza today. It's good, but like everything else very exspensive. I've got to start a playlist for Frankie. It's hard to believe we've only had him five months. He came into our lives and took over. He's sleeping by my feet. He's very touchy feely, I'm not. I had made a playlist for Shiner on his last birthday, all of his favorite songs. TTYL... 

Shop Clearance on Ebay (Thanks!)

Shiner's Songs

 

Minie' Ball Catch All

    Years ago I took all of my Civil War themed writings: poetry, short stories, a novella, and a novel and converted them into my series of five comic books, Minie’ Ball, that are now available bundled in hardback, paperback, and e-book on Amazon. Audio books can be found on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3urQOYEHtR22T6dk6upPHw

Dana Lee’s channel.  The poems can be found in Selected Poems by Dana Lee, but although typed and saved to floppy disc, the short stories, Ghost on the Highway, and A Dark Peace have remained unpublished until now. 

It's going to take a while, but I've been lazy and listless through this cold winter. It would be great if I had it done by the April Gettysburg trip. Doubtful, but you never know with me. I don't know what the cover art will be. The cover of Minie' Ball #5, perhaps, or this, inspired by my favorite Civil War literature, Diary from Dixie, by Mary Chesnut, maybe... The original is available on Ebay.

Get the Original (Good By)

Lots to Talk About: Dana's Dreams, Books, & More...

   First, I finished the cover of Dana's Dreams Two which came to me directly from a dream a couple of months ago. They were painted on the ceiling of a dressing room where I was changing my clothes. I have put them on loads of things on ZAZZLE: 

Wallpaper

Acrylic Prints

Ladies' Denim Jackets

Planners

Pillows

  Next, and sticking to the subject, I was telling my aunt how she might remember her dreams when The GOOGLE Monster gobbled everything that I had written up like a bag of cookies. A lot of folks might be interested, so here it goes. Take a glass of water to bed with you. Take a sip and say aloud, "I will remember my dreams". Set the glass on your nightstand. When you wake take a sip. Keep a dream notebook close to your bed. When you first wake, do not stir. Lie there and unravel your dream. Write down keywords in your notebook, so that you might remember upon waking. Share your dreams, talk about them. You must get to them first thing, otherwise you will forget. Pickles and pepperoni are dream foods, pickles being #1. The dream symbolism that you find online goes back to the ancient Egyptian priests. Finally, I had shared tonight's dreams with her: 

  2/21

  First I woke up as I heard Ron yelling, “Dana!”, in my head. This is the third time this has happened lately. It was just a dream, though very real. 

  The next dream was just a snippet: turquoise ladies panties embroidered with an Aztec bird were dancing in my head. 

  The third dream was Aunt Nancy’s summer wedding. Aunt Janet was there. They wore long matching sun dresses with blue and white printed roses on a red background. We were late getting to the church and missed the ceremony. We were waiting at my grandmother’s house. There was a dark haired young man working along the side of the house who I got snippy with. He had two of Mummy’s long stemmed fake flowers that Aunt Nancy was asking about. One was just a green bud, but the other might’ve been one of those dancing daisies. My little cousin had a big naked Jane doll still in the box. I was looking out the window at Aunt Nancy and her groom lying on a patio, snuggling. I told my cousin that Aunt Nancy and I both had Jane dolls too. 

Dana's Dreams

Now, on with my readings. Tonight's quotes are taken from BATTLEFIELD and Eisenhower:

"It dawned on me that I was up against more than an inflexible rule; I was challenging a tenet of economic survival. A utility company was loath to relinquish even one customer whose lifetime of rate-paying would add tens of thousands of dollars to its coffers." Svenson

This book, that Ron got for me at The Farnsworth House for Easter, is brilliantly written by an artist no less. In Farming a Civil War Battleground Peter Svenson gets down to the bones about building his third house.

"MacArthur, the most political of generals, never succeeded in politics, while three of the most apolitical generals in American history, Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower, did. They were true American Caesars, only American soldiers to hold both supreme military and political power." Ambrose