On the island

I’m writing from the dome room of our hotel in Palma on the island of Mallorca. This is the kind of thing I will miss about living in Europe. Today we spent most of the day exploring, strolling down the cobblestone streets of Palma after our Spanish breakfast, wandering from shop to cafe to ice cream shop, stopping to dance in various plazas with the kids and look for fairies inside the ancient olive trees. It was a lovely day. The previous two days were spent mostly on the beach building sand castles with moats, populated by dragons we discovered in the sand.

Our hotel is in a residential area, and so the beach is empty during the day but fills up when everyone gets off work. It’s like a huge block party on the beach come 7pm.

We still marvel at the Spanish lifestyle: siestas in the afternoon and dinners with the kids at 10pm. My eldest, my little Owl Girl, loves it (as do I). She doesn’t mind a nap if it allows her to stay up past 10pm (and sleep in until 8:30).

I’ve been feeling inspired, jotting down notes here and there. Most of them will have to wait until after we’ve moved back to Chicago and settled in. Of course, this will be slightly complicated by the fact that we sold our house and will have a week to pack it up after our return before we close. We haven’t found a new home to move into yet, so we’ll be moving into a short-term rental in Oak Park. It’s a bit chaotic, but I’m looking forward to the opportunity to live in downtown Oak Park, so many great little shops and parks.

Conclave Journal submissions have been coming in at a steady pace, although I’ve fallen behind while on vacation. I have a whole stack of rejections to send out once I’m back in Frankfurt. Some gems in there though, not many but a few. I hope we’ll see more as July 1st approaches.

Hard to believe that we’ll be moving back to Chicago in just over 2 weeks. I’m looking forward to the summer. It will be chaotic and messy and surely a bit stressful, but transitions tend to be that way.

Published by Valya

Valya Dudycz Lupescu has been making magic with food and words for more than 20 years, incorporating folklore from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth. She’s a writer, content developer, instructor, and mother of three teenagers. Valya is the author of MOTHER CHRISTMAS, THE SILENCE OF TREES, and the founding editor of CONCLAVE: A Journal of Character. Along with Stephen H. Segal, she is the co-author of FORKING GOOD: An Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of The Good Place and GEEK PARENTING: What Joffrey, Jor-El, Maleficent, and the McFlys Teach Us about Raising a Family (Quirk Books), and co-founder of the Wyrd Words storytelling laboratory. Valya earned her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her poetry and prose have been published in anthologies and magazines that include, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Kenyon Review, Culture, Gargoyle Magazine, Gone Lawn, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium. You can find her on Twitter @valya and on Mastodon.social @valya

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