Today on the agenda

By Holly Lisle

The chapter Cards, Books, Newspapers, and Other Arcana became Cards, and isn’t finished yet, and is already too long.

But I ran into three problems I didn’t forsee:

1) locating good card decks unrelated to tarot for writers whose religious beliefs would not permit them to own tarot cards;

2) recommending a few useful tarot decks out of the zillion or so available, and,

3) realizing that the deck I use most of the time is so racist and sexist that I cannot in good conscience recommend it, and have to consider dumping it from my own use—not easy, since this is the deck in which I found the Phoebe Rain “door” solution, and a dozen others that saved me from beating my head against a wall when my plots froze.

The deck is the Motherpeace deck, which does have a nice racial mix most other decks lack, but which is generally anti-male (with the exception of gamma males—essentially, gay uncles and members of the castrati choir), and vehemently anti-white-male, and built on revisionist history of the Barbara Walker, Marija Gimbutas variety. Back in 1987, when my first marriage was going into a tailspin and I was pretty anti-white-male myself, a friend in my writers’ group introduced me to the deck by reading for me. At the time, the deck’s blame-men philosophy matched mine.

Now I find myself having to admit that this is the deck I still occasionally use because I have twenty years of practice with it (as opposed to ten for the Universal Waite, the other deck I use), and because of its quirky, complex imagery and my ability to find funky solutions to plot problems in it.

Aside from figuring out the kinks in cards issue and finishing the Cards chapter, today I’ll also be writing the chapters Making Things and Chop Wood, Carry Water.

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