Mostly Pictures

I spent the afternoon asleep after another late night, and consequently didn't get much done today. I did get some pictures, though. Even John, who gets annoyed sometimes with my obsessively grabbing the camera in the Safeway lot at sunset, wanted me to catch the backlit flag before the light behind it faded. I didn't quite manage it. The camera jammed and gave me an error message when I tried to zoom in, and I had to turn it off and on a couple of times before I got any picture at all. By then the flag was hardly backlit at all. It's getting obvious that I'm not going to be able to ignore my camera problem much longer. The battery was low, so maybe that was a factor in this particular failure.

On the way home I held the camera out the window and took a few shots, but I didn't want to ask John to stop and let me capture everything my eyes saw. When we got home I noticed this huge, yellow cloud, too big to even fit in the camera's field of view. Here's an uncorrected photo of what I could capture in a single shot.

Here's the same photo, autocorrected and with the contrast boosted. Usually I go for a very slight enhancement of what I remember actually seeing, but this came out so strikingly muticolored that I decided to push it a bit.


The same cloud framed vertically, photo autocorrected again.


My last shot of the day kind of came out delft blue. The only thing I did to this one was resize it.

It's a little after 3 AM, and I have a meeting with someone from HR in less than six hours. I'm going to bed now. But I did get a tiny but of work done on Chapter Three of Mages, and went back to check all uses of the word Lopartin in the first two chapters as well. Lopartin is the ancient, arcane language the mages use in their spells. I wanted to make sure this is fairly clear from the first use of the word, and not explained over and over unnecessarily.

I also updated the word and page count of the first three chapters on my little spreadsheet. It's gone up, but only by a few pages overall, mostly in Chapter One because of the prologue scene. I can live with that. At over 323,000 words, though, assuming the count on later chapters is still reasonably accurate, Mages of Mâvarin is much longer than the thickest Harry Potter book, albeit still shorter than The Lord of the Rings. I hope to find ways to shorten it a bit as I go along, but it's clearly going to have to be published as a trilogy, even though it's one long story.

At least there's a precedent for that.

Karen


Technorati Tags: Photos, Sunset, Writing, Mâvarin, Tucson