Monday, August 21, 2006

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


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6 comments:

Laura said...

I love your Arizona sky pictures almost as I love your Arizona monsoon pictures. Thanks for the treat this morning.

Anonymous said...

Hi, Karen,
Beautiful photos.
BTW, you can drop the link to Occasional Blog as I've deleted it. There's something weird at that URL right now.
And you can swap out Presto Speaks! for The View from Here: http://anothershellyblog.blogspot.com.

Thanks. :)

--Shelly (posting anonymously due to an itty glitch with beta Blogger.

Chris said...

Wow. Those cloud pics are awesome. It almost looks scary. Was it raining as well? All I get here in L.A. is smog. lol.

Bea said...

THe color enhancement gives them a surreal quality. Very nice. Also, impressive word count for Mages...I'll soon get back to finishing what I started, reading your script... may have to go back and re-read the first three chapters to be fair to the flow of the story, though. Bea

Becky said...

I love the multicolored one! Very cool...

Anonymous said...

I noticed in the Chapters 1&2 you sent me you used the word "Lopartin" maybe 3 or 4 times before you actually come out and say it is the "language of magic" (explaining Li's history with languages). The Lopartin is always being used when someone is doing something magical, so it *is* very fairly clear what it is, but then when the read gets to that part with Li, they can then go "Oh, okay . . . that's the language of magic, just like I *thought* it was." And then you don't need to worry about explaining what it is for the rest of the narrative.

In other words, I think it's handled very nicely and clearly. :)