Monday, July 16, 2007

An Evening in Pictures

My brain is in revolt tonight against my wicked, sleep-deprived ways, so I'm going to upload and explain a few photos and then go to bed. That's okay with you, right?

One thing I don't have a photo of is an incident from church this morning. I usually have my camera handy in church, but not today, and I'm not sure I would have taken the shot anyway under the circumstances. During Father Smith's sermon, a little tiny lizard dashed out from behind me somewhere and across the Oriental carpet in front of the altar. I'm not 100% sure that it wasn't a chameleon instead of one of the local lizard species, but if so it was unusually small, bigger than the red-backed salamanders of my youth but not by much. As Connor (who also serves at Mass nearly every week) and I tried not to laugh too loudly, the little creature ran along the bottom of the sanctuary step, straight toward Reverend Angela. When she saw it coming, she stamped her feet to scare it off, lest it run up her leg. That sent the poor critter back our way. He stopped in front of the altar, and stayed there until Connor tried to catch him during the Sign of Peace. Eventually several people got involved in the lizard hunt, and it was successfully captured and put outside. I doubt that most of the congregation ever noticed what happened.

We went to see the new Harry Potter movie today. I enjoyed it, but have nothing in particular to say about it. Afterward we stopped off at Borders, where I noticed that displays designed to steer Potter fans toward other fantasy and sf including two displays of books by Madeleine L'Engle. Yay! There's a lot of YA fantasy about these days, which of course isn't news but cheers me nonetheless. A number of them are good, thick books, too.

Now, the thing about the Mâvarin books is that they're in the overlap between young adult and adult fantasy. They have teenage protagonists, but also some adult POV characters. There is no high school vibe to the stories - even the sequence of Darsuma at the College of Magic only takes up part of one chapter - and there is cannibalism in one of the books. So is it YA or not? Beats me. But if it is YA, then I need to get serious about finding an agent, because kids' books are even harder to place without an agent than adult ones.


I haven't checked whether the monsoon is officially here yet, but we were expecting rain tonight and oh, boy, we got it. As I headed out to buy pizza, it was raining very lightly, the sun had not set, and there was a faint rainbow in the sky.



When I came out again it was dark, and pouring, and so windy that the flooded parking lot had waves. I tried to photograph the waves, but the wind died down just then and the camera was more interested in focusing on the raindrops.



This is a rainbow shot from the other day, from a little smudge of a rainbow over my house. It wasn't nearly this bright, but I like this saturated, pixilated version.


And tonight my old computer, the one on which I play Doctor Who DVDs, reminded me why I replaced it in the first place.

I've finished Chapter 10 in my Heirs edit. I'm just starting Chapter 11, page 403. Progress! Good night!

Karen

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am glad you are making progress.
Barbara (beckerb6@aol.com)

Becky said...

Ack! The blue screen o' death. I used to look at those most every day back when I was working. LOL! As for the movie...my pal Kim said it was very dark and for those of us who read the books faithfully, there were too many gaps in the story line. She said they left too much out from the book. I'll have to reserve judgement until it's out on DVD I guess. I don't see me getting to a theater any time soon.

:-)