Take Two

So I tried that Multiburst thing again. The first time I selected an intermediate setting, Burst, but all it did was take single photos without flash. There aren't very good, so I'm not uploading any of them for now.



Hours later I tried again. Turns out the setting doesn't allow flash, and it was night so my multiburst Tuffy shots were severely underexposed. Lightening them up a lot (the lightest option once, and then tweaking beyond that) made for a rather interesting effect, I think. And you can just about tell that they aren't all the same image, but a bunch of Tuffy images taken within a split second of each other. I imagine the whole thing is meant to take outdoors photos of athletes and such.


So far this November rededication to fiction isn't working out at all. I've squeaked through by writing about Kate and Ariel, but really that's not in the spirit of the plan. Today I ended up wasting many hours on You Tube Doctor Who fan clips, followed by part of Casanova (starring David Tennant and Peter O'Toole and written by Russell T Davies) and some actual Doctor Who.

But I have been thinking about the story of Rona and her grandfather, trying to work out the logistics. In the initial story/installment I wrote,

Seth smiled at her. "It won't be like that. It's the sunlight that slows down our aging in the other world. Here you will finally start to age normally. And no, we're not waiting for you to reach some arbitrary age or stature."

The problem is, that doesn't really work. I have Rona turning 13 but looking seven years old, on the theory that the sun is up about half the time in the normal world, so she would age about 50% as fast as normal people. That's about right, but I also have her "impossibly youthful" gransfather, Seth, look about 23 years old. This clearly doesn't work under the rules I tried to set up. Even if he fathered Rona's mother at age 16, and Rona's mother gave birth at 16, Seth would have to be at least 45 years old as the story opens. To be a father at 16 he would have to have aged normally to that point, so he's been aging at half speed for a minimum of 29 years. 16+(19/2) would give him an apparent age of at least 25.5 years old. If, as seems more likely, he was older than 16 and so was Rona's mom, then his apparent age could easily be 30 or older.

And that's even before we consider the science fantasy explanation for the twilight realm's people aging at half speed when exposed to sunlight, or how the twilight realm, avoids both sunshine and full night.

I've thought about reversing things, so that Rona's people age normally only in the real world. This would give her family an incentive to get her to a place where she can get old enough to accomplish some political purpose back home. Alternatively, maybe they don't age when there are stars in the sky, the sun included. This would make them age at much less than half speed, and Rona could have lived for a few years in the shadow realm before coming to the normal world.

And why did her family bring her here at all? She's not royalty, and I don't think she's a wizard as such. She's not destined to save the world. Well, probably. so what the big dramatic backstory?

No idea. But I'm working on it!

Karen