Chasing Shadows

Shadows on the mountains, as seen from Wilmot south of Broadway

Today was a bit better than yesterday for shadow pictures, so I took some. Here are the best of them. I haven't anything brilliant to say about them. They are all of Mount Lemmon and the Santa Catalina Mountains, as photographed from Wilmot Road, more or less.

A few seconds later

From "beyond the berm" in the U.L.C. parking lot. I like the
shadow over the execs' cars in the covered parking.

I zoomed in and aimed high for this one. I like the result.

Lest you think I'm spending all my time on Doctor Who and Wikipedia, I am happy to report that I finished editing Chapter 11 of Heirs. I'm less happy to report that I crashed MS Word when I started work on Chapter 12. That happens a lot lately, especially if I've had the word count doc open. The table in it gives my computer fits. Still, I persevere. I'm on page 461 in the edit, about a third of the way through Chapter 12, which is the next to last chapter. I love the way the story comes together in the last three chapters or so, although there are a few annoyingly short scenes I may have to fuss with by combining a few things. Or not.

I should have a more substantive entry for you tomorrow night - unless, of course, I finish editing the book instead. If I do that, then good for me!

Karen

One of Those Days You're Glad You Don't Live Here

Of course it's different for me, because I do live here. Most of the time I don't mind, but some days are less pleasant than others.

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a picture in which shadow plays a significant role in the composition. You may ask, how does this differ from the recent Photo Shoot involving silhouettes? Silhouettes are a very specific sort of shadowplay, and for this assignment you can take a wider approach -- shadows of all sorts (you can use silhouettes, of course. Just don't recycle the shot you used!). Shadows make give a photo drama it might not otherwise have.

The temperature in my car at lunchtime

It was cloudy for most of the day today, so the conditions weren't ideal for photos of shadows. In fact, let's face it: conditions weren't ideal, period. My husband is the only person I know who claims not to be bothered by the kinds of temperatures we've had lately. Even he is starting to admit to the heat, occasionally, as the humidity rises. Even when I drove home around 6 PM, in a light rain at the end of a monsoon storm, the temp was only down to 88.

Shadows on the Catalina mountaintops

More Catalina shadows, as seem from the parking lot at work

Still, there were some shadows between 1:50 PM, when I headed out to lunch, and 2-something PM when I got back. I got a few shots of shadows on the Santa Catalina Mountains, but nothing as dramatic as the ones I've lucked onto in the past.

Palm tree shadows at lunchtime

This is my favorite of the lot, a pair of shadows from palm trees near our building's employee entrance.

Short entry again tonight: I'm trying to concentrate on Chapter 11 and getting to bed sooner. Also I've been feeling a little yucky today. Good night!

Karen

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

Continuity Copping

As a fan of various tv shows - you know the ones - I've spent considerable time contemplating continuity, the wealth of often inconsistent backstory that fictional works develop over time. The greater the body of work and the longer its history, the more likely it is that multiple writers have been involved with the franchise, introducing story elements that serve the current plot but contradict what went before. In Star Trek, the planet Vulcan "has no moon" in one story and two of them in another, with the mitigating factor that the second, contradictory reference is in an animated episode can can possibly be considered apocryphal. In Quantum Leap, the series creator established that Sam's body leaps - but the actor who played him and at least one writer of QL novels disagreed.

Continuity is an issue in both the book
I'm editing and and one I'm reading.

Doctor Who, with its nearly 44-year history, has lots and lots of continuity issues for fans to try to explain away. The show has had three versions of the destruction of Atlantis, two mutually exclusive origins of the Daleks and (if memory serves) two of the Loch Ness Monster. Continuity glitches between the end of the Second Doctor's run of stories (The War Games) and his return appearances in The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors have led to a theory about a gap between The War Games and the following story, Spearhead from Space, which was originally meant to take place immediately after The War Games. This theory, called "Season 6B", was first proposed by writer Paul Cornell and his co-authors in a book called The Discontinuity Guide. (Yes, there's enough continuity glitchiness in Doctor Who to fill a whole, rather thick book.) The idea has received enough acceptance that Terrance Dicks, writer of The Five Doctors, has incorporated the premise into at least two novels, one of which I bought today. Given such past continuity issues, it makes my heart go pitter-pat when Russell T Davies, the current executive producer of Doctor Who, manages to take story elements from three seasons of the revived series (and a few references to the old one as well) and make them fit together in unexpected but consistent ways, as he did at the end of the 2007 season.

But what does all this mean for my novel, Heirs of Mâvarin? After all, I've been working on stories about Mâvarin for about 33 years, over 1700 pages, and about half a million words among the various books, which is about the length of The Lord of the Rings. Okay, that's scary! You'd think that with my rather good memory (when I'm rested, anyway) and longstanding habit of finding and explaining away continuity glitches, that I would manage a remarkably consistent body of work about Rani and his friends. It's not quite true, though. Just tonight, in Chapter 10 of Heirs, page 376, I cam across another reference to the twins being seven months old at the time of the kidnapping. I knew I'd changed it, but what was their correct age at the time? I couldn't find the reference in Chapter Three, at least not quickly. It was somewhere around a year old, but did I establish anything specific? Were they 11 months old, or 13 months? Did King Jor celebrate their birthday in the Palace before his kidnapping? I don't really know.

You know where I looked it up? In this blog. I mentioned the age continuity problem in a previous entry. And I send with "just over a year old." There, that should do it!

Karen

The Mystic Journal

A cabin boy in the Union Navy during the Civil War, he was reputedly present when the Monitor fought the Merrimack. Tavern owner, informal banker, poet, publisher, member of the Mystic Band of Brothers. And I only found out about him last night.

His name was Bernhard Heinrich Funk, and he was my great-grandfather.

According to my brother's family tree data, and another listing online, he was born in Ostfriesland, Germany in 1843, and eventually died in Hudson, NJ. I don't know his wife's name or the year of his death. My dad isn't sure whether it was Bernhard's wife or his mother who eventually wrote and complained to the War Department, because he didn't get his promised share of the spoils from the capture of a privateer. He owned a tavern in lower Manhattan, and his son later spoke of hauling mattresses around to put up overnight guests there. Many of Bernhard's clients were sailors, who would leave money with him for safekeeping so it wouldn't be stolen or squandered.

The reason I happened to hear about him this week was that my dad was in New Jersey recently, visiting one of his sisters in the hospital. Another of his sisters had something interesting on the wall in a frame, and Dad borrowed it. That's how I happened to get this:

The poster tube and my dad's explanatory note

And this is what was inside:

Yes, I boosted the saturation to make it look more mystical.

It's only a photocopy Dad made, but there are four broadsheet-sized pages of it. It's a copy of The Mystic Journal, Vol I No. 8, published in New York City on March 15, 1872. My great-grandfather's name is in the upper left-hand corner of the first page, as the newspaper's "Proprietor & Publisher."

Proprietor & Publisher...and Poet? Probably.

Underneath his name is something one does not normally expect to see in a newspaper: poetry and fiction. The first poem, entitled "Life," begins,

Life is a rose, brier-burdened, jet-sweet.
Blooming a day;
Flinging its perfume to meet,
Wind blown away!

Okay, so it's not to my taste, is pretty much the best I can say about that one. The other poem, The Skipper's Boat, is in a bit of seaman's dialect - and remember, this isn't so long after the age of pirates. Kate would be interested.... Given the subject matter of the second poem, his knowledge of his grandfather's background and the lack of a byline, my dad reckons that Bernhard wrote the poetry himself. He probably wrote "Edith's Counterplot," too. A sample:

"But do you take into account the proposition that Edith Amesbury may love Walter Harding?"

"Yes."

"And do you furthermore reflect that a woman will be very slow to listen to tales of evil against the man who possesses her heart?"

"I have thought it all over Gideon. If the lady were alone concerned, I might doubt the success of my plan; but her brother Charles, who is her guardian since her uncle's death, is one of the stiffest and most exciting of the mortal crew. Let him so much as suspect that Walter Harling drinks and gambles, and he would see his sister suffer any amount of torment rather than see her marry that man."

The Mystic Journal is said to be "Devoted to Local and General Information, Miscellany, and the Brotherhood." It is an apt description, given the highly miscellaneous nature of its contents. But what of this Mystic Band of Brothers? Page Two offers us some clues. The "Directory of the M. B. of B." lists Grand Chiefs and Great Chiefs in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. A letter signed simply "Storm" offers reasons why Bernhard's paper has not heard recently from club officers in Philadelphia, citing illnesses and other personal troubles before admitting,

As for the Grand Conductor he has no excuse why he should not keep up a monthly correspondence with the Mystic Journal, but if I should ask him to do this he would laugh at me and say his leisure him is all taken up with entertaining any visiting brethren who by chance come in his way, the brethren that know him will corroborate my statement that he is a lively young man and enjoys good company; look out for him in New York the next session of the Grand Council.

Fascinating stuff. But my stepmother Ruth's favorite part is the ads of page four, some of which you can see below:



Thanks, Dad. I love it! This is an amazing glimpse at a relative from an era I know little about. And someday I'm going to rip off that amazing publication name for fictional use.

Karen

Tuffy Can Haz Loldog Thx

Weekend Assignment #174: Humiliate your pet! Show a picture or tell a story that features your pet doing something that's goofy or silly, even for dumb animal.

I added the following to last night's entry just five minutes ago! Now I'm moving it as the seed for tonight's Weekend Assignment entry. Synchronicity rulz!

This blog is 99% cat free.

I'm not entirely comfortable with lolcats (especially the spelling and syntax), but after enjoying some "Sclolzis" on Scalzi's Whatever and being told by a Robin to get a cat (never, never, never, sorry) I was moved to make this. You don't want to make me wheeze and scare my dog, do you? No, it wouldn't be my inability to breathe that would freak Tuffy out. It would be the cats. Scary, scary cats. Or is that just me? I don't know for a fact that she'd be scared, because I don't think she's met a cat in eight or nine years. But she's nervous around people, dogs, cardboard boxes, and anything else that moves or makes noise, so it's a pretty safe bet.

More later, probably.

Tuffy came in out of the rain.

Okay, later is here. It rained this afternoon, and Tuffy went out in it. She was inside when John and I got home (we happened to arrive at the same time), but her fur was wet. She willingly went back out for me so I could get a picture of her. Tuffy will do pretty much anything for attention and food, as long as she knows what I want and it's not too scary.

Karen

Looking the Wrong Way

Sunset, July 11, 2007, looking southeast across Craycroft

I was going to do a whole metaphor thing again tonight, based on the title this photo suggested. One of the things I love about Tucson is that it's possible to find a sunset photo in any direction, if you look from the right vantage point at the right moment. This one was taken in front of Yokohama Rice Bowl on Craycroft, looking across the street at the very same bus stop I photographed months ago for a Monday Photo Shoot after dropping off my car at my mechanic's garage a few doors south. You can just about see One Stop Automotive at the right edge of the photo. And yes, I saturated it to get the colors that were actually in the sky. I kind of like the Technicolor-style exaggeration of the buildings that came with it.

The point, though, is that tonight's sunset was more interesting as I looked in pretty much the opposite direction from where the actual sun was setting. By looking the wrong way at the right time, we often find unexpected sights, ideas, opportunities. Well, maybe. That was the basic idea, anyway. I'm sure I could come up with a great little essay about that, if I had the time, inspiration and functioning brain cells.

But I'm feeling a little stressed out and unwell tonight, in part because I have an international conference call in the morning, and must therefore be at work early (for which read: on time for once). I've finished the book I was reading last night, visited the Robins, and now must look the right way for a change: toward my bed. Good night!

Update: feeling better now.