24 MAY 2019
Yesterday was the last day of work! School is out! Time to get back to writing! And picture taking too!
For writing, I'm working on several stories at once, as the mood strikes. Me and my wife were watching The Amazing Race and one of the challenges inspired me to write a section for my long frontier story about a family moving across the sea to the New Lands. I think it came out pretty well, just have to figure out where to place it in the bigger story and tie it together with what is going on. As far as releasing new stories, I'm continuing on a rewrite of The Killing Parts, still working through some edits from another writer. Thought I was over 10K words but I forgot to remove her comments at the end of the piece. Not that I'm shooting for a nice round number like 10K, just looking at the overall size of the piece. Still have to work on a cover, and I'm also looking at including a few small illustrations with the story, as long as I can figure out the formatting.
The following photos were taken on a recent trip to the local museum, the RW Norton. I had posted some already. Enjoy them and enjoy the summer!
This last picture is a Honeysuckle. Not the kind that grew in my backyard as a kid, but a close variety. You can pull out the long yellow parts of the flower and at the other end is a delicate drop of sweet-tasting nectar.
05MAY18
Happy Cinco de Mayo and a late May the Fourth be With You!
Seems like we are witnessing the slow birth of a new holiday. But it's right up against Cinco de Mayo. Will the Star Wars holiday overshadow the very popular but 'sort of Mexican' holiday? Who knows. I would think so. Star Wars is global. Cinco de Mayo is not even that popular in Mexico, which actually has a real Independence Day in September. The Fourth is only based on movies though, so who knows.
It's May! Which means I'm getting ready for the summer break. My regular job is coming to an end for a couple of months, during which time I'll have oodles of hours to write and edit. I have a few stories that I've been editing away on, looking forward to building up the number of stories out there for sale, leading up to a short story collection in a couple of years. For the next short story release, I'm searching for an artist with a different look than my last cover. I really like the way woodcuts look, so hopefully I'll be able to pair up with a great artist. If not, then I might make the cover or ask my wonderful wife to. In any case, by the end of summer, I will have two more stories out there.
Picture for today: A sample of the woodcut type of art that I am targeting for my next short story release. Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite artists, used woodcuts for her chapter openings for a print of her Earthsea series. The short story I'm working on has some similarities to the Tombs of Atuan. Though I must say upfront that her story is way much more better than my little piece. I have a ways to go before I reach her level of writing, but that won't stop me from trying!
28 JAN 17
How are new stories born? Well, sometimes they come to us in dreams...and that is what we have for today. I woke up with the most fantastic dream in my head a few mornings ago. I rolled over and quickly wrote down what I could remember as fast as I could. The full dream sequence slipped away before I got very far, but I should be able to do it justice when I get done writing the story. Below are my original notes with additional developments and annotations afterwards:
The Lord of Winter visits the Summer climes. Burst this and that. Iguanas dropping from the trees. But at the end the southern lords give him the chilly reception kneeing him in the cold and turning a cold shoulders at him.
That's it. Now, granted, I was still partially asleep when I wrote that!
But I can remember some of the dream and the influences are easy to see. I visited my sister up in the cold north. Me, a southerner headed up. Maybe that is what starts the story, an invite from a visitor from the south and the Winter Lord wants to come down and see what all the fuss is about. We've had some cold weather here in Louisiana and I was concerned about burst pipes, which has happened before. The iguanas falling from the trees in Florida was very memorable from a few weeks ago in the news. They are cold-blooded and the chilly weather made them seem dead, but they were just unable to move. Crazy, uh? That got me to thinking what other changes would happen around the bayous and other southern locations when a big polar mass comes swooping down on us. With some editing, the basic story idea becomes this...
The Lord of Winter visits the Summer Lands. After getting a visitor from the south, the King gathers his lords and ladies and decides to travel to the fanciful lands to see the sights the visitor talked about. As his caravan heads south, the weather changes ahead of him, announcing his coming as surely as a full parade of trumpeters. A small foreshadowing of his impending visit should be here, maybe a flock of black birds unexpectedly heading further south to get away from the impending chill. The appearance of unusual white birds traveling south with the cold. "There's a Killing Frost coming..."
Freezing winds whistle through the castle, under doors and through the windows. Not burst pipes, but do wells freeze? Will have to look into that. Maybe some wizard's beakers of odd fluids and such freezing and popping like cans of soda in the freezer. Make a funny in here about how come Uncle's favorite stash doesn't expand and spill, Ah...it's alcohol that's why! Maybe not Iguanas, but some other type of reptile dropping from the trees. And alligators in frozen bodies of water, with just their snouts out to keep breathing. That actually happened too.
The Southern Lords pull out all the stops to make the Winter Lord feel welcome, but they are just not used to the air conditioning! They prefer fans!
While it would be a cool turn of phrase to have the Southern Lords give the Winter Lord the 'cold shoulder' and maybe that is still in there as a mini-climax to an issue, I think in the end maybe I will have the Southern Lords celebrate the departure of Winter with a festival and tie that into how an annual Mardis Gras type of celebration comes into being. Maybe come up with some way to say goodbye cold hello warmth in a simple phrase like Fat Tuesday. Fanciful costumes and a parade of floats in the manner of the Lord of Winter's caravan signal the end of the unwelcome climate and the return of warmer days. The celebration is not Mardis Gras, the focus being more a 'goodbye' to the cold and welcome to warmer weather than religious, but there will definitely be a lot of Mardis Gras elements in there. Sure, why not? Keep the same colors? Too easy I'm thinking. A blue for Winter should be in there perhaps. So perhaps Blue (for winter), Gold (for summer) and Green (for prosperity).
So, that's all the story development for today. Keep an eye out here occasionally for further story development and then of course buy the story when it eventually makes it to market!
Picture for today is from the interwebs... not one of mine.
This last picture is a Honeysuckle. Not the kind that grew in my backyard as a kid, but a close variety. You can pull out the long yellow parts of the flower and at the other end is a delicate drop of sweet-tasting nectar.
