Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 78

Mini painting

I'm currently working on learning to make book nooks, moss gardens, and other tiny-scale projects.

I ordered some 3D printed 1:64 scale figures from Etsy, and have been practicing painting them.

First try, with random sample figures.

Second try; Sheriff Crow and Becky in progress.

I can tell already that the big thing I need to obtain is a free-standing magnifying glass. I am in desperate need of a new glasses prescription and probably can't get one for at least six months. Thanks covid!

Any tips or favorite tip sites for miniature crafts?

comments

Chocolate Box

I wrote four stories for Chocolate Box. Heed the tags!

Dragonlance. The Golden General's Captive. Kitiara/Laurana. 1354 words. She was the Golden General. Kitiara was her prisoner. It made no sense for Laurana to be afraid…

Dragonriders of Pern. The Rhythm of Wings. 1209 words. Menolly/Mirrim, Mirrim & Path. Mirrim and Menolly go flying.

The Stand - Stephen King. one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan. 2977 words. Flagg rewards Lloyd for doing a good job.

Us (Movie). This Little Piggy Stayed Home. 402 words. Adelaide Wilson/Red. Addie's mother taught her nursery rhymes.

It's been an incredibly busy time and I read basically nothing other than my gift stories. But my gift stories were GREAT!

X-Men (Comics). Wayward Reflections by sheliak . 4432 words. Madelyne Pryor/Spiral, Madelyne Pryor/Rita Wayward. Madelyne Pryor never wants to be powerless again. To that end, she's willing to bargain with Spiral of the Wildways.

Original Works:

Herd of miniature flying horses & world-weary tough person: That's how the light gets in, by Silex. 3811 words.


Psychic Kids On The Run & Protective Sentient Location: Land of Shadows, by chiiyo86. 10,896 words.

comments

For Love of a Horse (Jinny of Finmory # 1), by Patricia Leitch

I discovered this book in a roundabout way. While prowling Amazon for classic children's books reprinted on Kindle, I noticed that Jane Badger Books was reprinting a bunch of classic horse stories. This led me to the Jane Badger blog, in which she reviewed a horse book every day for a year.

The Jinny books, along with Ruby Ferguson's Jill books, came up frequently as books which were much-requested but which couldn't be reprinted as she couldn't get the rights. The Jinny books were mentioned as having good prose, some magical elements, and a more flawed/realistic heroine than is usual in pony books. And lucky me, I just happened to already own the first one, which I'd bought at a library sale because it had a horse on the cover.

Written in 1976, the first book has some elements of gritty realism along with some that could only appear in a pony book. Jinny's father is a city probation officer in Stopton who is completely burned out by his inability to help the poor kids who get chewed up by the system. Naturally, he moves his family to a huge rundown house, Finmory, in the Highlands of Scotland, where he can pursue his dream of becoming a potter and his kids can ride ponies to school.

The middle child, Jinny, is all for that, as she loves horses. But when she sees a beautiful Arabian mare mistreated at a circus, she loses interest in the Highland ponies and becomes obsessed with rescuing her...

I liked this book enough to special order as many of the rest of the series as I could find (9 out of 12; not bad.) As promised, it has good prose, tons of atmosphere, and an intriguingly flawed heroine. I guess the magical elements appear in later books, as there's none in this one. Jinny is smart, extremely determined, and a talented artist; she's also obsessive, self-centered, and reckless.

The first book is much more about her than about the Arabian mare, Shantih, as through a wildly unlikely set of circumstances Shantih ends up running wild on the moors, with Jinny having about as much luck trying to tame her as is actually plausible. The supporting characters are vivid and also feel more like individuals than types; I especially enjoyed her burned-out idealist father and the vegetarian juvenile delinquent who helps them out and gives Jinny advice on horse-taming.

Note: Some cruelty/harm to animals but it ends happily.

Leaning into premise: Moderate. If this was the only book I'd say there isn't enough Jinny-Shantih interaction, but since it's the first of twelve I expect the later books to have plenty more.

What horse books have you all loved?

For Love of a Horse

[image error]

comments

Six Chicks at Malory Towers

I have ordered my chicks! They will arrive the week of March 8.

I'm getting an Ameraucana (blue eggs), an Easter Egger (blue-green eggs), a Maran (dark brown eggs), a Buff Orpington (light brown eggs), an Olive Egger (green eggs), and either an Austra White (white eggs) or a Wyandotte (cream to brown eggs), depending on which is available.

I will name them after Malory Towers girls, from Enid Blyton's girls' boarding school series. Did you know there's a delightful, mostly faithful TV version with a much more diverse cast? You can watch it here or on BBC. It was very inspirational.

I had no idea this existed until I saw this lovely vid of it!

You can now look forward to the exploits of my feathered Darrell, Mary-Lou, and other chicks.

comments

Hair By Me

I feel pretty

Oh so pretty

comments

Horrorstor, by Grady Hendrix

A horror-satire about Orsk, a haunted IKEA rip-off furniture store. ("Got a question? Just Orsk.")

After a sequence of extremely mild possible haunting events (escalator running backwards, poop on sofa, eerie texts), five employees stay overnight to get to the bottom of it, all with different motivations ranging from a plot to become breakout stars of a ghost hunter reality show to not wanting to spend yet another night home alone. Once the lights go out, things get a lot less mild.

Amy, the POV character, gets a lot of character growth, and Basil, the manager, is very likable. The others are mostly sketches, and the joke of the characters forever battling through assorted furniture sections gets repeated over and over and over.

The book is beautifully produced, with catalog entries for the furniture that get progressively warped as things get weirder, and it 100% leans into its premise. But it's a pretty slight premise, and doesn't do much more than just the premise. The characters and themes don't have the depth and richness of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Vampire Slaying, and the plot doesn't have the page-turning quality of that or My Best Friend's Exorcism.

If you like workplace satires, you'd probably like this more I did. I thought it was mostly just okay, though some moments rose above that, notably the book design and the ending.

Horrorstor[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Chickens Ahoy!

When I moved out of my apartment in LA and into a cabin on my parents' property in Mariposa, my original plan was to spend the winter looking for a new place, then move in spring, in time to start a garden and get some chicks.

The way things are going, especially due to the new, more contagious covid strains, that is clearly not happening. I was bummed about the gardening (I figured I could still do pots, but I'd been looking forward to a larger scale) and the chicks, which seemed impossible.

Last night I had a long talk with Kebi and got her full and enthusiastic permission to plant anything I liked around the cabin, including growing vegetables in the orchard next to the cabin and covering the orchard fence and gazebo with morning glories. She also...

[drum roll]

said I could put a hen house for four hens in the orchard! (There's only enough open space there for one big enough for four, and that's also of a size that I could pack up and move with me. I know four is not a lucky number, but we defy augury.)

CHICKS AHOY!

The place that got Kebi her chickens (mypetchicken.com) is sold out of almost everything and is mostly only shipping eight chicks at a time. I'm also nervous about getting mail chicks due to problems with the post office. But I called the local feed store, and they said they can order most kinds of day-old chicks for me.

If possible, I want one Buff Orpington (light brown eggs) and one Easter Egger (blue-green eggs) for sure. They're friendly, cute, and good layers. I'd ideally like a rainbow of eggs. Maybe a Wyandotte (extremely pretty, cream or tan eggs), or an Olive Egger (friendly, olive green eggs) or a Maran (dark brown eggs) or an Austra White (friendly, white eggs)...

Soon the chicks will be mine!

comments

Let's Travel

Where are you going today?

I'm hiking in Peru, beside a rushing stream. It looks a bit chilly, but I brought a warm coat and a thermos of hot cider.



(Link goes to a random location from Google Street View. To play, click and post a screenshot with a description of what you're doing. DW now allows you to select the size of a thumbnail image.)

comments

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke (Audiobook read by Chiwetel Ejiofor)

The narrator of Piranesi lives in an immense structure which he calls the House. It is full of statues. Its lower halls are underwater, washed by tides; its upper halls are in the clouds. It is visited by birds. Its only inhabitants seem to be the narrator and a man who he calls The Other.

That is all I knew going into the book, and I had an absolutely wonderful time learning the rest as I went along. I recommend doing the same.

The narrator is one of my all-time favorite characters, an explorer and a scientist and a philosopher, at once deeply naive and extremely intelligent. But most of all, he is kind. I have rarely loved a protagonist so much.

At one point he finds a pair of albatrosses building a nest, and knows that they will need more dried seaweed to construct it. He has some, which he needs to make a fire for himself, but gives it to them, reasoning:

What is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the world?

Piranesi is a book filled with beauty and wonder and understated horror, kindness and cruelty and the search for knowledge. It's often very funny, and, to my complete surprise, also quite suspenseful. For a book in which most of the action is the narrator wandering around a structure, it's also extremely narratively compelling. For me, anyway.

While listening, I was very torn between listening slowly, to fully enjoy every sentence, and all at once, because I was dying to see what will happen. It blows my mind that a Susanna Clarke book is this suspenseful as much as I love her, everything else I've read by her was leisurely to say the least. This is leisurely in a good way, AND has narrative drive.

It's a book almost designed to appeal to me specifically in some ways; I love stories which are about exploration and learning and observing nature and getting to know a fascinating place intimately, and a lot of the book is about that. I love stories about small/limited places, about labyrinths, about huge and vast and endless places full of wonder, and the House is all of those.

Piranesi is a love it or "why does anyone like this?" book. Not to oversell but it's one of the best books I've ever read. I loved it so much that I really struggled to write any kind of review of it.

It has some barriers to entry, such as Eccentric Capitalization. There are in-story reasons for this but I find it hard to read, so I listened to the audiobook. Happily, it's a fantastic performance - funny, warm, emotional, poetic - and has the bonus of allowing me to imagine the narrator as looking like Chiwetel Ejiofor, which I think is more-or-less how he canonically looks anyway.

Here is some non-spoilery and gorgeous fan art that really captures the tone of the book:

THE BEAUTY OF THE HOUSE IS IMMEASURABLE; ITS KINDNESS INFINITE.

Spoilers for the entire book below cut. Seriously, it's more fun going in knowing as little as possible.

( Read more... )

Piranesi[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Hamster Dance

I have a new, free short story out!

When the Defenders advertised their private security agency as "No problem is too big or too small," they had no idea just how small it could go...

Hamster Dance is a prequel story to the Defenders series, so you can read it even if you haven't read the series.

You should click on the link even if you don't have any interest in reading the story, because you have GOT to see the cover image.

Can someone please iconify it for me? I need a general Zoe Chant icon, and that image (by sholio ) is PERFECT.

comments