Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 114

Milky Way Railway, playlists, windships

Milky Way Railway
Miyazawa Kenji, who wrote the mysterious and beautiful story Gingatetsudo no yoru (銀河鉄道の夜; translated by Sarah Strong as Night of the Milky Way Railway), lived in Iwate Prefecture, which the ninja girl visited this past New Years. She sent us candies in this commemorative tin:




stoking the boiler



You can see that after Ginga (Milky Way) station comes Minami Juji (The Southern Cross)

playlists
I've been very much enjoying the six Ancillary Justice playlists ann_leckie posted about...

an ice scape

Here is a playground the Snow Queen designed for little Kay, full of the beauties and mysteries of ice. Mysteries like, how does is shine like this?



Mysteries like, how do these pieces fit together, and why did they come apart?



And beauties like this suspended pendant, the size of an old LP. Maybe they were playing this record some nights past, and dancing on this slippery dance floor.

A bundle of stories

blairmacg introduced me to StoryBundle, a site that puts together groupings of indie-published books on different themes, and invited me to be part of a bundle. And that bundle is available today.

Here are all the beautiful covers:



With StoryBundle, you can choose how much you want to pay for an initial bundle of four ebooks. The minimum price is $3.00, but you can pay more if you want (if you bought each book individually, the cost would be between $12 and $20). If you pay more than $12, you g...

proud

The sky was like this, this morning:




I had to drive the healing angel to school and as we were driving, the sun was rising. First just the bright curve of its back, glowing intensely, not quite blindingly pink-gold. Then more of it, almost all of it, and something about the cold day, maybe, but I thought I could see the swimming surface of it, the ebb and flow of the flaming waves on the surface of it, those incredible convectional currents. It was so BIG and so BRIGHT and appearing in our sky...

My anxious car

The car my generous brother gave to us really wants us to be safe when we drive. It really wants us to buckle up. If we don't put on those seatbelts right away, it beeps at us. And if we start rolling without seatbelts fastened, its blood pressure rises, its seatbelt light flashes, and its beeps become frantic.

But the poor thing can't tell the difference between a human in the seat and a 20-pound bag of Goya rice, as I discovered.

Now look: if someone of a mere 20 pounds were sitting in the f...

Our roads round here are trimmed with lace

Here, I'll show you:



This morning it was cold, so I blew bubbles. Here's a bubble in a crowd of snowflakes



And here are more snowflakes



Time to do some things. Stay well, all.

An Indonesian student's journey to publication (interview with Ahmad Alkadri, part 2)

One thing that really struck me about Ahmad's answers to my interview questions was how similar his journey to publication was to that of people I know here in the United States--being a vigorous fan, joining writing groups, participating in NaNoWriMo, going through the pain of rejection, and then at last publication--in his case, with a new small press. But I'll let him speak for himself:

You are a student. What are you studying? Will you pursue work in the field when you graduate? Or go on t...

Ahmad Alkadri and the genre scene in Indonesia

One thing I love about Twitter is that it lets you peek into many different places, many different disciplines, many different interests. Some of my interests include genre fiction, diversity in literature, and Southeast Asia, so maybe it’s not surprising that I’ve ended up following Ahmad Alkadri (@alkadri), a student in forestry in Indonesia who’s also a translator and a writer. His debut novel Spora , a tale of Lovecraftian horror, came out last year.

He kindly let me ask him some questions...

Dreams

(from two nights ago)




I dreamed an old friend died
I dreamed a speculator tore down my house and tried to buy the ruins
I dreamed the city flooded, and there were alligators
I dreamed I waded through, up to my neck
I dreamed women sat above the waterline
Picking through platters of half-eaten fruit
Pulling out the untouched pieces to sell again
I asked them for directions to my ruined house

All through the night I kept waking and nearly waking
Consoling myself with the intuition
That it was all a dream
B...

walking with foxes

The chilly path I walked along this morning was the route a fox had taken sometime earlier--his footprints were there in the snow, sometimes walking, sometimes bounding. Maybe he walked that route earlier in the morning, maybe last night. The tracks were pretty fresh.

It felt like I was walking with him. I practically was--if you take a longer view of time, I was, in fact. What's a matter of hours if we're talking centuries? We were walking side by side.

Sometimes other tracks were there--squ...