Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 115

How much oppression do you take in your dystopia?

I was musing on different styles of dystopias in fiction, and then in the real world, too. I came up with the following handy-dandy graphic:



It seems to me that in some stories, pretty much everyone is oppressed and miserable. There may be a superthin sliver of society that's privileged, but mainly everyone is miserable. Like in 1984 . . . which I haven't read in ages, so maybe there was a larger-than-superthin sliver that was living it up, but my impression was that it was pretty miserable. W...

An essay on publishing in today's environment

sartorias has a great essay on why she and rachelmanija are publishing Hostage, second book in their series The Change, through Book View Cafe rather than waiting on a big publisher--though the first book, Stranger, came out through Viking.

It's a thoughtful read, and not at all a diatribe: in fact, it includes comments from their Viking editor, Sharyn November, talking a little about how things look from the publisher's angle.

Link to the essay is here.

There are so many choices and possibilit...

Drax is like a muscle-bound Inigo Montoya: discuss

Don't you think? Y/N? They're both cruising for vengeance in a single-minded way, they both have a thing about honor, they're both steadfast friends. Okay, Inigo Montoya is maybe more comfortable around words than Drax is. But I think I like the two of them in much the same way.

Answer to the poll, plus a Big Brother observation

I'll go back and answer comments individually next, but I wanted to share the answer to my poll generally first.

Nine votes came in for Groot--which is who I thought people would probably think I'd like best. And I did love him a lot! I loved everything about him--especially his eating his own leaves. He was my second-favorite--but not my first.

Six votes came in for Rocky. Rocky was a fun character, and I liked him a lot, but he was not my favorite.

Five votes came in for Drax. And that is the...

A Guardians of the Galaxy poll, plus a question

View Poll: Asakiyume's favorite character

In the movie, Gamora was at pains to point out that Thanos isn't her real father (you're not my REAL dad). I was thinking about that as a story choice. It removes complications, and it strikes me as being similar to having "true blood," only in reverse. Character-we-like has no connections with character-we-don't-like.

For this movie, which is just a fun movie, it would be maybe kind of out of place to have the added complication and drama of making him...

for you, in the new year

May I present you with this plate of frost?


And with your meal, a tiny tipple?

You may have it with a black cap...


or gold...


or brown...


or orange...


or red.


The redcap bottle is the most elegantly adorned with frost:

riding the Vermonter

Train tracks run behind my neighborhood, where I walk. I often see trains go by: long New England Central Railroad freight trains and the Amtrak passenger train--the Vermonter.

On Christmas I learned that in January, the route of the Vermonter will change--it will no longer travel the length of track near my house. We've often talked of riding it, but our chance was fast disappearing, so on Saturday, December 27, wakanomori and I bought tickets to ride from Springfield, Massachusetts, to Amhe...

"so far I haven’t got beaten up or arrested or killed"

That's what Desmond Coutinho, fiancé of hunger striker Irom Sharmila, wrote in a letter I received a day after seeing news stories about his being assaulted and imprisoned in Manipur, where he'd gone to be near Sharmila and advocate for her.

I'm worried about him. He's a complicated person, and the situation with Sharmila is complicated.

I first heard of Desmond in a story by Basharat Peer on Sharmila and her cause (namely, repeal of India's AFSPA, a law that essentially grants the Indian army...

ripples or smiles

(this post is not holiday related ... also I'm not at home and have only very temporary and fleeting Internet access, so I'll be visiting everyone's journals later)

You know how if you close your eyes there are sparks and flashes you can see behind your eyelids? Just now I closed my eyes and there were all these curves, like many many faceless smiles, or like many tiny ripples, or like lots of closed eyes (the way those are always drawn with the same concave curve, like smiles are), or like fi...

ghost foxes in a cathedral, for sovay

sovay , here are some ghost foxes for you. I didn't include your pantomime foxes--the one in the flared skirt, the fox-masked giraffe--which would have been wonderful, but which I didn't think I could do justice to. Just ghost foxes themselves, overrunning a ruined cathedral--that image was so compelling all on its own.

I didn't know how to capture the soaringness of a cathedral, with its glory being so vertical, and the small litheness of foxes, which would be hard to see in a picture that cap...