Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 118

November 18, 2014

pine needles

Alongside the road and in the woods, the pine needles have dropped. Where the woods path goes through a stand of white pine, I met a grandmother and granddaughter raking up the fallen needles with small bamboo rakes. They were putting them in a long bag, like a cotton picker's sack. Remarkably, they were both wearing coats of exactly the same shade of copper-orange as the pine needles.

"Are you going to put the needles around blueberry bushes to make the soil more acid?" I asked. "Or are you m...
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Published on November 18, 2014 06:08

November 16, 2014

starlings, sky, and cranberries

At the Cold Spring Orchard today, so many starlings, thick on the telephone wires across from the main building, and in a bare tree by it, and more and more kept coming and finding room on those wires ("slide over; can I squeeze in here?"), and they were chatting to one another in their squeaky voices, metallic parts in need of oil, but they were cheerful and comfortable squeaks--not strained or agonized. So many, against a sky that was a broad watercolor sweep of gray. They filled up that sk...
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Published on November 16, 2014 13:28

November 14, 2014

our dancing waters

From NASA, A beautiful visualization of ocean currents, showing how the waters of Planet Earth move.

(Good for story research, too)



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Published on November 14, 2014 05:12

November 13, 2014

Stranger is out!

rachelmanija and sartorias 's post-apocalyptic and fun novel Stranger is out.

I read over my then twelve-or-so-year-old son's shoulder when he was beta reading this--it has an excellent ensemble cast and an exciting plot, that much I could tell even over the shoulder. But there's so much I missed and so much that's new in this, the final version.

I can't wait to encounter the illusion-casting rabbits and the telekinetic squirrels. Superpowers aren't just for humans anymore!

More from Rachel belo...
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Published on November 13, 2014 09:07

design by acorn

Last night I turned on the oven, to preheat it. Before I could put our supper in to cook, I smelled something already cooking. Did I leave something in the oven?

Of course I did. The ground-up acorns from some days ago: I'd had them on a low heat to dry. Well so now I have *roasted* ground acorns. I tasted some; they're nice. Interestingly, they left this pattern on the brown paper I laid down between the (wet-from-soaking) acorn bits and the (old, aluminum) cooking sheet.

The side the acorns w...
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Published on November 13, 2014 04:45

clouds





I hadn't gotten the photos off my camera in a while, and I discovered these clouds there:

first this...
clouds, earlier

then a few minutes later, they had moved a little....
clouds

There's a circle of brightness on the leaves at the top of some trees in that one:
clouds, spotlight on leaves

I found those pictures when I retrieved my camera from the car, to take the pictures that will be in the next entry...

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Published on November 13, 2014 04:35

November 11, 2014

this year's acorn flour ... and a leaf wreath

This year I used white-oak nuts to make my acorn flour. I could tell from the first day that I started soaking it that it was going to be different from the red-oak acorn flour I made last year. Here are the ground-up nut meats when I first set them to soak, this year:

DSCN5135

(Here, for comparison, are what last year's nuts looked like when I first set them to soak)

DSCN4214

Hmm, actually, in photos they look pretty similar. Take it from me: this year's batch had a yellower cast, and last year's had a red-brow...
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Published on November 11, 2014 20:03

dancing leaves

The oak leaves are starting to fall. If there's even a little breeze, they travel, and they do it by spinning round, like maple-seed helicopters, or by becoming tiny sails and moving straight forward, and sometimes by sashaying side-to-side, like a person enjoying the feel of their hips. They're hard to catch, dipping away just when you think you might grab one: "uh-uh-ohh, no-no!" they seem to say.

There was a family out raking their lawn together: a mother, father, grandmother, and little t...
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Published on November 11, 2014 08:17

November 8, 2014

novel blending

A friend was talking about National Novel Generation Month--Not National Novel Writing Month, mind you, but National Novel Generation Month: a month spent working on code to generate a 50,000-word novel. Like a fantasy-name generator, only way harder and longer.

One technique the friend mentioned was to take the nouns from one work of fiction and replace them with the nouns from another. Like Mad Libs! Forthwith we decided to try it. We replaced nouns in For Whom the Bell Tolls with nouns from...
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Published on November 08, 2014 14:22

November 7, 2014

come, take off your coat, make yourself at home





A friend sent me this very cool postcard, with art by Magda Boreysza. (Her website is here.) How about the final grin on this fox-squirrelly creature?

magda boreysza
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Published on November 07, 2014 08:49