Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 119

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...

our dancing waters

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

(Good for story research, too)

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...

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...

clouds

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

first this...


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


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


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

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:



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



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...

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...

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...

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?

cloud cat

Last week, on a stretch of highway between my town and the next, I hit a cat :(
I stopped and ran back to him, but though he looked completely whole, there was no life in him. He had a coat like dark clouds.

Yesterday, I was coming home in the evening on that same stretch of road, and the sky looked something like this:


(Not my photo; a manipulation of the first photo here)

--watercolor dark and light, as if last week's cat was stretched out there, relaxed, just dozing.