Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 126

Three times lucky?

My generous brother offered me his old car, which would allow us to retire our gently rusting-to-pieces van. His car is much newer and has a ridiculously low number of miles on it. All that's necessary is to register it at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Except . . .



Time the First
Except, as the healing angel has observed, it is impossible to accomplish anything at the RMV with only one trip. Still, I called up our auto insurance, got all those papers in order, and on Thursday drove across th...

tansy

All the tansy in my yard had flopped over, so I cut it way, way back and turned some of it into a door wreath. My front door gets BAKED BY THE SUN. Seriously, the healing angel and I have talked about the possibility of using it, somehow, for electricity or power generation. But anyway. This means the tansy wreath will . . . not freeze-dry, but the opposite. Flash bake?

Later in the day, the healing angel was going upstairs (the stairs are right by the door) and said, "I smell an intense smell...

Today in Pen Pal: A tin cup

On August 10, Em and her friend Small Bill found a cup in the shallow waters.

He picked the cup out of the net and turned it over in his hands. Every dent and bang was greeny black, and there was a tiny crab inside.

It sure looked old, but once a thing’s been asleep in salty water for a while, it gets hard to tell its true age.

“Look,” Small Bill said, showing me the bottom of the cup. There was a bird stamped in it, a bird with hunched shoulders, perching on a key—a crow.

A message in a bottle, milkweed fibers, and a poet

Message in a Bottle

Today's message in a bottle came in three languages: English, Mandarin, and Spanish, and additionally contained a UBS stick on which was a music video promoting a 2002 French film--it was dropped from a container ship somewhere between Hawaii and Vancouver and was found by a marine researcher--on the very day she'd been talking about messages in bottles--bobbing off the shores of Vancouver. The complete story is here , and I added it to the messages-in-bottles page on the Pe...

Favorite memory of a library or bookstore

I participated in this week's SF Signal Mind Meld. The question was excellent: what is your favorite memory of a library or bookstore? As several of the participants said, it's hard to pick just one! I told a story of an unusual encounter . . .

But how about you guys? What are some of your favorite memories?

Part 2 of my three-month giveaway is under way

For each of the three months that Pen Pal's Em and Kaya correspond--July through September--I'm giving away five copies of the book. The giveaway is worldwide! So if you have friends in faraway places who don't normally get to enter giveaways, and you think they might like Pen Pal, let them know. The giveaway closes shortly after the new month starts, then reopens.

galaxies

There are galaxies, many many galaxies, forming a bobbing, swaying screen between my backyard and my front. These galaxies smell like honey, and I push through them to get down to the laundry line or the compost bin.

But seriously, don't the umbels of queen anne's lace . . .



. . . look like galaxies?



galaxies . . . I wonder if they smell like honey.

July 27 in Pen Pal (post 2 of 2)

Well it's been some days! But the next date in Pen Pal isn't until August 10, so it's good that I have a second post for July 27. On July 27, not only did Kaya write in her journal, she also wrote a letter to Em. She wrote about the dream that led to her imprisonment:

Some months after I came back to my country, I had a dream about the Lady of the Ruby Lake. I dreamed she had become a very old grandmother. She asked me why nobody celebrated fire anymore, and I didn’t have an answer for her. Sh...

Review: Kaleidoscope

ETA: Coming out in August


I’ve just finished Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories. This excellent collection succeeds in every possible way: not only does it fulfill its mission to deliver fantasy stories with diverse protagonists (along many axes of diversity: ethnic, geographical, physical and mental status, sexual orientation, and gender1), written by equally diverse authors, but it also delivers diversity of mood, tone, and style. The stories are all excellent, some...

The Lunchbox

A thing on Twitter reminded me that I wanted to say how much fun the movie The Lunchbox is. Apparently I just really, really love epistolary stories? This one unfolded like a flower: there is nothing unexpected about how a flower unfolds, but you sure do enjoy watching it. And it wasn't just the main characters, the secondary characters were excellent as well: Saajan's young disciple Shaikh and Ila's heard-but-not-seen Auntie. And every small detail--a window closed so Saajan can't look in, w...