Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 150

Poison rationality

I was dropping the ninja girl at work early-early today, since I need the car in the afternoon, and on the way home I heard a remix of Panic! At the Disco's "I write sins not tragedies," which has the lines "No, it's much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality," but for some reason I was thinking of it as poison rationality. It's much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poison rationality. Hmmmm. I wonder what Vigilante Espresso would have...

James Fairfax

Genderbending and gender flips are popular these days, whether it's putting Disney princesses in their princes' outfits or designing gender-flipped casts for movies. One interesting example I came across recently is James Fairfax, a retelling of Jane Austen's Emma, by Adam Campan.

In this retelling quiet, reserved secondary-character-with-a-secret Jane Fairfax becomes James Fairfax. That's change no. 1. But the story also posits that progressive Enlightenment thought and the affections of cert...

Also, a pretty autumn scene

comments off; just enjoy!

The piney spine of the road

Behold, in autumn, the road's spine in certain sections is coated in pine needles. The pine needles stick right by the double-yellow line.

Some website art for Pen Pal

This'll go on one of the subpages. I like doing this! It gives me a chance to play around with various designs that are too しぶい(understated, low-key) --and amateur-- to be book covers.

Autumn colors

Swamp maple and Jerusalem artichokes



Skull candy from cafenowhere ♥



A skull full of skulls!!

the mighty (a) snail (b) potato (c) snow pea

The Snail
lnhammer linked to a marvelous blog entry from the British Library about the common image, in medieval marginalia, of knights battling snails. . .

Take that, ye gastropod!


. . . And sometimes losing!

suing for mercy


The Potato
Meanwhile, the healing angel and I found ourselves drawn into a Selected Shorts performance of "Subsoil," by Nicholson Baker, read by Thomas Gibson. It's the last of three stories read for the program theme of "Too Late." It was a hilarious and actually terrifying...

Another Tam Lin

My other favorite version of Tam Lin is "Tam Lyn Retold," an electro-reggae updating of the Tam Lin story by Benjamin Zephaniah and Eliza Carthy, with Simon Emmerson and Transglobal Underground. It was released in 2007, six years too early to be the tale of Muhammed Sillah, pictured below, but perhaps fairy magic grants it prescience?




Muhammed Sillah, an outspoken critic of the government of Gambia, fears for his life if he is deported from Canada

Yes: in this version, instead of a captive of...

A book cover for Pen Pal

Thanks to everyone's good advice, I decided to go with a photo for the book cover. I did have one more idea for a drawn cover, but what I'm realizing more and more is that in some cases my own instincts are just . . . dead wrong. And while one of the delights of self-publishing is being able to do things as you like, on the other hand, there's that huge hurdle of trying to reach people. A savvy self-publishing friend of mine put me on the trail of a very friendly, very talented cover designer...

(Brief observation)

I kept a calendar of events for Pen Pal as I was writing it--I set the events in 2013--so that I could be sure things would work out (in terms of time it would take for letters to get to places, news to travel, etc.)

Now on iCalendar they keep on popping up. It's unnerving. Tomorrow a plot-central event happens.