Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 178

signs and portents

My friends elsewhere took advantage of the rains to send me shaggy mane mushrooms. They send them whenever folk come calling...



(everything is sparkling quietly)



My walk this morning brought me other signs and portents:



A coin for fortune and a flashcard: seven, a lucky number, and twelve = noon or midnight, hours for visitations.



And a purple bottle cap with a white bird or butterfly on it. In the Pen Pal novel, M's younger sister Tammy collects bottle caps and finds one like this. I don't know...

Union Square West, Manhattan

A mural truck. What would you title this painting? Aztec warrior mourns his love while at a distance Our Lady of Guadalupe looks on? Except he seems to be gently smiling and she has a languorous rather than dead look to her. Perhaps he's her lover now bowing and departing?



ETA Possibly an illustration for the story Ramona. See stillnotbored 's comment.

Second ETA tekalynn offers another possibility, here

when did this happen?

Suddenly there are red trees around? Someone is turning the kaleidoscope, and now the flakes of color and light have fallen into flame colors and hints of ghost colors, still with green all around--the grass and many leaves do not yet believe in autumn. It's a rumor, they say. The evidence is, as yet, anecdotal.

Oh! And also, "The Yew's Embrace" is live at Podcastle

This is a story of mine that ran in Strange Horizons in 2011.** And now it's been given podcast treatment over at Podcastle! I am going to listen. So excited!

"The Yew's Embrace," read by Stephanie Morris"

It's a ghost war revenge sibling ... it's a story, anyway.

Recommendation: Branson-Thomas Downton Abbey fic

Honestly, this fic in which blackmail becomes the occasion for Something More just rings so true that it's become part of my head canon.

Nice job, osprey_archer !

BLACKMAIL

from this weekend's travels

Life is a sharp blue sky and drifting-island clouds. A black-winged vulture circles above a hill, and by the side of the road, another picks at the body of a deer.


I was running out of gas on that highway, so I exited into a small town I've never been too or even heard of before. It was afternoon, but the town's church bells were playing "Morning Has Broken."

There was a farmers market, and I knew it was my destiny to stop there. Why else was that the exit that promised gasoline? Why else was t...

A visit

Today I had a visitor. As is my habit, I took her along a straight and dangerous road. My minion the ninja girl (or am I her minion? Hmmmm....) saw the path was marked in rust by the ghost of a leaf:



My guest filmed our progress on the straight and narrow path:

look how the ninja girl seems just to float along it (she's on the right)--she doesn't even need to balance. It's because she's a ninja





My guest is right at home in the wilderlands. No one who knows her should be surprised.



She peeks into...

touch and tenderness

Sonia Rochel, a newborn nurse, gives a newborn a relaxing bath. It's a miracle of touch and tenderness, a bridge between the world of the womb and this world of hard edges.



Some stills from the video:

what are the voting rights of ex-felons?

This was a question put to me by someone I tutor at the jail, and I realized I didn't know the precise answer. I said I'd find out. Seeing as a quarter of the US population one in every thirty-two people in the United States will spend some time behind bars (though not necessarily for felonies),** it's a very cogent question.

It turns out to vary from state to state. The table below comes from State-Level Estimates of Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 2010, by Christopher Uggen, S...

Aung San Suu Kyi taking young people's questions

Amnesty International had an event yesterday for high school and college-aged (or thereabouts) people, where they could ask Aung San Suu Kyi questions. The whole thing was live streamed.

screenshot



Some extraneous things about the event distracted me:

It didn't start on time. That's not a big deal I guess--presidential speeches don't always start on time either. Or even usually?
Of two microphones, one each for two event introducers, one didn't work. This was so like what happens in events organi...