Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 47

Neowise

I saw the comet! Thanks to mallorys_camera I knew where to look, and I went out with binoculars, and so I could see the long spray of glittering ice--how powerful is the sun to blow on the comet and make that tail appear!

It's so beautiful.

And it's doing its comet thing: appearing in a year of cataclysm, just the way a comet should.


(confirmation bias or what! Lots of very agreeable comets show up when there are no cataclysms whatsoever ... Or do they? I suppose there's always a cataclysm happeni...

Wednesday reading

Winged Histories

I made a tiny bit more progress. I liked this description of hope:

I know what I saw: hope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. that hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.

Also, not quite a title drop, but:

Now often at night it seems as if there is something abroad in the wood with wings or something that breathes as it sits upon my chest. I get up in the night and go to the flap of the tent and open it ... The wind blows ...

adding my own books, heh

I'm slow on the uptake: I only just realized I can add my own books on Goodreads--like, mark them to-read and all--and that that alerts people (well, some people... the people who follow me here) to their existence. So I did that!

Only stand-alones, though.

Wednesday reading, plus some art

I've done only a very little reading this week.

Long form:

I read a little more of The Winged Histories, but this may just be something I need to come back to at a later date. Will keep reading a bit more, though, because I do love the writing, so casual and graceful with insights:

I put down my things, and he noticed the swordbox. "Oh! Ha, ha! Did you bring that thing? Ha, ha!" he wheezed, leaning on a couch. "A joke," he explained to my Aunt Firvaud, who regarding me with a searing stare. "Our Ta...

a dollop unsolicited information of a lexicographic nature

Saw a thing on FB and decided not to engage because it wasn't from anyone I knew and no one was begging for my input. Instead I'll inflict the information on my readers here--who also didn't ask for it, heh.

The FB post was about a news story yesterday that "Merriam-Webster has declared 'irregardless' a word!!" The news story was full of pearl-clutching and oaths sworn to continue to teach children not to use that word, no matter what MW says, and the commenters on the FB post were shaking their ...

mermaid with hydrangea

I have a hydrangea bush that blooms about once every ten or fifteen years, and THIS IS THE YEAR! Behold, the tender flower:



And another, tinier flowering:



In honor of that hydrangea, today's chalk drawing is a mermaid holding a hydrangea:



And some close-ups...





It's thanks to stillwater_fx that I thought of making a shell crown--because of his sharing what people in the mer community make. The world really is full of cool people.

comments

July 4 2020

This day had some marvel to it. The neighborhood felt very festive--the neighbors next to us and diagonally across the street had both put up tents for their kids to play in, and the across-the-street neighbors were sitting outside all day, chatting with various visitors, masked. Their little boy and the next-door little boy were playing together, masked, so let it not be said that little kids won't wear masks.

Here's the next-door neighbor, posing for me:



His little sister wasn't wearing a mask ...

Wednesday reading

I've started reading Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories, and it's got the same finely realized scene setting that I loved in A Stranger in Olondria, but unfortunately the first of the four sections in it focuses on a soldier, and the first part of the soldier's narrative is bloody and depressing in a way that I'm not really in the mood for. But I'm going to push on, because there's more to this section than the war part, and it's only one of four sections in the novel.

Here's what I mean by fin...

And "Duplication" is live!

"Duplication" is now available on all the platforms I sell on! If you'd like to get a copy for 99 cents, below are the relevant links (and as I said last entry, I'm happy to send a PDF or a Word doc free of charge if you'd like to read it that way).

Blurb for the story:

What happens when your child suddenly becomes two children, and both of them are equally real?

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Apple Books

Kobo

Offering up my diffident gratitude to readers! (ETA: And disabling comments--this entry is here just ...

coming soon: Duplication

Back in 2016, I posted about a recurring dream-type I used to have, in which my children would inexplicably temporarily duplicate ( here's the entry ). In that entry, I said that I might write a story about it.

Well I did. I actually finished it quite some time ago (as queenoftheskies and osprey_archer can attest to), but it's taken me a long time to work up the energy and conviction to make it available as a stand-alone.

I had a very clear idea of what I wanted for the cover, but I lack the abili...