Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 47

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.

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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...

reading: The Headless Cupid

Our internet is being dreadful. I can't *quite* pin the blame for my being a half-hour after Wednesday on that, but it did contribute!

I read many Zilpha Keatley Snyder stories in my youth. The Greensky books were life-changing for me, but I also really loved The Changeling. I never did read The Headless Cupid, however—until now. (Thank you, osprey_archer !)

The pacing is very leisurely. We meet good-hearted David and his three younger siblings, who are all distinct, charming personalities. We lear...

seen this morning

It's a drought here, and there's a water ban. Grass lawns are burned gold except where trees shade them---there they're still green. (I don't have much of a grass lawn: mine is a lot of thyme and clover and hawkweed and sorrel. Where I have grass, it's the same as everyone else's.)

I went for a walk this morning under a drifting gray sky and saw many good things. I didn't have a camera so you'll have to bear with words. I saw the red-winged blackbird royalty, the princes with their scarlet epaule...

crickets and others

Last year around this time I was terribly unhappy to not hear any field crickets. I remember walking around the block and hearing only one, chirping away in a lonesome solo.

One friend on LJ suggested that maybe they come out later--and indeed, later last year I did hear a fuller chorus of them, and I told myself that maybe I'd only imagined hearing them all summer long all my life--but no; I was right to remember hearing them, because this year I hear them in full strength--now, in June. It mak...

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is a wonderful, unique story. Its protagonist, Piper, is eleven, and I think it has the potential to be a beloved favorite of readers of that age, but it's also a very rewarding story to read as an adult.

I've been calling it a time travel story, but really it's a friendship-between-times story, in that the focus isn't really on traveling through time so much as it is having a friend from a different era. Piper's friend from a different era is Rosie, who's from app...

Yesterday's chalk endeavor

Yesterday, rather than do a drawing, I had the idea to do a very simple choose-your-own-adventure story. The location is the paved path across the common space in this housing development.

The start point for the story was right in front of a bench that's right off the path. There were two choices: to the mountains



Or to the sea



(photographing these is hard at the time of day I drew them... major sun-dappling interference!)

( follow the mountain thread )

( follow the sea thread )

I have NO IDEA how t...