Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 49

A swarm of bees

Two days ago was World Bee Day. One day ago, in the evening, my neighbor up the street reported on FB that he had a swarm of bees in the branches of one of his oak trees.

A swarm of bees! I've never been so lucky as to see a swarm of bees. A swarm of bees is like a fairy hunt, a wild racing, everyone together, the queen at the lead. HOW COOL.

Today, a woman who raises goats and has two beehives came to relocate the swarm. I got to see her work. I can't begin to convey how magical it was to be wi...

Wednesday reading, plus an only tenuously related story & a song

When I get a free moment, I've been enjoying the stories posted in the New Decameron project that Jo Walton organized, though there are so many that I've got bookmarked that I haven't had a chance to read yet. One I *did* read was Naomi Kritzer's "A Star Without Shine" , which begins like this:

Once upon a time, in a very small kingdom, there was a king with one daughter. His wife had died, and he had not remarried. This is not the fairy tale where the king decides to marry his own daughter, don’...

a package

Some time ago Mike Allen was looking for some more ARC readers for A Sinister Quartet (a quartet of novellas by CSE Cooney, Jessica Wick, Amanda McGee, and Mike Allen himself), and I expressed an interest, and so he put a copy in the mail for me.

And time went by, and the foursome did a reading (preserved on Youtube ), each sharing part of their novella, and when that happened, I dropped Mike a line saying I really would read and review, but that the book still hadn't arrived yet--and he sent...

Lagoonfire

I'm happy to report that Annorlunda Books, which published The Inconvenient God, will publish the sequel, which will be called (thanks to good advice from sartorias ) Lagoonfire.

No timeline yet, and I mean... I am thankful each day just to be alive another day, and have no real faith that that will continue, so ... For now I'm just happy that the publisher liked the story and wants to publish it!

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Wednesday reading: THE THREEFOLD TIE, by Aster Glenn Gray

Wow, did I really go more than a week without posting? What can I say... it was a combination of actually getting paid work in (yay! relief), which kept me busy, and self-censoring of potential posts ("No, Asakiyume; you will regret it if you give in to the urge to post that).

I'm delighted that this week I'm in time to post for the Wednesday Reading meme, and I just finished a great novella, Aster Glenn Gray's The Threefold Tie, a post-Civil War love story involving Everett, his former Army...

the touch of a stranger

One of the most adventurous things I've ever done was go to Timor-Leste, alone, and not just Timor-Leste, but Ainaro, a mountain town a half-day's journey from Dili, the capital. I'm proud of myself for that: I found an English-teaching organization that I could plausibly crash without inconveniencing them too terribly; I reached out, made an application, got accepted, saved money, and went.

My first night was spent in a hostel in Dili. I had gotten a private room, but I was so tense, knowing...

Reading: This Is How You Lose the Time War

I really wondered how I would feel about this: there was so much to love--that it was an epistolary novel, that it was enemy agents who fall in love, that it was a time war! But I had also heard that the language was very flowery, and I have a complicated relationship with flowery language. I'm not against it by any means! I love the possibilities that the manipulation of language offer; I love metaphor, poetry, associations forged through language, all of that. But I also really crave story...

Interview with a mer-tail maker: part 3 ~ hardest part, favorite part, swimming

And here we are at the last mer post! I hope youve enjoyed spending time with the mer community and learning about making tails as much as I have. This post has Stillwater_fx s answers to my questions about favorite things, hardest things, and the thing I most wanted to know aboutcan you actually swim in a mermaid tail. (Special thanks to genarti for teaching me how to make a cute Instagram tag of Stillwater_fx s name.)

asakiyume: Whats the hardest part of tail creation?

stillwater_fx: For me,...

Interview with a mer-tail maker: part 2 ~ Creating a Mermaid Tail

If you're fascinated by process and how something as magical as a mer tail actually comes into being, you'll like this part of the interview. Thanks again, stillwater_fx , for sharing all this great information and the marvelous photos!

asakiyume How did you first learn about making mermaid tails?

stillwater_fx For me, the moment I saw the practical props used in the movie The Thirteenth Year, by Disney, the tail and the arm fins in that movie were wearable items. When I realized that, I...

Interview with a mer-tail maker: PART 1 ~ The Mer Community

One of the people I got to know when I was tutoring in Holyoke last fall was stillwater_fx , who has an amazing side job: he makes tails for merfolk. Theyre incredible works of art, and you can actually swim in them, if youre skilled.





( Interview under the cut )

Here you can listen to stillwater_fxs remarks about the community as therapy.

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2: CREATING A MERMAID TAIL

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