Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 49

Pimpernel Smith

I finally saw this movie, which sovay has written about eloquently several times. It's a retelling, more or less, of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring (and directed by) Leslie Howard, who played the Scarlet Pimpernel in the 1934 film. Pimpernel Smith was made in 1941 and set in 1939; in this version, it's a mild-mannered archaeology professor who spirits people out of Nazi Germany.

It's a *smashing* film. I loved the 1934 Scarlet Pimpernel, but I love this version equally well, maybe better. The e...

oak flower season

When you see one bundle ....



... there are likely to be more



These are fallen flowers from oak trees! Sometimes the tumble-bundles can get quite sizable.

Look at them lining this path



Another photo:



That one shows the trees, too--healthy and strong this year, so different from the years they've been under siege from gypsy moth caterpillars.

Musical note: here is a lovely tune from the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist cartoon, played on a music box.

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Wednesday reading

I finished CSE Cooney's The Twice-Drowned Saint, the first (and longest) of four novellas in the collection A Sinister Quartet, which I'm hoping to read and review in its entirety before it comes out--in two weeks or so!

I think this may be my favorite thing I've read by Claire--and I've read lots, all of which I've enjoyed. But this was just--it was a whole other level. It reaches for something really big and achieves it.

It starts out an acrobatic tale of an angelic city that's really a kind hel...

Audiobook!

It's quite a breathtaking thing when a friend likes your story so much she declares she'll do audio for it--and then assembles a team to do the sound engineering and proofing! But that's what CSE Cooney did for The Gown of Harmonies, and now it's live and available via Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.

We're in the final week of May--my hope is that this new format will get a new batch of people interested in the story and lead to some more purchases--> more money for the Food Bank of Western New Engl...

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...