Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 67

scarecrows

I saw a scarecrow today--I thought it was a person, standing very still. It was a very realistic scarecrow.

Today was also a rainy day, so there were no shadows, no direct light, confusion of air and water as rain misted down, confusion of earth and air too, as hills and trees melted away into clouds. A good day for summoning ghosts . . .

You can do that, when the rain brings ghosts up near the surface of the earth. Sorcerer farmers trap them in old clothes like helium in balloons, and make the...

Forget the Sleepless Shores, by Sonya Taaffe

Regret, sorrow, obsession, and yearning are so present in Forget the Sleepless Shores that it’s almost like they’re main characters. The human (and otherworldly) protagonists caught in their clutches often find words failing them—so light must speak, or clouds, or objects, or landscapes, but most of all, bodies must speak, skin to skin, sweat to sweat, intermingled breath, hands tangling in hair or gripping wrists. It’s sensuousness with an incandescent filament of the erotic threading throug...

a treasured non-friend

osprey_archer has talked about how we need to have more gradations in how we refer to people than just "acquaintance" and "friend" (and then piling on the adjectives to explain how close a friend the friend is, or how distant the acquaintance is). I'd like also a word for a person you don't even know at all, but who you see often and whose existence brings you joy--

--like this older woman I often see walking around the time I'm finishing up a morning run, or sometimes on weekends if I'm doing...

Wednesday reading meme

Look at this! I'm doing a Wednesday reading meme!

I'm reading Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning (Amusingly, for the first few days I kept thinking of as Nothing Like the Lightning. My brain was in opposite land, clearly). I started it because of Puddleshark's answer to my question about hopeful futures (and because I'd read interesting reviews of it, and Puddleshark's comment reminded me of that).

What an intriguing, absorbing book. I'm equal parts enjoying it and arguing with it (but I enjo...

Pablo Escobar's hippos

We didn't make it to Medellín on this trip to Colombia, but in reading through our guidebook, we discovered that some distance outside of Medellín, drug lord Pablo Escobar had his private ranch, Hacienda Napoles, where he had, among other things, a menagerie of exotic animals, including hippos. After Pablo Escobar's downfall, the other animals were taken to zoos, but the hippos had managed to elude capture... and established themselves in Colombia's Magdalena River (and other watery locations...

Iced Coffee Dreams

The fourth and last of Jennifer Montgomery's wonderful coffee shop romances is out, Iced Coffee Dreams , starring Wynne (short for Eowyn--her parents are die-hard Tolkien fans), who's working part-time at Campus Coffee over the summer. She has dreams of opening her own cafe one day, but she's prone to anxiety ... and she finds it impossible to say no to problem-customer Shannon, who comes in all too often with a "Hey girl, hey," and a request for extra caramel, milk on the side, an extra punch...

Unlocked drawing

Today is two weeks since I posted my giveaway for Unlocked, so I put all interested parties' names in a hat....



... and have three winners:



That's sonia , nemophilist , and petrichor_pirate !

Please message me via DW/LJ messages with mailing addresses for the physical books and email addresses for the kindle version (mobi format). Unfortunately I don't have an epub format, but I do have a PDF if the mobi format won't work for you.
ETA: Thanks to sonia , I now have an epub version to offer, so nemophi...

making things better

Back in one of my Egipto entries, I said in a comment,

I've been thinking that rather than focusing so much on Nazi Germany and how things fall apart, we ought to be looking at how places recover. No two situations are the same, and we might not be able to put into practice anything of what we see, but just for the sake of remembering.

Because descent into awfulness is one story, but recovery from awfulness in another.

Here's an example of working to recover from awfulness--it's an exhibit call...

Readercon

I haven't attended Readercon since it switched venues, but it was nice to be back--even if the hotel is located on an Alcatraz-like hill that makes leaving it on foot feel like a jailbreak (... actually maybe that makes it kind of fun? Maybe the truth is I had fun making my getaways now and then.)

I was there for the second half of Friday, all of Saturday, and Sunday morning. I missed many things I would like to have heard, but I heard and participated in many fun things. Here are a few highli...

Unlocked, by Jerry Zaltman

I don't usually edit whole books, but every now and then it happens, and this was one such case: Unlocked: Keys to Improve Your Thinking. I really enjoyed working on this book and have used some of the exercises in it with students I volunteer with, always with wonderful, thought-provoking results.



The intention of the book is to get people thinking about how they think, to understand how things like priming and cues work, to learn about the faultiness of memory and the selectivity of attentio...