Writing Wednesday: Sharper Pearls

So yeah, I didn't quite get around to posting the final sea things cards update, but I'll get to it soon. I also have some pictures of our resident porcupine wandering around in the front yard to share. But it's Wednesday, so it's writing update time.

I got my story "Sharper and More Fragrant" added to Smashwords and Kindle (it's up now at Smashwords, from whence it will be distributed to various other venues; the Kindle version should be live in the next day or so). This is the story that eventually led to the novel I'm back at work on, formerly known as "White Foxes, Full Moon" (which title I'm now using solely for the short story that I later expanded into the first third of the book), and which is now probably going to be called Reindeer Girl, Fox Woman. Maybe.

I also formatted and posted "Cobbleshore Knit" but it's still in conversion. It should be completed by later today at Smashwords, and in a day or two on Kindle. "Cobbleshore Knit" was originally written with a completely new character, but I re-wrote parts of it once I realized the drowning man was actually Torin Danickson, the young man who captured the selkie girl in "Sealskin." It's a standalone story (at least I hope it is), but obviously connected.

And that puts me nearly halfway through the stories that make up the Frisland cycle. Unless I write more. I'm trying now to complete a half-written story that connects "Hollow Bones"/"Remembering to Fly" with "Great Skerry" (and also, in a background sort of way, to "Fox Point Dragon").

Phew. Sorry about all those titles all at once.

In non-Cobbleshore news, but still in Frisland, I should soon have the second part of Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective written (under the pen-name Calliope Strange). The cover is nearly done, too, largely because it's the same as the cover of chapter one, but in a different colour with a different flying machine image. I'm lagging a bit on the printed versions, as they require an entirely different sort of formatting, and also because I want to include an image in each chapter that will be full-colour in the deluxe (letterpress-printed cover) version and greyscale in the cheapo (photocopied cover) version. And I have yet to draw them.

And in completely non-Frislandish news, I have a new story in my head called "A Pearl Beyond Price." It's a fairytale thing with sentient dolls (creepy), weird sex (really creepy), and possibly incest (really, really creepy). All the creepiness means it gets to be by Nic Silver, instead of by Niko Silvester, because despite the fact that Nic and Niko are both me, Niko writes nice things and Nic writes weird shit. Nic Silver also wrote Brother Thomas's Angel.

More and More

More finished, more half-finished.

I finished Tom Sawyer, which turned out to be much better in big chunks than in small doses, so two reading sessions later, it was over. I'm still not sure why I had trouble getting into it, but now I'm ready to tackle some more Twain. Well, once I've polished off some more of the half-read books on the list.

And speaking of half-read books, yes I found a couple more. One is The Great Airship by Lt. Col. Brereton, a truly abysmal boy's adventure novel from sometime between the wars (I suspect--there's no date on it). It cost me all of a dollar in a tiny "bookshop" located in a garden shed in New Brunswick. I actually have quite a fascination for boy's (and girl's) adventure novels from around the turn of the century and just after. I have a small collection of them that feature airships and am always looking for more--but I think I'll make this a post all on its own. The book has a certain appeal, despite the terrible writing.

The other book is one I picked up on sale at the book fair when the Congress of Learned Societies was in St John's in . . . 1997, I think. It's called Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, edited by Jane H.M. Taylor and Lesley Smith. It's a proceedings from a 1993 conference, published with additional essays in 1996. Very scholarly, which explains why I didn't get very far before setting it aside--I was researching and writing my Master's thesis at the time. I picked it up again last night and decided to start over at the beginning since I didn't remember the two essays I had already read very well. Really interesting stuff, and so far quite readable.

It reminds me, for some reason, of an ex-boyfriend. I had seen a book on Celtic archaeology at the bookstore where he worked one day a week--it didn't have a price, so I asked him to check next time he worked. As I recall, my birthday was coming up, and I hinted that it might make a nice gift, if it wasn't too expensive (though I also suggested that it probably was too expensive). I have a small collection of Celtic archaeology books, and this one was a thick anthology of essays by different scholars. So he reports back a while later and it was pricey, as I had suspected. "You wouldn't want it anyway," he said. "It was really technical and full of charts and diagrams."

Erm. First clue this was not the man of my dreams? (Actually first clue was probably that he was a Christian Scientist, but I did try to be open-minded.) I guess he never noticed that I actually sometimes read scholarly books for fun. And maybe he forgot that my BA is in archaeology. One lesson I learned: it's a bad idea to go out with a man who feels threatened by your intelligence (assuming he finally figures out that you have it).

Slippery Dog

I just got a spam mail with the subject "Dalmation lubrication." It had an attachment. I did not open it.

So much wrongness

Add "guys who list anal sex in their interests wrong" to the list in the previous post. Shudder.

It's alive!

Yeah, so, not dead. At least not literally. I look a bit like a zombie:


But anyway. I seem to have survived the semester. I also seem to have grown a few muscles and lost some fat. Printmaking is hard work.

Speaking of which, here are some more work-in-progress photos of printing, this time relief printmaking.

Here is a reductive linocut all ready to print the final colour. There isn't much left of it now. Behind the block is a newsprint proof of the one colour all by itself.


If I back up a bit, you can see more of the area where I'm working.


And here's the block on the press, waiting for me to add paper:


And backing up a bit from the press . . .


The print, covered with a tympan and blanket, as it comes out the other side of the press. Unlike lithography or intaglio printing, relief printing requires very little pressure so it's really easy to crank the bed through the press.


Here's the print from the back. I've used a thin Japanese paper, so all the colours show through.


The finished print alongside the block I just printed from. This was the final run, of dark blue over the other colours.


And finally, the print itself. I've titled it Kitsune Kaze, which means "fox shadow" in Japanese (which I do not speak, but I know a few words).



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So, what else have I been doing . . .

I signed up for some stuff, like Facebook, which I tend to ignore until someone posts something on my page or sends me a message.

On a whim, when I was supposed to be writing a paper, I signed up on Plenty of Fish, which I am not going to link to here. Much to my surprise, I met a few interesting people (in real life, even!). One signed up on a dare, and another in a fit of madness. Or something. Even so, I have come to the conclusion that dating sites are strange and disturbing places. And while I am, at times, all for strange and disturbing, dating sites are really the wrong sort of strange and disturbing. Very, very wrong. Like old men with big mustaches and no beards who like country music wrong. Like men from Europe who proclaim you drive them crazy in obviously not first-language English wrong (not that not having English as a first language is itself wrong, that's silly). Even guys who, when you tell them that colour, size and shape are not important, tell you to spare them your liberal nonsense and inform you that skin colour is how we know our own kind wrong. But I'm sure these things are great for some people. For me, I'll be giving my real email to a select few people (well, one of my real emails, anyway) and getting the hell out of there.

I suppose there is more, but I should sleep before I have to get up for work and I still have a few people (non dating site people) to email before that. Probably, due to the hols, it'll be less than a month before I update again. Until then, here is an amusing picture of Poe: