So you filled your hands

From here: I am deeply taken with this woman's face.

( Love is a catalogue of deadly sins )

This is absolutely incredible, and it manages to look unreal in the same way the 300,000 starlings do. It's like watching a science documentary, in a way, but those are human bodies. lindensphinx once made a comment about seeing -- the Joffrey Ballet, possibly? -- and remarking that they had turned their bodies into art. This feels like that.



Via Ann Leary

Someone went to Hecatia and took pictures.

Also, not Midwestern mythic, but post-apocalyptic Americana all the same.

I found some original fiction I wrote once during a "sit down in a coffee shop with lindensphinx until something comes out" session. It's two years old, and most of it I'd discard now, but there's also this:

All the families in this town have photographs of their relatives from 1906. That year, a traveling man came through with a horse and wagon, and a set of lights and a camera. He lived in the wagon, and slept in attics and barns and bedrooms abandoned by dead relatives when he could. His darkroom was also in the wagon, all its chemicals and washes in scavenged metal jars. People wrote in their diaries of the vapors that clung to that man, even out here in the good fresh open air.

He vanished three towns over from here. Somebody found the wagon abandoned, intact, by the creek. All those jars were open and spilled out on the ground. They’ve said ever since that you can learn what happened to him if you can see the shapes of photographs dimly printed on the rocks.

vagabondsal sent me this fantastic video of the Noisettes covering a song by the Killers; they do it with strings and back-up singers, and it's marvelous. You know what else is cool about it?

Shingai Shoniwa, the singer, is totally the face I've been looking for for a main character of the novel which still needs a code name.

I recently discovered a trove of images I collected as visual references for an earlier incarnation of this novel, which needs a code name (I like your cunning plan, saramily). The world is strange and wonderful; I love this. I may end up posting an image every few days or something, once I figure out how I want to handle image hosting (or once Dreamwidth begins to offer it).

Query: have any of you ever tried the Snowflake Method? Has it worked for you? I like to think it's a good theory, and I'm a fan of fractals and parts-within-parts-within parts in general. Math may not be my strong suit, but I can admire the underlying principle at work. Personally I'm a fan of elaborate notebooks and intricate outlines with plenty of doodles and irregular use and non-use of lines, but I won't lie, I've always been secretly curious to try this. (I doubt I will, in the end: I understand that this is valuable especially for when you want to sell a story, to be able to sum it up in a fifteen-word sentence, but this may be in the same camp as trying to assign meaning to a story before it's written. We'll see.)