So you filled your hands

Another face for the scrapbook, this time from an Etsy seller: ( What a neat way to do eyebrows. )

Also, if you're on the Falling Woman filter and missed it, more went up recently, hopefully with more to follow soon! The move is this weekend, and internet service won't start until Monday, so fingers crossed something can be accomplished in the near future.

Unbelievable landscapes — totally unreal and just real enough.

Last night I picked up an old copy of The Mystery Writer's Handbook that my mom gave me the last time I was home. I think a lot of my sensibilities about writing come from mysteries, even though I don't particularly seek them out. My mom does, though, and would always play them whenever she was doing something that required a backdrop: chores, walks, car trips, commuting. We also were regular viewers of Mystery! on PBS. At a young age I was a particular devotee of Hercule Poirot, Brother Cadfael, Hettie Wainthropp and Rumpole of the Bailey. Mysteries were a constant presence growing up, and I always loved the suspense and the occasional terror, often mixed in with fantastic humor and great characters. Even though I don't seek out the genre, I also think it's kind of a perfect genre, and as this book points out, there's a strong reliance on form that really serves the stories well.

Anyway, Mom gave me the book because she thought I might find it useful, and I think I really will, given the quick flip-through I gave it before bed. I fell asleep thinking about how I should finish The Falling Woman (a constant theme here, I know) and let myself move on to other things. Setting up a routine is really the trick, from what I can see, and NaNo did that so effectively by creating the panic of meeting your wordcount every day. I have today off work, and maybe now I have a plan for what to do when I'm not clearing out my apartment in advance of the Imminent Move (which sounds like a great title for something, now that I think of it).

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.)