So you filled your hands

...wow. Note to self: these are in the world. How cool is that?

I am taking a break from a serious apartment-scouring, which is revealing two things to me: one, I have an inane number of weird little things that don't really go anywhere, and two, I cultivate dust bunnies like nobody's business. I have to do this now, not only because the marvelous oliviacirce is coming to visit in a few days, but this is essentially my last chance to do a thorough clean before December, because God knows when I'll make myself do it during NaNo.

I'm really enjoying ramping up into this endeavor: I find I've been doing a lot of notebook scribbling, and while I'm aware that I'm pretty firm on the beginning of the story and most of the end (though not the very end), there's still this big blank spot in the middle labeled "QUEST" in my outline. I like to think that if I world-build well enough, this will work itself out. (Or I can just fill it all in later: after all, I seriously doubt I'll have a satisfactory middle section on the first draft, when I want to write what I know.) Fingers crossed either way. I see this project as much bigger than 50,000 words.

Every so often, I'll be messing around and realize something. The ghosts, for instance, aren't traditional looks like the person in life but translucent. They're masked; they're disguised; they've been made into symbols. I got this because of happening on Betsy Walton's work on Etsy. Her prints look like something from a mindmeld between '50s and '60s surrealist animation (you know, like the hyper-abstract backgrounds from shorts about spacemen or Precambrian science) and William Blake.

( See what I mean? )

Little animate dogs made of wax drippings and leftover candles

(Yes, I'm creeped out too.)

He's not a prophet. Nobody told him a thing he didn't see for himself. War's over and the whole United States is all bombed out. Cities are pulsing, trains are running, women are working, but all those years this country poured and pushed and flooded into one thing and now it's not needed anymore, and the ones who are left don't know what to do yet. He sees it — he sees what came back from what was shipped overseas. Walking craters in uniforms and A-line dresses, that's what we've got. They're gonna want peace and quiet, but this country is due for some yelling time. Something's coming, something that knows this place can do big.

He has seen the future and he will be waiting for it with drinks.

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.

Note to self. And more, with better picture and actual information!