March 31, 2018 at 8:57 pm (Flowers, Holidays, Links, Surprises)
Tags: California, Cee Neuner, flower photography, Garden, Redwood City, Saturday, websites
More irises began blooming in the side yard today:
Blooming Today: Saturday, 31 March 2018
Which photo do you prefer, the blurry or the sharp?
For more gorgeous flowers, here’s a link to Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
March 31, 2018 at 2:15 pm (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Holidays, Places, plans, postaday, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Albion, California, fantasy, novellas, postaday, postaweek, Saturday, science fiction, Wordpress, work-in-progress
(Self hopes this story, which she started writing last year at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, can go into her newest collection)
This has always been, from the very first draft, the opening paragraph:
Sunrise, Albion, California: January 2017
The report came from somewhere on the Bering Sea. The pair had left Yellowknife the previous morning. The woman, it appeared, was headed for Baranof, the man for Kuiu. Both were on foot.
The story was born New Year’s Day 2017, in Albion, California.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
March 31, 2018 at 4:39 am (Flowers, Links, Surprises)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Fridays, Garden, Redwood City
It has been much too hectic a year, even though it’s only March.
Today self drove home to Redwood City from Mendocino and it took her five hours.
She was feeling very tetchy — until she stepped into her backyard and saw that a few iris had started blooming.
There is no pattern to self’s gardening. She just plants bulbs here and there, wherever she feels like it.
Today, she saw that half a dozen spectacular (huge) iris are just unfurling by her kitchen door. In the side yard (where she took this picture), these three blooming iris are the first, but there’s almost a dozen more getting ready, close by.
Cee Neuner’s photography blog is an endless source of inspiration. Not only does she have the Fun Foto Challenge, she also has “Flower of the Day”
She tried getting close-ups of the irises, but the background was off.
Side Yard, Friday, 30 March 2018
Here are the side yard irises from another angle, farther away.
The backyard looks a little wild, but she likes it that way. She planted so many different things, without much forethought, just squeezing everything together. There’s actually a mature rose bush tucked right in the middle of those big bushes, but you can’t see it because it hasn’t started blooming yet.
HAPPY EASTER, ALL!
Stay tuned.
March 29, 2018 at 4:03 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Explorers, Lists, Women Writers)
Tags: fantasy, novel, reading lists, YA
Currently reading: The Book of Dust, Vol. One: La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman, self’s first Pullman novel EVER.
Next: Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass
And then a selection of classics:
Self never read Treasure Island, or Wide Sargasso Sea.
Utopia was assigned reading in self’s high school English class (in Manila), but only a very short portion.
It will be interesting to re-read The Old Man and the Sea and Lord of the Flies.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
March 29, 2018 at 3:45 am (Links, Lists, Places, postaday, Recommended)
Tags: artists residency, Mendocino, photography, postaday, postaweek, websites, Wordpress
Here’s sunset at the end of Little Lake Street, Mendocino:
Little Lake Street, Mendocino, February 2018
Every day she gets to watch the drama unfold and begin anew.
Other Rise/Sets of note:
Stay tuned.
March 28, 2018 at 11:45 pm (Books, Conversations, Fan Fiction, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: fantasy, Game of Thrones, Gendrya, happiness, indulgences, Mendocino, novel, reading lists
Since self began writing Gendrya, she’s been learning just how different the Game of Thrones fandom is from the Hunger Games fandom.
For one thing, in the Game of Thrones fandom, minutiae matters to an obsessive degree.
Self learned today (from reading GoT fan fiction) that the language the White Walkers speak is called ‘Skroth.’ It supposedly “sounds like the cracking of ice.”
So if you’re planning to write Night King dialogue (or inner monologue, or whatever) you’d better know your Skroth. Just saying.
To help give her Gendrya more texture, self has been reading the books. There was one in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and another from a friend’s son’s bedroom. The one she has with her in Mendocino is the one that belonged to the son of her friend. And it’s A Clash of Kings. Which is thrilling as all get-out (She’s also reading Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, Vol. One: La Belle Sauvage, and that too is pretty exciting, so she’s in the equivalent of Reading Heaven right now)
Conversation between Sansa and Tyrion:
“My guest.” He was wearing his chain of office, a necklace of linked golden hands. “I thought we might talk.”
“As my lord commands.” Sansa found it hard not to stare; his face was so ugly it held a queer fascination for her.
“The food and garments are to your satisfaction?” he asked. “If there is anything else you need, you have only to ask.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
March 28, 2018 at 2:30 pm (Conversations)
Tags: essay, politics, Protests, The New Yorker
Here is one explanation, which self found in a back issue of The New Yorker.
It was the lead essay in Talk of the Town: The New Yorker, 28 August 2017
“The Divider”
. . . speeding toward yet another airport last November (2016), Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. “We’ve seen this coming,” he said. “Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years . . . “
For half a century, in fact, the leaders of the GOP have fanned the lingering embers of racial resentment in the United States. Through shrewd political calculation and rhetoric, from Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the latest charges of voter fraud in majority African-American districts, doing so has paid off at the ballot box.
And make no mistake, Trump is planning to do it again in 2020 — he’s planning to call upon that mass base of Americans who turned Charlottesville, Virginia into such a spectacle. And the only ones, it seems, who can stop him are . . . Parkland Survivors.
As I’ve told anyone who will listen: The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High are people who had eight years with Obama. They know what a good president is. Thank God.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
March 28, 2018 at 1:54 pm (Artists and Writers, Places)
Tags: art, artists residency, Cee Neuner, Mendocino
Self took these pictures from around the Mendocino Art Center, where she’s currently a writer-in-residence. She was inspired by Cee Neuner’s Fun Foto Challenge: ALONE. She focused on the art that was either standing alone or, like the giant tomato, the only bright thing.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
March 27, 2018 at 8:15 pm (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Links)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Mendocino
This oven mitt in the kitchen of my apartment in the Mendocino Art Center looks LONELY!
Thank you to Cee Neuner for the wonderful prompt!
Stay tuned.
March 27, 2018 at 7:21 pm (Books, Conversations, Personal Bookshelf)
Tags: fantasy, Game of Thrones, novel
All hail, GRRM!
 | anthropologist on Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge… |
 | Cee Neuner on Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge… |
| anthropologist on Beginning IN THE LAKE OF THE W… |
 | Allan G. Smorra on Beginning IN THE LAKE OF THE W… |
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