January 5, 2019 at 4:48 am (Artists and Writers, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: fantasy, Fridays, horror, novellas, work-in-progress
- They tested the salinity in the top layers of ocean water left behind by the ice melt. The data was extracted from brine droplets trapped in pockets of glacier ice. The average was 35 kilograms ppt: 35 kilogram parts per thousand. Suddenly, after a month, salinity in parts per thousand had dropped drastically, to just above 20 kilograms ppt.
Would you believe self wrote this?
Reading it over, now, it all sounds like gobbledygook.
She started this particular story in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland (All her best science fiction were written at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig). That was really bold, since she’s never been to either of the Poles, North or South.
In addition, she’s the furthest thing from a scientist you can imagine. Put numbers and other hard data in front of her, and her mind will cease to function. She’ll go into shock.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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December 27, 2018 at 5:13 am (Explorers, Links)
Tags: news
While Trump and Melania were off in Iraq doing God-knows-what, an American named Colin O’Brady became the first man to cross Antarctica un-aided.
In 54 days of enduring bone-chilling temperatures, he made a journey of 932 miles (1,500 kilometers), while pulling a sled. He told the Associated Press: “Can you see it in my face? I’ve suffered . . . ”
He and Englishman Louis Rudd were racing each other for the record.
In 2016, English adventurer Henry Worsley died while trying to make the first such attempt.
Here’s a link to an article about his trek on the National Geographic website.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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November 28, 2018 at 9:19 am (destinations, Explorers, Links, Places, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: Cambridge, Cee Neuner, England, London
It seems apt, the theme of this week’s Fun Foto Challenge from Cee Neuner: COLD.
Self is in northern England. In Durham. It took self three hours by train from London, via Peterborough.
Her train pulled into Durham just after dark. She saw a large cathedral. She realized this must be her stop.
Since she hasn’t begun exploration of Durham yet (it’s a very bleak morning), the pictures she’s posting are from her previous stop, Cambridge.
Cambridge felt arctic.
This was Bridge Street when self left St. John’s Chapel after the Advent Choral Service:
Bridge Street, Cambridge: Sunday, 25 November 2018
And note the bundled up tour guide. Self was on a Cambridge Highlights Walking Tour. We stopped in front of the most fabulous clock.
Corpus Clock, Cambridge: Friday, 23 November 2018
And, finally, Blackfriars Station in London. The previous night, self stayed in a hotel on Fleet Street so she could attend the Journalists’ Service at St. Bride’s.
Blackfriars Train Station, London: Thanksgiving, 22 November 2018
Thanks as usual to Cee Neuner for the fabulous prompt.
Stay tuned.
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October 23, 2018 at 12:33 pm (Books, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Philippine History, Places, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, historical fiction, Ireland, The Philippines, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, work-in-progress, writing process
Self has cut so much from her novel-in-progress, Blue Water, Distant Shores, it’s now just 314 pages.
The parts that stay, that made it through three drafts, will be part of the end manuscript now. For sure.
Such as this passage:
The new Gubernador-General announced his intention to establish a system of garrisons ringing the southern Philippine kingdoms of Maranao and Sulu, to contain the Moslem threat. Everyone knew this was idle talk. Spain could not send more soldiers. As the situation stood, she could barely hang on to her prize, the Most Holy City of Manila.
Matias’s watchtower preceded the Church. The site he found was a narrow spit of land that followed the Bago River from its mouth to the Guimaras Strait, which united the Visayan and Sulu Sea.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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October 20, 2018 at 9:37 am (Books, Explorers, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Traveling)
Tags: India, Saturday, travel books
Varanasi at the end of the rainy season, 28 September 1973:
Brown eyes observe us as we pass. Confronted by the pain of Asia, one cannot look and cannot turn away. In India, human misery seems so pervasive that one takes in only stray details; a warped leg or a dead eye, a sick pariah dog eating withered grass, an ancient woman lifting her sari to move her shrunken bowels by the road. Yet in Varanasi there is hope of life that has been abandoned in such cities as Calcutta, which seems resigned to the dead and dying in its gutters. Shiva dances in the spicy foods, in the exhilarated bells of the swarming bicycles, the angry bus horns, the chatter of the temple monkeys, the vermilion tikka dot on the women’s foreheads, even in the scent of charred human flesh that pervades the ghats. The people smile — that is the greatest miracle of all.
Waiting for alms just outside the entrance of the Shiva Temple
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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October 14, 2018 at 12:02 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Places, Sundays, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: England, flash fiction, history, inspiration, Literary Magazines, memories, mysteries, short story, Stonehenge, Wigleaf
In 2014, self went to see Stonehenge.
She signed up for a small-group tour, the only one allowed on the site towards sunset. All the big tour buses had left. The guide, a retired military officer, led the group across a sheep meadow.
This is unquestionably the best approach. It allows the view to unfold gradually. You are reminded that this was how people, in time immemorial, must have approached the monument: in procession. Self could hardly contain her excitement at her first glimpse of the pillars of stone.
The mystery of the site has stayed with her. The fact that no human habitations were ever built around it. What was it used for?
From this vantage point, we could clearly see the jagged outline of the stones, just above the rise.
Well before she saw Stonehenge, she’d written about it in a piece called Stonehenge/Pacifica, published in Wigleaf, 2012.
It was a dream I had, some restless night. One of those weeks or months or years when we were worried about money.
But when were we ever not worried?
First there was the mortgage, and then the two.
And then your mother got sick, and your father died.
And my mother I think developed Alzheimer’s, but we never mentioned it.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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October 12, 2018 at 8:28 am (Explorers, Filipino Writers, Surprises, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, fantasy, Fridays, Ireland, short story, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, work-in-progress
Self’s story is set in some unknown century. The explorer who is the MC is something like Captain Cook (Oceania! What a fantastic exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts!):
- From the lack of authentic records, ascending into remote antiquity, the origin of most very ancient cities is involved in obscurity. Who would have supposed that a very old civilization existed on the ocean floor, one that had escaped the notice of man for centuries, equaling — nay, in some cases exceeding — the grandeur of ancient Rome.
In self’s story, the Residents of the Deep accomplish all their daily tasks in one-quarter time. That is, they appear human, but their behavior is just a little “off.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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October 11, 2018 at 12:52 pm (Explorers, Filipino Writers, plans, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, Bellingham Review, fantasy, inspiration, interviews, Ireland, short story, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, work-in-progress, writing process
Map of Oceania
Self began this story on her very first visit to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig and has added to it, bit by bit, over the years. She was in Unit # 4 and there was an old maritime book in one of the cupboards.
She doesn’t worry about finishing this story. It will always be “in progress” — it will always exist in middle time, like her visits to this part of Ireland and beautiful Annaghmakerrig.
Here are the opening sentences:
There is something singularly impressive and affecting to the imagination when, in a perfectly calm tropical sea, under a vertical sun, one is able to look down through a depth of thousands of fathoms of clear water and see on the ocean bottom glimpses of the City and all its strange and wonderful objects. The discovery of a populous City existing under fathoms of ocean is an occurrence with no precedent in the annals of exploration, one that overshadows even the discovery of the Americas by Columbus.
Self’s stories are always birthed this way: with the opening sentences. No matter how many drafts her stories go through, the opening sentences never change. If the sentence is strong, it is like a fine, big engine that can power her through — even 20 or 25 pages later — all the way to the end. See the interview she gave to Bellingham Review, the Contributor Spotlight that accompanied their publication of self’s story, Ice. (The first four or five paragraphs of Ice were unchanged from first draft)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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September 24, 2018 at 5:29 pm (Artists and Writers, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Places, Surprises, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Dharamsala, India, Mondays, short story, work-in-progress
The music comes on and she recognizes Edith Piaf. Of all things to play! Is it because she is sitting by herself in this restaurant and someone feels compelled to provide her with some distraction, some light background tune, or because they do not want her to be lonely (she is, though: loneliness is always seeping out of her skin), or perhaps they worry she is getting bored, sitting by herself at a small table, eating a vegetable chapati and sipping sweetened Masala tea at 9 in the morning when it is 32 degrees Fahrenheit outside?
En route to Dharamsala, self stopped by a small temple. She dredged up the courage to ring the bell, too (though she couldn’t ask anyone to take her picture while doing it)
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September 22, 2018 at 7:18 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Explorers, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: novel, reading lists, Saturday
Self finished reading The Door in the wee hours. Now she’s back to reading American novelists.
From the foreword of the Penguin Books Edition of My Antonia:
- In April 1883, when she was nine years old, Willa Cather was uprooted from everything she knew and loved at her birthplace near Winchester, Virginia, and taken to the prairies near the embryonic town of Red Cloud, Nebraska. The familiar green, closed-in Virginia countryside was replaced by a seemingly endless undulating landscape of shaggy red grass, “not a country at all,” says Jim Burden in My Antonia (1918), “but the material out of which countries are made.”
Beginning:
Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat . . . While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-colored and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything.
Great.
Stay tuned.
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