Happy Hallowe’en! Blessed Samhain! Merry NaNo Eve!
All that good autumnal stuff.
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tipping into autumn
We’ve had a very busy, very long weekend.
Thursday night we went to see Moby at the House of Blues. I’d never seen him in concert before but I listened to Play practically non-stop when it first came out and his new album, wait for me, is marvelous, so the boy & I decided it might be fun. It was phenomenal. Quite possibly the best concert ever and it just kept going and going. And Moby is seriously adorable. Go see him if you get a chance. Highly recommended. (And hopefully you won’t have people loudly discussing BC football standing behind you the way we did.)
Friday night we went to the boy’s cousin’s wedding, which was sweet and fun even though the cake was elusive. But for two nights in a row we didn’t get home until about 1:30am. So we’ve been pretty tired.
Rather than sitting around all day yesterday, I suggested we take advantage of the lovely weather and run around outdoors. Our original plan was to go apple picking, but that was apparently also the plan of every other person in New England yesterday, so instead we ended up wandering around Den Rock Park for a couple of hours.
It’s really lovely, and we had great light for it. There’s a beaver pond (we saw a goose, but no beavers) and a river and tall rocks and absurd amounts of acorns. We saw two little snakes and a lot of ferns and I took a bunch of photos. It was a relaxing way to spend the day (and so quiet! We only encountered a handful of other people walking around, and one very pretty dog) after all the raucous late nights.
And then we came home and made apple crisp. There are more photos on my Flickr photostream (of the park, not the crisp). Today is grey and rainy and not so photogenic. I am packing up my wine and cookies to take back with me to revisionland, where I will be pretty much full-time for the next two weeks.
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magic & pennies
I love how magical the internet is sometimes.
I met the artist known as Clovia over on the Absolute Write Forums. Then she found me over on Etsy, and she liked my art and I liked hers and we arranged a trade.
I traded her a print for these earrings, which are marvelous.
And I mentioned that I loved the Ganesha design in her galleries and she said she’d make me up a little ornamental piece with one of them as well.
I was expecting something very simple, so I kind of flailed around like a crazy person when I saw this.
Photos don’t do it justice, there are too many lovely shiny parts and the actual Ganesha design is beautiful and intricate. I have it hanging above my desk and I love it to bits.
Please go check out her Etsy store to see more of her gorgeous work. She does magical things with pennies. (Pennies!)
All spare change should aspire to such lovely destinies.
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nine nine nine
I spent a large portion of the weekend re-imagining Beauty & the Beast for my writing group. We have a Summer/Fall project of fairy tale rewrites and this was mine, I wanted to get it done before I get to full-time revisions.
My version has a vaguely steampunk castle with a mechanical garden. I do have a bit of a thing for settings.
It is supposed to be a short story. I finally forced myself to stop around 8k and it desperately wants to be at least twice that if not longer, and so far the feedback I’ve received on it agrees. So I will probably go back and expand it after my revisions are finished but before NaNoWriMo, if I have time in between.
Am wondering when I became the kind of occasional writer who is constantly writing. Somewhere in there I need to paint the kings for the tarot deck, too, and I have this shadowbox-esque thing on my worktable at the moment that needs many more layers of paint and buttons.
Maybe it’s just the uber-productiveness of autumn or some such, now that it’s arrived in all its crisp glory. I keep looking at it askance because it seems too early, even Hallowe’en last year was warmer than this. But I’m not complaining! I have tea! And tons of things to work on while wearing socks! Including knitting a fuzzy red scarf. And, of course, revision-o-rama.
I keep trying to come up with something to say about it being 09.09.09 today and all my brain can manage is “nines! lots!” so I think I will give it some more tea and get back to revising.
(P.S. Catching Fire was made of win and wonderful and I love Peeta and want him to bake me cookies and I cannot wait for book three. Except that I have to. Boo. Working on that patience-virtue thing.)
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minor things
I spent part of this morning changing the layout of the flax-golden tales page over on dreamwidth.org. They’ve added more layouts since I started posting over there and I think this is an improvement. It’s a bit crisper and I like the lighter background.
I have tomorrow’s tale all ready to post. I actually wrote it ages ago and had forgotten about it, and it kind of insisted on being posted this week.
I’m having kind of an off-kilter week. I blame the combination of the weather and Monday being crazy concerting day. Getting stuff done, but more in little bits and pieces than any major accomplishments.
I’ve had this window open for about an hour trying to think of something else to add. Clearly, there is nothing else and I should just go make myself a cup of tea.