birthday

Today is my birthday.

I have been working on a birthday present for myself, and for sharing. It officially starts on Friday, but it is being unwrapped today to be more festive.

flax-golden tales is an experiment in words and pictures.

For awhile now, the idea of doing short stories based on images has been percolating around in my brain. Something akin to Chris Van Allsburg’s brilliant The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, only with slightly longer tales.

But I didn’t know what kind of images I wanted to use.

And then I was looking through my friend Carey’s photographs, and something clicked. She finds marvelous things with her camera, capturing images brimming with story.

Carey granted me permission to use her photos, so I started writing these tiny stories and stole an appropriate title from a Shel Silverstein poem I have always loved.

And thus, flax-golden tales is born. Please wish it (and me!) many happy returns.

Each Friday, starting on July 10th, I will post a photograph of Carey’s with an accompanying ten-sentence story.

Stories will be posted here on the blog, collected on their own page, here, and cross-posted to the flaxgolden community on dreamwidth. (Thanks to someone absolutely lovely, there is now an LJ-feed over here.)

I’ve had a lot of fun planning this, and I hope it will continue to be a lot of fun both to write & read as it goes along. Comments, questions, concerns & birthday wishes welcome!

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
— Invitation, by Shel Silverstein

curiouser and curiouser

First blog posts are always difficult. This one is especially problematic since I’m not entirely sure what I want this blog to be just yet. At least it looks pretty.

I have been blogging in various forms for several years, though this is my first WordPress endeavor and I am vaguely overwhelmed with shininess and buttons. I’ll get the hang of it eventually.

And because I have a penchant for significant dates, this blog has the same birthday as I do. Only it is zero years old and I’m thirty. I suppose, if nothing else, this is a new blog for a new-to-me decade of age. I am fond of the number three, and it has been a birthday of books and cupcakes and pomegranate martinis, so that bodes well.

Hopefully this blog will figure out what it wants to be somewhere along the way. Though there will undoubtedly be pictures of kittens.