Writing Retreat 2019, Day 2

On Tues­day, I:

• wrote 2,000 more words in two shifts, morn­ing and evening;
• read about ⅓ of Drey­er’s Eng­lish, chortling all the while;
• went for a 3.5km kayak ride on the lake;
• did a quick 5km bike ride to the cof­fee shop and to Co-op for groceries;
• and went back out for some more astropho­tog­ra­phy, this time in the riv­er val­ley to the north.

Here’s a quick sam­ple of the writ­ing so far (still 1^st draft):

Your nose is bro­ken, she’d said. I reached up and touched it, gin­ger­ly, expect­ing pain. Instead it felt cold and numb. Touch­ing it felt like I was touch­ing some­one else’s nose. Like it was made of wax.

I felt a thin strip of met­al or met­al-like plas­tic that ran from between my eye­brows down the bridge of my nose to its tip. I tried to lift it off, to pry a nail under it, but couldn’t. It was like it was a part of me. Maybe it was a part of me now.

You’ve been con­cussed. That part I didn’t need to check to believe. I remem­bered the headache, the nau­sea that nev­er quite went away and nev­er quite resolved into actu­al vom­it­ing. When I lay down on the bed, the room seemed to shiv­er and spin, slow­ly, an orbit that I didn’t like.

From Trans­la­tions, 1^st draft

Pho­tos:

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• 

• 

• 

The moon rose and the fog rolled in as I was pack­ing up my gear, about 2 AM. I was impressed by how it lay low in the field behind the car, so I snapped a quick shot of that (it’s the last one in the gallery above).

Also, my intent was to do a short video of the galaxy mov­ing across the sky, but there was more traf­fic on the high­way than I’d expect­ed, and so about half the shots I took were blown out by high beams (the cam­era pulls in a lot of light to get an image of some­thing so faint; 45 sec­onds of head­lights (scat­tered in the fog that lay over the riv­er all night) at f/2.8 & 3200 ISO basi­cal­ly leaves me with a sol­id white image). I don’t think there are enough clean images for even a super-short video, but if I don’t go out tonight (there’s rain in the fore­cast), I might revis­it the pho­tos I got.

Or I might go to bed ear­ly. It was near­ly 3 AM when I went to bed last night.

Inter­est­ed in prints of my pho­tos? Let me know, and we can work some­thing out.