Part-time prevaricator
I had dozed off on the couch, and woke up about 12:45am or so. I thought, I should go to bed.
Then, brushing my teeth, I noticed there was quite a moon. So I check the aurora data and decided, what the hey, I’ve got the week off, I can stay up late on a school night.
So I packed my gear and headed out for about half an hour, and these photos are the result.
Taken on my bike ride yesterday.
Nerdy details: This is a 22-image panorama, all 50mm, f/2.8, 1/4000s, stitched together with Hugin.
Last night I took a drive, and got some shots of a diffuse aurora borealis on a back road a few miles outside of town.
I shot for about ½ hour between 11 and 11:30 pm, and made a short timelapse video, too. Each second of video is about a minute in real-time.
And then, when I came back to town, I decided to get a few shots of the old Kullbergs warehouse demolition going on at 18th Street and Pacific Avenue. The photo below is an HDR merge of two photos, to try to balance the brightness of the exterior with the darkness of the interior.
Snow in April is the norm in Manitoba. So it goes.
The robins didn’t seem terribly impressed, and I sympathize.
The demolition of the Kullbergs warehouse at 18th St. and Pacific Ave. is really, really happening.
The weather’s supposed to turn wintry again for a few days, so I took advantage of today’s nice weather for a good long bike ride—27.8km, which took about 1¾ hour or so of cycling (I stopped to take photos and to chat with a friend, so I was gone from the house for 2½ hours).
I took my camera along, too, and snapped some photos.
The contrail photo above is actually a panorama of about six photos. Compare and contrast below with a single-frame version of the same image.
Out now on the finer Internets everywhere: my (very) short story “The Atlas”, which features an atlas, a bottle of absinthe, and a hunting knife, published in Volume 2 of Cloud Lake Literary.
Forthcoming in October 2021: Alternate Plains (available for pre-order now!), featuring my story “Summertime in the Void”, which is one answer to the question “What if the Singularity didn’t want you?” (Canny CanCon types might wonder if I lifted the title from an I Mother Earth song. The answer is “Absolutely.”)
(It’s been a long time since I had two publications in the same calendar year. I think the last time was ’04, when On Spec published “Resurrection Radio” and I won the Manitoba Short Fiction contest with “A Map to the End of the World”.)
To the eye it was a faint haze to the northern horizon.
Today is the release date for Cloud Lake Literary, Volume 2, which contains my very short story “The Atlas”, which features an atlas with at least one extra country, a bottle of absinthe, and a hunting knife.
I just checked my stats on The Submissions Grinder, and this one sold to the 18th market I submitted it to. 17 markets said, gently or bluntly, “Thanks but no” before this one found a home.
I guess the lesson is, Keep trying. Someone out there wants your story.
Writers: If you’re not using The Submissions Grinder, you owe it to yourself to at least look into it. It’s a market list for fiction and poetry, and it’s a submissions tracker, and it’s free. It’ll let you import your data from Duotrope (if you were using Duotrope before, it’s kind of like a less-polished Duotrope).
Cloud Lake Volume 2 is available for purchase from Cloud Lake’s site. For $10.00 $7.50 (Canadian), you get fiction, non-fiction, children’s stories, poetry, and art from 16 Canadian creative types.
Header image by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.
Hoss, hunkered down in our yard on a windy, drizzly spring evening.