North of ACC.
I can’t decide which I like better. Do you have a preference?
Autumn Trees
North of ACC.
I can’t decide which I like better. Do you have a preference?
Blog
On Reflection: Oct. 1st
I went for a bike ride yesterday, and there was no wind to speak of. The river was very calm.
Star Trails, late September
I was hoping for aurora, but it wasn’t there. But the stars keep moving, and so I present these two nights’ trails.
eppur si muove
Corn & Sunset
Some corn at the edge of town, shot right around golden hour.
The photo above is, in fact, a composite of three photos, a handheld HDR composition. The three photos are below.
Middle exposure 
Dark exposure 
Bright exposure
And then, a sunset.
Review: Velvet Was the Night
A young woman has vanished. Her neighbour Maite is looking for her because she’s not willing to feed her cat forever. A possibly CIA-funded gangster, El Elvis, is looking for her too, for somewhat darker reasons.
Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a mystery novel, a slow-burn noir set in Mexico City in the 1970s. It’s funny, tragic, startling, and violent. It’s full of comics and Elvis and unrest. It’s terrifying at times, sad at other times, and full of characters you root for and against, even if you’re not really sure you’d want to meet them.
I thought it was great, and I’m looking forward to reading more from this author.
Buy a copy: McNally-Robinson | Bookshop | Amazon, if you must
September Bike Ride
It’s been a while since I hopped on the bike and rode 20ish km, so today—since it was gorgeous out and all the gravel I’ve got is already in place and tamped—I did just that.
Continue reading “September Bike Ride”Writing Retreat 2021: The week in review
Last week I was at a rented cabin up at Minnedosa, writin’ words and takin’ photos. I had a bunch of goals for the week, but how’d I do?
Continue reading “Writing Retreat 2021: The week in review”Writing Retreat 2021, day 6
On Friday, I:
- Continued outlining “Praise The Torch”
- Did some update work on my grant application
- Read more Zero History—I think I’m just about halfway through now
- Went for a bike ride—not a long one, but I climbed a lot of hills and got a few photos
- Watched a few more Firefly episodes
I decided that, even though the sky was clear, I’d stay in and not keep myself awake past 2 am again. I was in bed reading by 11 and asleep before midnight, and I think that was the right decision.
And now I’m going to start packing up the cabin. My time here draws short. As always, I’m feeling conflicting emotions: I’ll be happy to be home, but I’d love another week doing this kind of thing too.
Vacations: They’re Never Long Enough.
Writing Retreat 2021, day 5
Thursday, I:
- Worked some more on “The Slow Apocalypse” (minor edits in several sections, and a new chapter in the “What we will lose the fire” sequence, excerpted below)
- Also worked on the “Praise the Torch” outline—I feel like I’m getting close to endgame, but I keep going back and adding things in so they’ll pay off later
- Watched a truck try to maneuver a new cabin into the cabin area (eventually they did it, though they had to trim a couple evergreens back)
- Drove back out to Spruces for some more Milky Way photos (it was calmer, and I got to listen to the waves on the shore and the occasional loon)
Jane had fallen asleep. No, that was too gentle a term for it. Jane had collapsed into unconsciousness, and soft snores, well-earned, came from her bed. Night had fallen, outside, and Mímir paced slowly back and forth in front of the window, looking out onto a view of parked cars under a light dusting of snow, six stories below, the lot illuminated by great lights, bright white fringed in violet, on tall, thin metal poles. The boy slept against his shoulder, wrapped in a white-and-blue hospital sheet of napped cotton fleece.
Mímir wondered what his dreams might be, if they would even make sense to anyone not a newborn.
From “The Slow Apocalypse”
The two images above were taken with my 50mm lens, which results in a much tighter shot than the 11–14mm that I usually use for night photography. Both the images above are composites; the one with the trees is 2 shots merged into one (you can probably see the seam), and the other is a stack of 6 images, manually merged, to try to bring out the detail in a segment of the galaxy.
The image at the top is one of about 200, the only one where I caught a Perseid meteor in the frame. (I did see quite a few last night, about a dozen or so, including three very bright ones. I think the one in the photo is one of the earlier ones, and I remember thinking after it had burned up, I hope I got that on camera.)
Writing Retreat 2021, day 4
On Wednesday, I:
- Rewrote a scene in “The Slow Apocalypse”
- Got lunch to go from the local coffeeshop with my friend Tim, who’s on his way home from camping at Wasagaming
- Continued outlining for “Praise the Torch”
- Went for a bike ride (it was pretty windy, but at least it was at my back on the way back to the cabin)
- Drove to a side road off Mountain Road and watched for Perseids
I saw about six or eight meteors with the naked eye, and caught a few small ones and one longer one with my camera. I was on the side road in the dark for about an hour. Maybe I was too early for the 40–60/hour that the websites claimed you’d see on the peak night of the meteor shower.
