Category Archives: Photography

Images from my Flickr photostream.

Bits and pieces…

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Bits and pieces…

Public Service Announcement I:: The writing workshop known as Reconstruction still has spaces available. Oz Drummond has a blog post with all the info here. The short version: Your stuff could get critiqued by Jack McDevitt, Mark Van Name, Steve Miller, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lawrence Schoen, Matthew Rotundo, Tom Doyle or Carl Frederick.

PSA II: Buy art to help Terri Windling: Terri Windling has reduced prices on her art so she can raise money to help with a family member’s medical expenses. Here’s info on the Big Painting Sale, and here’s her Etsy store. Buy now, buy hard, buy often.

Gone to the Dogs: I mentioned the pit bull who lives across the road in a passing way some time ago, generating much chatter. He tends to get tied up out on the porch of his home, and sings his woe for hours, usually in the midafternoon. Anyway, I caught him in mid-song a few weeks ago.

Woodland Drive Dog

It took me a few days to identify the source of his peculiar strangled yowling, and I confess my initial reaction was relief that it a) wasn’t a baby and b) he didn’t live in the apartment directly below me. So–a few of you suggested I call someone, but I’m letting it sit. In the past I’ve called the SPCA about dogs who were in similar-but-vastly-worse conditions, only to end up sucked into a bureaucratic tangle that got the dog (or in one case the captured baby crow and its aggressive, freaked out parents) a frustrating-for-me pile of less than nothing. One of my cafe buds is their next door neighbor; I’ll ask him if he knows Pitty’s peeps.

In the meantime, he’s out there with a comfy blanket to sit on and a decent amount of slack in his leash, he’s not frying in inescapable direct sunlight, and he has water. There’s only been one occasion where he’s been out there longer than a couple hours in the afternoon. They didn’t have him out there this weekend, when it was ninety degrees out.

Jay Lake on the virtue of slowness in writing: Fast writing is not bad writing. But it’s not the best writing.

TOR.com’s Urban Fantasy Spotlight continues: “Olga,” by C.T. Adams is a crackin’ good ecofantasy, and there’s still time to win a bunch of very cool books if you comment within the contest thread by noon today!

Out chasing birds again…

By | |
2 Comments

Barb and I hit Burnaby Lake on Friday in pursuit of birds and had a five mile ramble along the northern path to Piper Spit and, from there, to the Cariboo dam. It was middling warm and cloudy. Glorious cartoony clouds: they made the light for bird chasing a little challenging, at times, but check this out:

DSCN3755

Light or no light, we had some good birder sightings: a downy woodpecker, cedar waxwings, this little common yellowthroat, singing his guts out in the not-actually-this-lightless gloom:
RSCN3812

I think my best score photographically, was a… song sparrow? Maybe a Lincoln’s sparrow? Anyway, he’s got bling. I know Wildlife Rescue has their shelter on the edge of the park; I shall have to ask Fearless if they tag all their rescuees before releasing them. It seems as though a lot of the animals at the lake have bracelets.

RSCN3827

Locus Awards 2010

By | | , , , ,
3 Comments

Last Saturday kelly-yoyoKelly and I climbed out of bed at the appalling-to-most hour of five in the morning and vroomed via rental car to Seattle for the Locus Awards. It was a leisurely drive; we stopped at the Rustic Cafe in Fairhaven because I remembered they had tasty, small biscotti. Wireless, too! Alas, the coffee was only so-so. We hit a Fred Meyer for Luna Bars and still reached the hotel, a Marriott of some order or another, in time for the first panel at ten.

This was my first Locus Awards, and I gather they used to be quite small affairs, but what they have evolved into lately is a delightfully intimate little one-day con. The vibe was World Fantasy-esque, very pleasant and low key, with lots of shop talk. The first panel was about research and had Connie Willis, Walter John Williams, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nancy Kress on it; the second was called “Ten Mistakes a Writer Should Not Make” and featured editors Gardner Dozois, Eileen Gunn, Beth Meacham and Jeremy Lassen. Both were moderated by Gary K. Wolfe, who reviews for the mag (as I myself did at one time, actually. It seems like a long time ago, now.)

Ursula K. Le Guin, pondering research:
Locus Awards 2010

There was an autograph session and then the awards banquet itself. I always enjoy it when Connie Willis hosts, and she was hilarious as usual… except, of course, when talking about Charles Brown being gone. This was the first awards ceremony since he’s died; it hadn’t sunk in, really. Ouch.

I saw so many people. Some I’ve known for years, some I know slightly (and now know better) and, of course, people I consider friends whom I’ve only ever met online. I tried to tell calendula-witch I was sure we’d hung out, only to realize I had seen her pic, many times, on Jay’s blog. I got to have a nice long convo with Michael Bishop, who reprinted my “Cooking Creole” last year in Passing for Human; we’d met before, but only glancingly. I hereby nominate him for the Best Smile in the History of Ever Award:

Locus Awards 2010

There was some precious stolen time with Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge, and a few minutes with Eileen Gunn. I got to tell Nancy Kress, who I’ve long admired, what it’s like to teach “To Cuddle Amy” in my UCLA class “Creating Universes, Building Worlds.”

Two big highlights were meeting some of the folks from this year’s Clarion West class, who were in attendance after a week with Michael. They’re keen, bright-eyed, engaged, visibly bonded and entirely adorable! Second, kelly-yoyoKelly and I lured Maureen McHugh out to a slow, pleasant and thoroughly delicious meal at Serafina.

Maureen is close to Snuffy. I’ve read her blog, off and on, for years. I reviewed Mission Child for SciFi, back when it first came out in hardcover, and we’ve Tweeted at each other once or twice. When we invited her out my thoughts, essentially, were: Look! Fellow writer! Who knows Snuffy and seems really nice! And then we were sitting by Lake Union, taking in the sun and the boats while waiting for the restaurant to open, and it sank in: by the holy Bleeding Elvis, I am out for dinner with the author of China Mountain Zhang! I’m so a fan of hers! Even though I was too tired and hungry to make sense of the Serafina menu, or to count to four on my fingers, I knew bits of trivia about her life and family, and babbled worshipfully about the dirt on the Mission Child planet. (No, seriously. Extremely cool dirt.) And she didn’t even run screaming into the day yelling, “Eeek, stalker!”

We get to hang with our gods in this subculture; it’s so gratifying.

Proof:
Maureen Alyx Kelly at Serafina in Seattle

False Creek shots (Locus Awards write-up to come…)

By | |
Comments Off on False Creek shots (Locus Awards write-up to come…)

I want to write a witty, erudite and thoroughly name-droppy post about my trip to the LOCUS Awards in Seattle yesterday, but I’m too travel-zoned to manage it right now. It was a lovely occasion and I do look forward to telling you all about it. In the meantime, here are two shots from the walk home today–K and I dropped off the rental car, had lunch, and then she went in to work and I had a much-needed stride along the Seawall.

Harbor seal

With the naked eye, I couldn’t make out whether this was a seal or an otter, but as you can see it’s the former.

This, meanwhile, may be my best heron shot ever:
Great Blue Heron

Though this birds-eye-view angle of him is pretty cool too, if I do say so:
Great Blue Heron

Importing, exporting

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Importing, exporting

This afternoon went to pre-trip correspondence: lots of e-mails saying, “I’ll get to that on Monday, okay?” and a few more asking “Could you possibly get this back to me by Monday?” I did substantial and quite satisfying work on a short article; I know I’ve been a tease lately, but I do hope to have details on that for you soon.

I managed to get JoCo looks Back back onto the pod, a pre-Road Trip necessity. I picked up a little U.S. cash, and said a final goodbye to the folks at my Friday mentoring gig. One of them got me a begonia, which I’ve planted out in my deck garden. I got to hug her and my other favorite person there. I’ll miss some of the people, but I won’t regret having to go to Burnaby every Friday; it was fun for a good long while, but except for cheap cereal, the Metrotown area has nothing I want.

Sixty pages into the Nelson/Trafalgar book, I can report that it’s well-written and interesting, and I plan to haul myself off to the couch to read it very soon indeed.

I’m also continuing to experiment with WordPress; this post was written Friday night, but is supposed to go live Saturday morning. (Edited to Add: did not work–their clock and mine disagree.) As I’ve continued to play, I’ve found a fair number of superbly handy widgets, but so far I haven’t been happy with any of the Flickr apps. There’s none of them, so far, that beats what Flickr will do itself. For example, here’s a slideshow, all handily packaged, which includes the white-crowned sparrow I shot last Wednesday.