Category Archives: Photography

Images from my Flickr photostream.

Early bird gets the raptor

By | |
Comments Off on Early bird gets the raptor

We have shifted around the Dua schedule a bit, and so I was on my way home early from a grocery run today. It is cold but bright, and supposedly due to snow tomorrow, and I was only too happy to let a cloud of upset crows lead me down Sixth. At first I couldn’t see the source of their distress, so I merely shot video of the cloud of them freaking out. (It’s not great visually, but the cawing is impressive. I’ll see if I can post it at some point.) Then I got this, and considered myself extremely lucky.

Hawk

The show was by no means over, though, because what happened next was this:

Hawk

It sat there, maybe twenty feet away, in a big oak in the schoolyard on Woodland and the Grandview Highway. The crows were high up, cawing and grieving, and I and the schoolkids and many random passersby just drank it in. Is it a sharp-shinned hawk, or a Cooper’s? I cannot tell.

There will be more birdage to come, for it has been feathered presents for Alyx week or two. I got a somewhat less blurry shot of a kingfisher in Yaletown, a varied thrush, a decent hummingbird while in Portland, and yesterday I found Stellar’s Jay heaven on 18th and Fleming.

Being clubbed

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Being clubbed

My very first story sale was to an Alberta literary magazine in 1989. I have no idea if anyone read that story, which was called “Quiet Father” and which earned me ten bucks, and I probably never will.

By 1995, when I went to Clarion West, I’d sold some SF and mystery stories, and once in awhile I met up with people, usually other writers, who’d tell me they’d seen my stories, usually the ones I’d had printed in Crank! This was almost always an entry point into a conversation about their notorious “Kill YOur TV” rejection slip. It was still a face-to-face or print on paper world, is my point–you had to be fairly conspicuous as an author to hear much from your readers. They either had to write to you the old way or make their way to a convention.

So I don’t know what the era of fan contact by snail mail was like. I do know that now it’s incredibly easy, as a reader, to be able to drop someone a line saying how much I like their work. I do this from time to time, usually when I’m very very enthused and excited, and could you please write another one now? Anyway, it is very nice to get feedback on one’s own stories and books.

You also find out about things like this: a couple of book clubs that have been looking at me lately: Torque Control’s Short Story Club read “The Cage,” a few weeks ago, and now editor Cleilie Rich has let me know I am to be Ms. August in the 2011 Women In Fantasy Book Club line-up. Indigo Springs will be in the company of Prospero Lost, by L. Jagi Lamplighter, War for the Oaks by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear‘s All the Windwracked Stars and seven other selections (number twelve is reader’s choice, and thus TBA.)

(If fantasy isn’t so much your thing, I should mention that there is also a Women in SF club, with an amazing reading list and Tiptree mid-month bonus stories, and the sign-up for that one is here.)

You can’t help but feel gratified and appreciative of attention like this, especially when you find yourself in such good literary company. Really, if you’re me, you want to rush over, saying “Hey! Can I do anything? Bake cookies, answer questions, change your oil?”

And that’s where the double-edged sword of “It’s so easy to just drop someone a line” comes in. Because I can’t help thinking it might be a little weird if we authors descended on the club like a bunch of bright eyed and eager birds, waiting to gulp up their every thought on our respective masterpieces.
DSCN2958

And also, possibly, because I don’t know how to change someone’s oil.

Is there etiquette for something like that? Anyone know?

Feathered fruit of the voyage

By | |
2 Comments

We went to Airdrie last weekend to spend Halloween with family. It was a lovely trip, and very relaxing. We put in a few hours of wandering in malls, searching for hard-to-find garments, rewatched Iron Man II, and talked, talked, talked some more. I spent a lot of time reading All Clear, by Connie Willis, on my iTouch. My in-laws are good cooks, trick or treating with the Niecelet was great fun and even the weather was terrific.

The part of the city I was visiting is easy to dismiss as a featureless suburban wasteland, full of cookie-cutter houses, but it’s under construction, which means it still has vast fields of prairie here and there, waiting to be dug up, and the development itself has some relatively big green spaces. So I made it out once with the camera, hoping to catch a jackrabbit and a magpie.

Magpie

The rabbit did not pan out, as it happens, but in addition to this moody blur of a ubiquitous Alberta bird, I did see an astounding number of grasshoppers sunning themselves on a black tarp on the way to the grocery. I imagine the black fabric was just a tad warmer than the grass itself.

Fall, interrupted

By | | ,
Comments Off on Fall, interrupted

I have been trying to make an illusion like this one for at least three years, ever since the first time I found a fallen leaf dangling from a near invisible cobweb, arrested in mid-air.

DSCN5672

I’ve stopped for web-tangled leaves only to have them disappear into the visual noise of whatever is behind them, had them hang too limp and still to convey the pull of gravity, had them swing too wildly in the wind to allow me to focus.

A few have been too tattered and scabrous to satisfy my sense of pretty. But now, with this, I’m pleased. I will keep chasing tethered autumn leaves, but this gives me a worthwhile image to improve upon.