Feathered fruit of the voyage

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

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.

Indigo Springs paperback copies have arrived!

I’m getting all my contributor’s copies (can you still call them that when you’re the sole contrib?) this week… the pretty pretty new version of my book arrived on Wednesday, and after I’d unpacked them in a fit of excitement, I put them all back and declared them ready for their close-up:

Indigo Springs MM paperbacks

Eee!

Gleeful about Glee, puckish about Puck

My contributor’s copies of Filled with Glee have arrived, and they look very fine indeed, packed with interesting articles like “You think this is hard? Try being an Antagonist, That’s Hard!” by Jennifer Crusie, (Quote: “Aristotle would have loved Sue Sylvester”), “Musical Promiscuity” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Diane Shipley’s “Not Just a River in Egypt.”

Editor Leah Wilson’s introduction is here: it’s all about the brilliant imperfections of the show, and how it rises above them.

And, of course, I’m in it too, with “Who’s the Real LIMA Loser? The Curious Friendship of Finn Hudson and Noah Puckerman,” in which I say, among other things:

Cheating, lying, and competing for the affections of women are all ancient human behaviors, of course, and if he were called upon to explain himself, it seems more than likely that Puck would say he was letting his groin make his choices for him. But on Glee, nothing is ever so simple. Fans of Puck’s bad-boy mystique have to ask whether poor impulse control is the whole story.

If you’d like a chance to Gleek out more than once a week, check it out. All articles should be entirely spoiler-free for S2, as the deadline for the book was just after the S1 finale. Enjoy!