:: Saturday 21 July 01 ::
Random drivel:
When it comes to humidity, who needs to know exact percentages, or dewpoints, or all that meterological minutae? There are really only two categories that matter: Not Too Bad, and Misery. If you are in any doubt about which status currently prevails, try Kat's Simple Home Hygrometric Test: take an ordinary fortune cooke, such as you'd get in any ordinary Chinese restaurant, out of its plastic wrapper. Place on tabletop or other horizontal surface. A few hours later, check on fortune cookie. If you can unfold it and flatten it out into a limp little square, you can rest assured that what you've got is indeed Misery. Seek air conditioning immediately. (If none available, slut around the house in a cheap torn slip, and pretend you're in a Tennessee Williams play. Or drink Singapore Slings, and channel Graham Greene.)
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A due South story I've been meaning to recommend here is Surface by Kalena. It's been out a few weeks, but Kalena's not very well known in the fandom, so some of you may have missed it, and if so you're missing a treat. It's smart, funny, well-written, it's got spot-on characterizations and hot sex and a marvelous morning-after conversation. And it's her first dS story, so after you read it, please write to her and tell her we want more, OK? We need to haul this woman out of Sentinel-land and keep her here with us!
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Back when I was first doing photography, which was like 15 years ago, it was all darkroom and chemicals and cropping with a blade and it was cool, I dug the arcana of it all, but I am now officially in love with digital photography and doing photo editing on the computer. I love not having to worry about wasting film with multiple shots, I love being able to take one image and crop it seventeen different ways on the same screen, I love being able to enlarge and reduce and futz with saturation and color balance and light/dark just by clicking a few buttons and dragging scroll bars around. God, the hours I used to spend making test strips, and squinting at contact sheets with the loupe, and slopping things from the developer to the stop to the fixer, and waiting for the prints to dry, and hunching over prints with a teeny tiny brush, spotting, because I always managed to get dust on the negatives....
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Writing, and wrestling as always with the endless aggro of trying to come up with stuff I can interpolate into dialogue-heavy scenes to break up all the talk. It strikes me this is one way (for me, the only way) that RayK is easy to write; he's fidgety enough that you can always give him something to do, physically, some piece of business. Whereas with Fraser--well, I think this is why dS fanfic tends to so overuse the neck-crack and the thumbnail-to-eyebrow gestures. The guy stands. He talks. He talks some more. He stands. With Fraser, you really have to go internal, which I suppose is one reason I tend to write him in first person.
The story is creeeeeping along. I keep poking at scenes, a scene here, a scene there, trying not to have panic attacks about how the whole thing is going to come together. My mantra is "We're just writing scenes." Leave the spackle on the shelf for now.
fandom journals
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other sites
Bad Hair Days :: Hissyfit :: kottke.org :: lileks :: memepool :: Mighty Big TV :: plaintive wail :: Tomato Nation
An assortment of good resources for digital photography:
Kodak's Digital Learning Center
New York Institute of Photography
"I'd learned on the highway and in the circus, in the army, and at boxing gyms that even if you have a cutman in your corner to stanch the blood, it doesn't obviate the need for stamina, self-reliance, and keeping oriented to what I think of as the earth's magnetic field. You can have allies, mentors, be married, but still you're going to be alone most of your life, and if you're going to run off the rails, you had better be good company for yourself."
--Edward Hoagland