A Year in Pictures – St. Mary of the Salt

St. Mary of the Salt
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One last shot from the Wieliczka Salt Mine. I’m not positive that this is the Virgin Mary, but given how heavily Catholic the area is, that’s my bet. (It’s her or St. Kinga, in all likelihood; there’s a legend associating St. Kinga with the mine.) She is, of course, carved out of salt, and the lighting makes the most of the translucent quality.

Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it, and I hope the rest of you have a splendid day, too.

A Year in Pictures – Lights in the Darkness

Lights in the Darkness
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Okay, so it isn’t a menorah. (Actually, these candles are in Notre Dame, so really not Jewish.) But I love the image of little flames burning against the dark, and this is the most suitable picture I have to mark the beginning of Hanukkah. May those of you who celebrate it have a wonderful few days — and those of you who don’t celebrate it, too!

A Year in Pictures – Stairway to the Temple

Stairway to the Temple
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I mentioned earlier this year that you have to walk barefoot up to Sravanabelagola, the Jain temple we visited in southern India. This is what the staircase looks like: steps carved into the enormous barren rock on which the temple itself stands. They bake in the sun, and therefore bake your feet, which is possibly part of the reason you’re supposed to walk there barefoot — I don’t know for sure.

A Year in Pictures – Temple of Hadrian

Temple of Hadrian
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This is one of the more thoroughly reconstructed bits of Ephesus in Turkey. The people in charge of the place only rebuild a structure if they have enough pieces and enough sense of where they originally went to be confident of what they’re showing you; this one is obviously still missing quite a bit, but you can get a good sense of what the temple looked like back in the day.

Sometimes the weather is actually a thing to discuss

I am a solar-powered person, and as such, winter is often a difficult time for me. Not just the short days, but the dreariness: grey skies and — at least theoretically, since I’ve come to live in the Bay Area — frequent rain. It makes me grumpy, and I long for sunny weather.

Of course, this hasn’t been so true of late. Not just that we’re in a drought, and saw almost no rain last winter, but my response to it. A month or two ago my mother asked whether we were still having “beautiful weather” out here. I said that at this point, my notion of “beautiful weather” is a nice steady downpour. Rain is no longer a cause for complaint; I feel like I ought to be grateful for what we get, and (so far, anyway) I am.

We’ve just been through a spate where it feels like the dry spells are things that interrupt the rain, rather than the rainy spells interrupting the dryness. It is, in a word, a godsend, and I hope it continues — though as my husband pointed out, the real question is how much snowfall the Sierra Nevadas are getting. What falls on the Bay Area as a liquid right now is nice, but what falls on the mountains as a solid is what we’ll be using all next summer. I’ve glanced at some sites trying to answer that question, but they’re all geared toward skiers, and I care less about how many lifts are running than about where we stand vis-a-vis the averages for this time of year. I feel like this much rain here must translate to some amount of snow inland, but I don’t really know the weather patterns of the region well enough to be sure.

There’s a storm coming in soon, though, and apparently we’re at risk of flooding because the ground is already saturated. This actually sounds like a good thing to me. (Much better than the kinds of floods Dallas is prone to, where everything runs off because the ground is so dry and hard, and the storm so brief and fierce, that nothing has time to sink in.) It’s a price to pay, of course, but if I have to choose between saturated ground and the winter we had last year, I choose the rain, every time.

Even if the weather does get me down sometimes.

A Year in Pictures – Dragon Basin

Dragon Basin
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I miss the style of architecture where things would be decorated just because. Even in “elite” buildings nowadays, the sorts of things where we pour lots of money into the construction, we’re very minimalist; we don’t have random little dragons holding up basins on the walls. Which is a pity, because I do love the posture and the expression on this guy’s face.

Ten Years Ago Today…

On December 8th, 2004, I sold my first book.

I tend to think of myself as having sold it on November 2nd, which is when I came home to find a message on my answering machine (we still had answering machines back then; it was the Stone Age) from the editor I’d submitted Doppelganger to, asking me to call her back. In reality, that was the moment at which I moved from “maybe someday I’ll sell a book” to “I am going to sell this book, and soon.” But I didn’t have an agent, and Warner Books didn’t buy unagented manuscripts — I’d kind of sneaked Doppelganger in the back door — so the phone call was basically to tell me I should go find an agent, pronto. Which I did: I officially signed on with one November 16th. But the deal wasn’t official until December 8th, ten years ago today.

In the interim, things have gone pretty damn well. I have nine novels out there, and two more within the next year. My books have been translated into several foreign languages. I’ve gotten a World Fantasy Award nomination. I’ve experienced my share of the vagaries in this line of work, but on the whole, I feel confident in calling my career a success. Heck, Doppelganger and its sequel are still in print! That isn’t likely to still be true ten years from their publication — it took about a year and a half to see the first one on the shelf, so the anniversary of that would be April 2016 — but they’ve trucked along in a manner that I will, channeling my Scandosotan ancestors, call “quite respectable.” Everybody tells you to expect your first book to sink like a rock; having mine still out there eight and a half years on is pretty darn pleasing.

In celebration of this day, please tell me what your favorite book is (or favorite author, if picking a single title is impossible), and why!

A Year in Pictures – Buddha on the Roof

Buddha on the Roof
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Another shot from the garden of Fukushu-en in Naha, because it was so bloody photogenic. 🙂 I actually don’t know whether the little figures on the roof points ought to be called “Buddhas” or not; that’s just what I mentally label that style of statue. Boddhisatvas? I welcome corrections in the comments.

A Year in Pictures – Costa Rican Bug

Costa Rican Bug
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Another scanned print. Many of the insects and other small life forms of Costa Rica are terrifying (that bit in The Tropic of Serpents? That was me channeling all the dire warnings I got when I went to Costa Rica), but this one is cute. It disguises itself as a pair of leaves to hide from predators.

There is no war in Ba Sing Se

Earlier today on Twitter, Chuck Wendig posted:

Every week, every month, every year, another story, the same story told over again. White police killing unarmed black men. White men on the street killing unarmed black men. Because they thought the black men were armed. Because they felt threatened. Because they were afraid for their lives. Because the black man didn’t obey fast enough, was wearing a hoodie, was playing his music too loud. And time and time again, verdicts handed down that say, that makes sense. Of course you were afraid; of course you killed to protect yourself from the threat that wasn’t there.

I think about what I feel like, as a white woman of less than Amazonian build, walking down the street alone at night. Tensing up just that little bit when I see someone else approaching; tensing up that little bit more when I see that it’s a man. I imagine what it would be like to be a black man, and to tense up that little bit more when I see it’s a police officer. To see such a person as a hazard, rather than an ally if trouble occurs.

An op-ed in the New York Times today said,

Any police department that tolerates such conduct, and whose officers are unable or unwilling to defuse such confrontations without killing people, needs to be reformed.

This is fundamental. When we have riot police on the streets in military gear, SWAT teams burning infants with stun grenades, tanks rolling through suburbia because they’re army surplus and they might as well go somewhere — then something has gone so profoundly wrong I don’t have the words to describe it. When police turn their force against black men who have done nothing to deserve it, I can’t say “something has gone wrong,” because that implies it was ever right to begin with. But this is just a new verse in the same song. From its very founding, the relationship between the United States of America and its black citizens has been wrong. (The relationship between the United States of America and any of its minority citizens.) This country has used every tool at its disposal, from law to money to rhetoric to armed violence, to preserve the imbalance against them. Our steps in the other direction have been too few, too small, too often reversed with steps in the other direction. The problem hasn’t gone away. It’s right there today, tonight, all around us.

We need to reform a lot more than just the police. But the police are a place to start. If we cannot trust them, then we cannot trust anything that follows.

Books read, last several months

I realized a few weeks ago that I’ve been forgetting to make book posts. So this is September, October, and November — but it is also an incomplete list. (I’ve decided to omit my research reading, because it would constitute a minor spoiler for the fourth Memoir.)

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