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Sometimes my favorite bits are not the big, coherent, famous ones, but the unimportant little details off to the side. I don’t know what this inscription in the Roman Forum belongs to, or what its significance might be; I don’t need to. The thing itself is enough.
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I don’t know why this sloop has red sails, but it made for a different “ship on the water” photo than most of the others I’ve taken — and I do like me some “ship on the water” shots.
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Since the last time I visited the Tower of London, they’ve added a bunch of sculptures: mesh statues of the kinds of animals that used to be kept in the menagerie, and these steel-band figures of soldiers on the walls. This crossbowman is cranking his weapon on the wall walk along (I believe) the eastern side.
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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.
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I am fudging ever so slightly: while I like this shot, I don’t consider it to be one of my absolute best. But it’s from a display of Christmas lights at Edaville in Massachusetts, and is the most fitting thing I could post for Christmas Eve.
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A final shot from the incredibly photogenic Fukushu-en in Naha. The little bridge over this stream had statues of sages on each of its posts, each one unique in design.
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Last night was the longest night of the year. This morning, I give you the oculus in the ceiling of the Pantheon, glowing like a miniature sun.
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That isn’t snow on the ladder and tools; it’s an encrustation of salt crystals, built up over I don’t know how long — decades at least. This part of the Wieliczka Salt Mine looked like a winter wonderland.
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Bodies of water are a mixed bag in photography: they’re very boring and flat and featureless, unless they’re reflecting stuff well or have something floating on them. This is a case of the latter making the image far more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
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Maybe it’s a gazelle? I don’t know; I can’t tell my ungulates apart. It’s some kind of four-legged creature with horns, and it is one of the countless animal figures adorning random bits of the Natural History Museum in London, aka the Victorian cathedral to St. Darwin.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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This tree, in the Lal Bagh Gardens of Bangalore, is just utterly spectacular. (Nor is it the only spectacular tree there — but it’s the one I was able to get the best picture of.)
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I have a deep and abiding love for this kind of green. Add in the warm tones of the wood and the beautiful architecture — this is another traditional-style church in the Zakopane region of Poland — and I am exceedingly happy with the result.
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.
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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.
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!
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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.
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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.
