A Year in Pictures – Kinkakuji

Kinkakuji
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When this posts, I will be on my way back from a week and a half long karate seminar in Okinawa. It seems a good day for this shot of Kinkakuji, the famous temple in Kyoto that is quite literally plated in gold. (There’s another one that was supposed to be plated in silver — Ginkakuji — but that one’s still just wood.) It’s kind of a refrackulous place, but undeniably photogenic.

A Year in Pictures – Memorial in the Wake

Memorial in the Wake
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The next time I take a picture like this one, I’ll have an easier time of it.

Hawaii was one of the last trips I took before I was in the habit of using Lightroom to edit my photos, which means I didn’t plan for the editing process in taking the shot. Which means I took about twenty-seven of these shots, trying to get one where the horizon was actually level — that wake you see is from the ferry I was riding in, so I kept being rolled in one direction or the other. In the future I can just take a wider shot without worrying as much about the framing, and then straighten it out in post.

quick Okinawa update

I have survived training! Most of it, anyway; maybe all. It’s unclear whether there will be more training on Kouri Island, which is where we’re going for the next couple of days. The schedule originally said yes, but the final version said no, and we’ve been told not to bring bo or sai or even gi. So if we are going to do more karate, it’ll be in swimsuits on the beach. Which would not be a bad thing . . .

Apart from the fact that I ended up learning kusanku yesterday (a kata I’m not supposed to know for another year or so, which involves dropping to a one-legged crouch three times and is absolute murder on your right quadricep and glutes), I think I’m in pretty good shape. Ankle isn’t bothering me much, though it was a bit bad on the first day — I think I blame the plane flight. Okinawa is hot and humid, but so far not as bad as it could have been. I’ve experimented with continuous shooting for stuff that’s moving (traditional Okinawan dancers; adorable ducklings), and therefore have vast quantities of photos to wade through and cull. I would try to make a more interesting post out of this, but my brain appears to have been chopped up for chanpuru. 🙂

I should eat breakfast. And pack for Kourijima. Yeah.

A Year in Pictures – Ironwork Detail

Ironwork Detail
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I think I’d been to Nanzenji before, on my previous trip to Japan, but I wasn’t as much of a photographer then; I didn’t pay attention to small details, and wouldn’t have been able to control my camera to get the short depth of field I have here. It’s nice to know what you’re doing . . . .

A Year in Pictures – Iron Rail in Ivy

Iron Rail in Ivy
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I’m saving most of my Highgate Cemetery pictures for October, but here’s one that isn’t so much of a grave as a piece of a grave that fell off and landed in the ivy. (This is not difficult to achieve at Highgate. Missing the ivy when it fell would have been a remarkable achievement.)

A Year in Pictures – Monument Relief

Monument Relief
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When I took my husband to see the Monument to the Great Fire, the sun was at precisely the right angle for the light to reflect weirdly off some nearby windows and onto this sculpture that decorates one side of the Monument’s base — in the process making it much more visually interesting to me than it had ever been before.

A Year in Pictures – July Column, Bastille

July Column
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Our last evening in Paris, we went to visit a friend who lives outside the city center, and ended up strolling with him down toward the Place de la Bastille (former site of the Bastille fortress). The castle’s long gone, but there’s a column commemorating the “July Monarchy,” and the clouds made the early sunset light absolutely glorious.

A Year in Pictures – Hippodrome Obelisk

Hippodrome Obelisk
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This obelisk is Egyptian (as you can presumably tell from the hieroglyphics), but it stands in the Hippodrome of Istanbul. I had very little time for photos there, unfortunately, because our tour included a couple of women who had apparently missed the part where it said there would be walking, and moved at a snail’s pace while complaining the whole time. But I got what I could, and this is one of the results.

Achievement Unlocked: World Fantasy Nominee

So I’d been having a less than stellar day, mostly on account of the fact that I’m leaving for Okinawa next week and don’t feel remotely ready and this fact is making me stressed. I was out getting take-out and running Okinawa-related errands this evening when I checked my phone and saw that hey, Mike mentioned me in a TwHOLY CRAP I’VE BEEN NOMINATED FOR A WORLD FANTASY AWARD.

You guys.

I am on a shortlist with Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Sofia Samatar, Helene Wecker, and Richard Bowes.

I . . . have still not wrapped my brain around this fact.

For crying out loud, it’s the World Fantasy Award. It’s one of the biggest awards in SF/F, alongside the Hugo and the Nebula — and if I’m being honest, it’s the one I have lusted after the most since I started publishing. The Hugos and the Nebulas cover speculative fiction as a whole, but the World Fantasy Award is for fantasy, and although stories of mine have been published as horror, fantasy is fundamentally My Genre. To see A Natural History of Dragons on the list of nominees is nothing short of gobsmacking. Like, I’m half-afraid to hit “publish” on this post because what if I’ve imagined the whole thing? (The couple dozen congratulatory tweets and emails and such argue otherwise, but y’know, paranoia knoweth few boundaries.)

I was already planning to go to World Fantasy this fall; now I guess I should plan on going to the banquet, too? And get something interesting to wear to it. Not that I expect to win — and that isn’t just modesty talking; it’s my admiration for my fellow nominees. But hey, let the record show I have promised my husband that, should I win, he has my permission to get me drunk. Which is a thing that hasn’t happened in the nearly thirty-four years of my life, so the promise is a non-trivial thing.

And what will I do between now and the con? I will write another book. Because being an author is like enlightmentment: Before nomination, chop wood, write book. After nomination, chop wood, write book. I don’t have any wood or an axe, so I guess I need to focus on the writing.

Congratulations to Todd Lockwood

His cover for A Natural History of Dragons is one of the finalists for the Chesley Award, in the category of “Best Cover Illustration — Hardback Book.”

I feel a bit proprietary about this, of course, because the book in question is mine. Furthermore, I had input with Tor about the cover design; I had suggested a skeletal diagram of a dragon, while my editor was thinking of more of a life drawing, and the two concepts got hybridized to produce the final cover. But the cover itself is Todd’s work, and the nomination is richly deserved. Fingers crossed for him to win!

A Year in Pictures – Fireworks over Lake Biwa

Fireworks over Lake Biwa
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The fireworks display at Lake Biwa in Kyoto during Obon was astounding. It utterly dwarfed any such display I’ve personally seen in the U.S. For the most part it did not photograph very well — I would have needed to set my camera on a tripod and have it take lots of rapid-sequence shots to have much hope of catching things at the right moment — but this one came out pretty well. (The shadow impinging on the left is a tree; the spot of light lower down is someone’s cell phone. I don’t know how many thousands of people were there, but judging by the crush in the train on the way out, it felt like the entire population of Kyoto.)