State Fair by Night
Encounters with a Bold Jumping Spider
Found this guy on my porch. Used a Macro Lens to see what he was up to for about a half hour. He (maybe I'm presumptive about gender, I don't know the morphology of Phidippus audax) was less than 0.5 inches long even when extending while moving. No bold jumps, despite the name.
My Logline
Here’s the logline I’m using to pitch The Book of Blue Daggers to agents. Striking? Captivating? Boring?
“ A desperate book thief must track down the secret history and latest victim of a sentient book before it disappears forever.”
Blue Alchemy
Off the top of my head, here are some of the various chemical compounds I reference in the Book of Blue Daggers
- Capsicum
- Shilajit
- Acetic Acid
- Adderal
- Xanax
- Cocaine
- Tetrodotoxin
- Hydrocodone
- bromo-DragonFLY
- Haldol
- Ryogardase
- Estradiol
- Magnesium
- Cinnabar
- Mercury
- Aqua Fortis
Vietnam Aesthetics
Ken Burns "The Vietnam War" is fantastic, if exceptionally bleak, but I was thinking about how good the visuals, aesthetics, and literal landscape background of Vietnam are as a narrative driver towards any story or document about the Vietnam war. The intensity, and texture of the landscape allows for an abundance of narrative depths and visual immediacy to any story in, around, or about the Vietnam war.
The country itself is an beautiful. Jungled mountains, tropical agricultural lowlands, and forrested highlands cut by rivers and streams, with a continually warm and rainy temperature that lends a constant, wet green.
Narratively, the aesthetics of the country itself have made Vietnam a hyper-tactile, and very visually apparent conflict. I'm talking solely in the sense of the visual shorthand of what wars/conflicts "look" like, and, how much of it you would need to see to understand a narrative around it. World War 2 has maybe too much, it's too spread out, it was in black and white, and the camera technology wasn't good or fast enough to differentiate.
But in these photos, you know exactly where this is, don't you? You can pinpoint exactly where it is, and what is going on, right?
Relationship between Money and Happiness
Fantastic infographic here, although this source is a pro-investment and heavily marketing trend.
- United States is large, has lots of money, and is slightly unhappy
- Costa Rica is unusually unhappy, small, has less money, fascinating outlier
- Finland, as usual in these sorts of satisfaction-of-life charts, is doing just fine, hanging out in the above-average group
- Luxemborg is having a terrible time for some reason
Revisions
I've been working on revisions to The Book of Blue Daggers. Getting to the editing part of a novel is always thrilling, but daunting in that everything you make feels like an improvement, but it is obvious that there is no end point. Unlike a first draft where you're just trying to get done, finished, completed, the 2+ drafts can take an endless amount of time.
There's a point where the story is completed, but how do you know that it cannot be told in no more efficient or exciting way?
Book Moods
Just some moods I have for my novel, The Book of Blue Daggers. Images, feelings, ideas, concepts, textures.
Shades of Blue
Ink and Water
Rust Macro
Anything up close can look like landscapes from far away
A deep water trench
Iron Mountains and the Plains
A desert island