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Lovely 🍂 Autumnal 🍂 Hump 🐪 Day
I made my oatmeal with hot coffee this morning and I think that’s how I’m doing it from now on. ☕ With seasonal churn, I noticed that the local landscape looks like a bunch of mums that are basically done.
Shadowless Like Silence
I saw old 🍂 Autumn 🍂 in the misty morn stand shadowless like silence, listening to silence. ~Thomas Hood
It’s a lovely mid-Autumn day and I’ve been pecking away at my backlog at work.
Kelly and I took a walk the other day because, frankly, I needed to get out and enjoy the weather I’ve been waiting for all year.
She found it cold and unpleasant, but it was perfect for me. I literally wish I could live somewhere that it was like this indefinitely.
If anyone ever invents a viable holodeck, that’s going to be the permanent program running in mine.
Not everyone loves a blustery day, though. Here’s a classic toon with a variety of perspectives on my favorite kind of weather.
Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day || 1968 Oscar winning animated short film
That’s okay. Everybody doesn’t have to like the same things.
It would be nice if people could be free to like what they want.
It would be nice if people could be free, period.
But, hey, who needs freedom when you can just wear a mask or two or three or however many Fauci decides is enough this time?
🧛 Vampire-Free ⚰️ Thanksgiving 🦇
The BEST-Ever Garlic Butter Turkey Recipe! Super JUICY & Delicious!! (Hundreds of 5-star Reviews!!!)
Whether it’s Thanksgiving or just any other supper of the year, there’s nothing better than a moist, savory bird.
Only one more week until this Thanksgiving is in the can. Then I’ll be allowed to talk about…
🎅🍪🤶 Christmas All The Time!!! 🦌🎁🎄
Because I just love talking about Christmas All The Time whether it’s before Thanksgiving or not.
I like Christmas music, Christmas movies, Christmas cookies, Plum Pudding, all the kitsch and festivities.
Why? Who needs a reason? Either you like something or you don’t.
The time of year doesn’t actually matter. People still like football outside of football season.
What matters is what makes you happy.
Figure out what makes you happy and do that.
If voting for Democrats makes you happy, please get a new hobby that doesn’t hurt the rest of us. Okay? Thanks.
What You Make
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. ~Edgar Degas
This is an interesting point.
There are some authors who describe everything down to the last button on someone’s shirt and there are others, like myself, who prefer to let you paint the walls.
Which is better?
I don‘t know that there‘s really an answer to that. It‘s just style.
A more spare kind of prose keeps the story cooking right along.
I don’t know that it’s that important to describe the details of someone’s attire, decor or personal appearance unless it is somehow key to the story.
There are so many versions of Aragorn because there are so many people who had to interpret the sparse details provided by Tolkien. I remember the Rankin & Bass version, the Bakshi version, the one on a calendar I had as a kid, a ton by the Brothers Hildebrandt, the Soviet knock-off version and, of course, that guy in the Jackson movies.
We know that Harry Potter wears roundy glasses because JK Rowling said so. “He wore round glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose.” That’s really all anyone needs to know.
There are times when you want a florid description of a character or a location and there are far more times when you do not.
The details are contingent on the importance of what’s being described. If something absolutely must be seen clearly through the author’s eyes, then it’s time to break out the word pictures.
I have a very clear idea of where that line is drawn. The big question is, will my readers?
His and Her Christmas | Full Comedy Movie
Since my Holiday Season Serial Romance isn’t quite done, I figured I’d tide you over with someone else’s.
Movies, being a visual medium, have an entire team of specialists who do the set dressing in order to make the whole thing seem Christmasy and thematic. Prose has an author, an editor and a fixed number of words to include.
For Holly and Ivy, you know that Holly is a redhead, Ivy is blonde, Ian needs a shave and Dustin has a rather severe case of acne. I have a couple of other characters I’ve mentioned by name so far. I have a basic idea of what they look like because the movie is playing in my head. Until it becomes necessary for someone to know what they look like, I probably won’t waste the words to describe them or their houses or their clothes. What they do is what matters.
In the Sentinelsverse, Empire City is what we know as New York City. People know what that looks like. There are enough movies, TV shows and live news segments and parades to show us every corner of the City that Never Sleeps.
On the other hand, since I have to invent Auringia and the Far-Flung Reaches from scratch, I’ll need to spend plenty of time painting those pictures in people’s minds. What do the houses look like? It’s not a given. It’s not self-explanatory. It’s on me to make you feel as if you’re there.
In Empire City, Laurel Ridge or Wyoming Pass, a house is a house is a house and an apartment is just an apartment. I’ll describe the Sentinels’ conference room once or twice. It will probably need to get redecorated over the course of 13 books, but I basically need to describe it very few times to cement the image in the readers’ minds. Everything else looks an awful lot like it does in our world, which is rather convenient for me.
That’s it for one lovely 🍂 Autumn 🍂 Wednesday. I hope you’re having a lovely week and getting your turkey’s thawed out for next week.