Happy Holidays!

Peace on Earth ...

not with YOU ...

OK, just for today ...

Star of light

Happy Winter Solstice everyone!

From tomorrow the days start to get longer, and not a moment too soon for me. We'll try to glimpse the full moon lunar eclipse that will occur tonight, though it seems unlikely that the cloud cover will lift. There's only been one other lunar eclipse on a Winter Solstice day in the last two thousand years, so I'm really sorry to miss this one.

The nerdy part of me enjoyed reviewing facts about our Sun with the kids. Do you remember this ...?

Age: 4.5 billion years

Type: G2V Yellow Dwarf

Composition: 75% Hydrogen 25% Helium.

Volume: 103 million time that of Earth

Mass: 333,000 times the mass of the Earth

Interior Temperature: 27,000,000° F

Impressive, huh? I think I might wake up early and do some sun salutations tomorrow morning ...

Onward, donkey train!

Got to the end of Part 1 today. YAY!! I feel like I'm getting somewhere with these revisions. I just read all the revised chapters in sequence and they seem ... OK. Take that, Part 1.

But enough with the premature crowing, it's time to get back to work. The holidays/vacations are looming, along with the end of my regular weekday writing time, and I've still got Part 2 and 3 to do. Onward, donkey train, there are plenty more hills ahead. (More sweet faced donkeys below ... thank you, nice YouTuber helentonic, for bringing the Annapurna to me today)

Doing the work of revision

picture from flickr creative commons by TaylorMiles

Revision is hard. I'm in the middle of one right now. It takes dogged determination to get through a little bit everyday. The thrill and magic of the first draft is gone, now it's all about craft.

I like looking at this dude as I plug away at the ms, hoping I'm making things better instead of worse. My new wip has a donkey in it, and I'm really getting fond of them. What patience, what perseverance, what attitude! If this creature can get up that hill with his stupid load then I can get this revision done. I can't wait to get back to him and the new story, but I've work to do first.

One more chapter revised today. Nearly there, buddy. Don't vanish while I get this thing finished!

Things that make you go hmmm.

I'm working hard on my revisions so this space may be a bit neglected. Again. But I thought I'd share some random nuggets I uncovered on the net, while procrastinating, ...um, researching.

First random nugget: Punjabi pioneers in the Australian outback! Seriously? Who knew? Yet here they are in all their turbaned glory, next to the tinker carts in which they plied their trade. I have got to look into this. Someday.




Random nugget number two: Caminho Das Indias a.k.a. India, A Love Story, an international Emmy winning Brazilian soap partly based in India. Imagine a bunch of people who look Indian (sort of), with names like Ananda and Maya, dressed up in Indian clothes, in Indian settings, and speaking Portuguese. Oh, it's exactly as weird as it sounds! Of course this would never work if they were Swedish or something, but some of them look like pukka desis. I know from experience that the reverse is true. I'm constantly having people talk to me in Spanish and Portuguese, from the doctor's office to the the dude in the MacDonald drive through. So it's actually fun to watch them attempt some Hindi for a change! Check out this rather sweet clip which shows two naming ceremonies/baptisms, one in India (or so they would have us believe!) and one in Brazil.

Both these things made me think about the strange connections between people and places. Hmmmm! And now ... back to revisions.