One of my favourite meditative activities is working on the decorated margins in my dream journal.
They are always different and often suggest living creatures, such as here a beaked being on the right, and a fox-like entity in the centre.
The process is simple. I use my water colour paints and a 0.4 Artline 200 pen. Today I used Quinacridone Gold and Scarlet.
Since this book is new and the paper is an unknown quantity, I’m starting with primary colour mixes. I’ve already noticed there’s a vast amount of spotting on this paper. Don’t yet know why.
I painted patches and streaks of the first colour round the margins surrounding the blocks to be saved for writing, and waited till moderately dry.
Sloppily over-painted with second colour, leaving some of the gold patches and streaks, and making new patches and streaks over the first, and any unused areas.
It doesn’t pay to be too exact. Wait until thoroughly dry. Some people use hairdryers to speed the process.
In my next session I use the outliner—I prefer black—to make lines wherever the colours change including in areas of shading, though it’s easy to go too far.
It pays to keep checking how the work looks, and whether any recognizable entities are cropping up, and then to give them an eye or ear.
It’s harder to set up than it looks, even for me, and I invented it.
There’s one piece missing … it’ll be in the post as soon as I have my computer back and can get to my favourite Bricklink store … but I want to get begun on my next project.
I started it as an experimental thing seeing how these slopes could work together. One thing led to another.
While this event is already past, I want to learn about the outcomes. Just reading the first few paragraphs, I’m sure I can learn ways to rephrase my messaging which seems to be falling on deaf ears at the moment.
Prior to my cancer scare I was a deep green greenie. I volunteered as a Landcare committee member, biodiversity co-ordinator, group leader and the local ‘fungi lady’.
Did talks in science week at schools, talk-and-walks about fungi in the local arboretum. Joined Knitting Nannas, an activist group. I fitted my house out with PV and a watertank.
When I woke after the end of the treatment, about July 2021, I was ecstatic that I had survived. And a few weeks later, very confronted by the seeming lack of concern about the climate emergency. My usual sources had dampened right down.
I had nothing left of any of the above, apart from an abiding fear for plants and wildlife and above all, how my very young grandchildren, and everybody-else’s descendents are mean to survive.
I had to relocate to the next state for the treatment, which all happened during covid. I’m in a rental with no control over the utilities. I have very little energy. No local contacts. But am still largely online.
My flavour of activism is being rejigged …
A unique discussion on the compelling intersections of art, climate change, and social innovation.
The Star Wars chronology has been my go-to viewing for the past few weeks. The Mandalorian has just said auf wiedersein to his small charge and will be at a loose end.
The Mandalorian series got me thinking about novels, such as The Crystal Planet by Vonda McIntyre, set in the Starwars universe.
[All Star Wars related media produced pre 2014 are now referred to as Legends, while for post 2014 material and the original series, Disney+ claims the ‘Canon’ label.]
While they all have only a tenuous position on the original timeline, TV series and books have expanded the Star Wars universe.
The original timeline of the Lodestar universe has always involved timetravel. Not sideways to expand the size of the universe yet, to give more options where to set stories, as in the Star Wars universe.
The Lodestar universe began in the future … I even set a date for its beginning when I was still new at the business of writing a universe. But it turns out that in a story that involves a time travelling, forward falling, octohedrenal spaceship such as the Lodestar, there is no beginning or end.
Because that’s what happened …
A storm lurking above an anonymous suburban scene … a harbinger of climate change … one of the drivers of eco fiction … image from Alex Steffen’s Substack The Snap Forward
Seriously? I’m completely boondoggled … is that even a word, I imagine you’re asking … I’ll need to check that myself. It’s been a while since I saw it written.
That suspicion was right. Not the right meaning. The Navy has my favorite explanation … a boondoggle is a fun, but unproductive meeting.
So. Try again. I’m completely at a loss … not as descriptive is it?
But me going to the thesaurus from here and then trying to get back with a good word under my arm… will take me another half hour.
I’m at a loss. My writing is on my laptop and the external hard drive. My research ditto. Everyplace where I might check somthing, also inaccessable.
It’s Friday, and here in Queensland, Monday is a public holiday. I won’t be able to take my ailing laptop to a repair place until Tuesday!
Couldn’t take it today, yesterday or day before due to too much other stuff those days. I have ME/CFS and am constrained by a frequent lack of energy.
I’ve been training myself to take 2200 steps per day. If I go over my daily limit, I’m setting myself up for a three day crash.
The computer repair place visit has to be done on the same day I need to go into that direction for another thing. Three blocks distance is all it is, and three blocks back. It’s all I’ll be able to that day.
Grey wolf, Canis lupus, single mammal on snow, captive
Type ‘dog’ into your search engine and you will get the facts about dogs, their history of domestication, the variety of dog breeds, the origins of the word ‘dog’. Everything you might want to know about Canis lupus familiaris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Terminology.
BUT … all the above were not the concepts I had in mind when I started this research. I wanted to know how dogbox, dogger, dogging & dogman fitted into the word ‘cloud’ to do with dog. How these words originated. Have they anything to do with the canine subject of the title?
Apart from ‘dogger’ hard to find.
So. Dogger. Is not originally an English word. It’s an Old Dutch word for codfish. Pronunciation, I assume, is with the Dutch/Scottish -ch-. The boats the Dutch used to go fishing for codfish became known as ‘doggers’; then the place in the North Sea where they usually went fishing got the name Dogger Bank. Now sometimes known as Doggerland. Quite a bit if interesting reading about that: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/01/doggerland-lost-atlantis-of-the-north-sea-gives-up-its-ancient-secrets
Dogbox, dogman and dogging. The only place i found mention of them is in the Australian construction industry.
“To safely sling a load, it requires an understanding of the suitability of the lifting gear, as well as what method of slinging is required. Further consideration of the nature of the load, such as its mass and centre of gravity, is also a factor. The Dogman course teaches you the basics to get the load moved safely.” https://constructiontraining.com.au/courses/dogging-courses.html
At the bottom of that page: “The simple explanation is that a dogman, colloquially known as a dogger, is the person. The actual task – the slinging techniques or guiding of loads mentioned above – is called dogging work.” The basket used to lift a load of smaller items is referred to as the ‘dogbox’.
Finally, back to Canis familiaris, in Australia someone culling feral dogs is also called a dogman.
Any other interesting uses out there of this three letter word?
First, being in a state of nit-picking doubt about my novel Meld, I re-read about the need for micro tension at sentence level. The novel’s so far milky pale sentences paraded in front of my mind’s eyes. I wondered where or when to start. Continue writing pale and milky? Start writing micro tension when I’m about half way? I haven’t even finished the first draft?
That was last week.
I started writing micro tension in Zebe’s POV chapter—where my head was at that moment—but soon hit a place where Zebe’s mood needed to be able to play off a moment of micro-tension that should’ve been written several chapters earlier.
Writing is a lot like sketching. For me, anyway. Sketching, I make a mark on my paper. Another mark alongside it, or continuing from it. If I make a mark in what proves to be a wrong place, I’ll erase it, and redraw it in a better place, or draw over the top of it.
Getting a story down, if I change direction, I can’t just keep writing into the now incorrect direction. I need to go back and change where that direction is coming from, to be able to remember it correctly for the next swag of material to be fitted into place.
And so I decided I need to start again, again. Bring the manuscript up to scratch before continuing.
BUT the day I present the Fungi Walk-and-Talk is approaching. Saturday 21 at 1 pm I’ll be out in Brunswick Valley Heritage Park trailing twenty keen-to-learn-all-about-fungi learners. Gone are Zebe and her problems. Because this week I’ve needed to refresh my mind on all things fungi. The novel is on the back-burner of the writing stove again.
Path through Brunswick Valley Heritage Park
Because, yes, there is what started as a little idea on the front burner. I asked myself, what could be a better way to practice writing micro-tension than with single, or at most two sentence stories? Of course I agreed. Who doesn’t, when they’re talking positivity at themselves?
Little stories they’ll be, part of larger stories of approximately 30 sentences and or 300 words. With that word count it could only be a kid’s book. Inevitably, I mashed that idea onto the Duplo story idea.
The Duplo people are tired of living in a box … They build a staircase for everyone to get up, and out…
[The staircase (previous post) is a MOC I learned, which is an acronym for My Own Creation.]
I’m using these sentences to learn my new version of Powerpoint, which is the only appropriate format I could find to publish a read-aloud book for toddlers. That, as well as another idea, is also a justification/rationalization to continue with this much more finishable project when I could working on my so far 77k sf manuscript.
At the same time as studying up on Fungi, of course.
Rita de Heer 