Why so dark?

I don't see any reason why steampunk and urban fantasy HAVE to be creepy or dark. There has to be more room for creativity than that. If it's icky and miserable, with no glimpse of goodness, it's not something I will enjoy reading. Or writing, for that matter.

All my stories tend to be rather dark at times, but the darkness isn't the point; it's only dark until the light bursts in and shatters the darkness with its radiance.

Forsythia flowers, time rifts, and... yellow Christmas stars?

It's December. Yep, that's a forsythia flower. Obviously there is a time rift somewhere in the area. Perhaps I should go tromping about, see if I can find it. If it manifests as a slash of glowing blue time energy it might easily be mistaken for Christmas decorations and ignored.

;)

Top Ten Tuesday: Childhood Favorites

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

It was hard limiting this to just ten. :P

1. Animorphs. I LOVED this series of books. It was the first "sci-fi" I'd ever read that wasn't intolerably stupid. (It was ridiculous, oh yes, but it was the fun kind, not the stupid kind!)

2. Wayside School Stories, by Louis Sachar. I think there were three books like this, and I loved all of them, especially the stories about the missing 19th story.

3. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. My favorite was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, especially the part where Eustace becomes a dragon, and is saved by Aslan.

4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J. K. Rowling. This one was the only one I had. I was banned from reading Harry Potter at one point, which I obeyed for awhile, since I only had one book anyway, but it didn't last. I was never exactly the most blindly obedient child. . .

5. The Babysitters' Club. I read lots of these, and I liked how funny they often were.

6. Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was always on the lookout for more of these, I only had two of them and read them till they practically fell apart.

7. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This was the first really long book (well, I thought it was long) that I read, and I still remember finishing it, sitting in my favorite pine tree. I SO wanted a secret garden of my own, so I went out in the woods and pretended I had one.

8. Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo.

9. The Magic Treehouse books. (These were when I was younger, most of the list has been coming from when I was 11 or so.)

10. My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George. I wanted to go out in the woods and make my own tree house, like the boy in the story did.

A doctor's touch.

This is a wonderful Ted Talk, and it's also great steampunk story inspiration. :)

Steampunk music.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On forestmaiden's TBR List For Winter

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Most of these I already have, or else hope to get on Kindle. E-books have won me over -- they're not exactly properly REAL, but you can have as many as you like without taking up any space, which is absolutely brilliant.

1. Replication: The Jason Experiment by Jill Williamson. I watched the book trailers for this and I'm totally excited, can't wait to read it!
2. The Fiddler's Gun by Pete Peterson. Again, this sounds too awesome -- the plot sounds like something by Lloyd Alexander, one of my favorite authors. And the Kindle version is only 99 cents. *jumps up and down* Do want!
3. Heartless by Anne Elizabeth Stengl. I'm very curious about this one, it sounds like a beautiful fairy tale.
4. North! Or Be Eaten by Andrew Peterson. I've already started reading this one. A cool thing about books by Andrew Peterson is that, when he includes a song in the story, it reads like a true song and not just a regular poem, because he's a musician as well as a writer. Lots of fun wordplay here too.
5. From Darkness Won by Jill Williamson. I loved the first two books and I can't wait to see where she takes the characters next.
6. The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan.
7. Arrow by R. J. Anderson.
8. The Monster In The Hollows by Andrew Peterson. Obviously, after I finish N!OBE, I'll have to read this one. :)
9. Blaggard's Moon by George Bryan Polivka. Pirates! I just got this book, but my brother has it right now, and he'll probably finish before I even start (when does that ever happen? LOL).
10. Starfire: The Mending by Stuart Vaughn Stockton. Not sure what to say about this one. It sounds really interesting, though.

Frost at last

First 28 degrees, in November? It seems crazy late to me. This is normal weather for a warm winter in this area, as I know quite well. The winter will most likely be full of record warm days and thunderstorms and hail. In some perfectly unexplainable way, that this should seem so strange to me is pretty peculiar. :P

Fog is beautiful.

People may think I'm crazy, but I like fog better than a sunny day. It hides ugly things and makes pretty things glow with beauty, gives everything an aura of mystery. Wide-open fields become as peaceful and shadowy as a forest. It's like stepping into a fairytale.

It also makes me miss Oregon. I'm sad when the sun emerges again, not the other way round, because the reverie is over. When I lived in Oregon, it was a little different -- in the Pacific Northwest, I can genuinely appreciate sunny days. But I'll always love fog, too, and rain, and storms.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books To Read During Halloween

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Happy Halloween!

1. Lamplighter, by D.M. Cornish. I read this for the first time around Halloween, and it's very Gothic and eerie. Perfect! The first and third of the series are very good as well -- lots of monsters and fascinating characters. Factotum even has a masquerade ball.
2. Any Harry Potter, of course!
3. Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen. I love the scene where Catherine scares herself finding the mysterious note, only to discover it's a laundry receipt. It's the kind of thing I might do. ;)
4. Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones.
5. On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, by Andrew Peterson.
6. Rapunzel's Revenge and Calamity Jack, by Shannon Hale. After reading these and seeing all the beautiful art, I wanted to go out costumed as Rapunzel -- she's awesome.

That's all I can think of -- I didn't sleep much last night, and my brain won't cooperate.

steampunkery

I wish I had the skills to sew this costume. So pretty! Mine would be green, and I'd make a cool hat and jewelry to wear with it. If I ever get my sewing machine back I have another project to finish first (a midnight blue, Elvish dress), but I'd try this one after that anyhow, and learn the complicated stuff as I go.

Malina Lassë

Yellow leaf. :)





I love playing with the macro setting. :)

A daydream.

If I was free to do anything I wanted, I'd move either to Canada or to Portland, go to college at an inexpensive school where they don't make you live in a stupid dorm, and then get a job working in a library while I write in my free time. And if that had to involve becoming an indentured servant to a student loan company, then so be it. The debt is a small price to pay (actually, the loan would be pretty small, too) to finally be in a position to do something besides washing dishes and daydreaming! And to not be so lonely. . . priceless.

The heart of a flower, the wings of a butterfly

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Top Ten Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

1. The Lord of the Rings: the first fantasy I ever read and my favorite book of all time. The first time reading it was jaw-dropping amazing, and I wish I could experience the story with such fierce intensity over and over again.

2. Lamplighter, by D.M. Cornish: the first time I read this it drove me wild and scared me silly. (Shouldn't have been reading it so late at night, lol. :P) And the cliffhanger is a killer.

3. The High King, by Lloyd Alexander -- The surprises in this story were so beautiful.

4. Harry Potter. 'Nuff said. :)

5. Isle of Swords, by Wayne Thomas Batson -- I guessed the secret long before story's end, but it was (and is) still an awesome ride.

6. The Hunger Games -- I'm not sure I ever want to read it again. I don't think it's possible for me to enjoy a reread of this, and I really don't want to try. But it was very good the first time. :)

7. Curse of the Spider King, by Wayne Thomas Batson. This was loads of fun to read the first time, but for some reason, just isn't as interesting to read again. :(

8. Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie Tolan

9. Wings, by Aprilynne Pike: I like this one a lot, even though I don't usually like paranormal romance. But I've lived in Crescent City, and on my second read the occasional little inaccuracies in the setting stuck out and bugged me.

10. The entire Fablehaven series, particularly Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary, which has a twist so shocking it left me with my mouth hanging open for a full five minutes before I could go on reading. Very cool books, these. :D

The spiders have decorated for Halloween.

I went outside on a wet, foggy morning, everything covered with dew, and discovered that there are spiderwebs everywhere. Seriously. The trees are actually draped with possibly dozens of spiderwebs, smaller, like those, or big and freakishly scary, like. . .

. . . that one. Yeah. :P I think I'm more afraid of spiderwebs than I am of spiders. With the exception of black widows and brown recluses. *shudders* I mean, I like little hopping spiders, or cute baby spiders in little webs on garden plants (they're killing the bugs! Yay!), and I know that makes me pretty weird for a girl, but big, brown, bouncy spiders hanging in places where people walk. . . at, quite possibly, nose height. . . yikes.

Fortunately, though, I'm short enough that they're often above my head. Haha. :)

A frog.

The bug is a fractal.

I have no idea what this bug is. I'm not even sure whether it's really a bug, since all it does when I poke it is quiver. It came from the top of the big ash tree in our yard -- the tree had split and needed to be cut down, and my brother spotted it when we started dragging branches out of the driveway.

Edit: I cannot believe it -- randomly surfing the web and I found another picture of the thing. It's called a Crowned Slug Caterpillar.

Eep.

It's much too hot.

I suppose blogging is like writing.

In order to get better at it, first you have to write lots and lots of posts and not worry so much about how good they are. It's a way to take the rust off too. And I'm awfully rusty.

Monarch caterpillar