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Happy Holidays!

Wishing everyone the best of the season, whatever that means to you: relaxing, socializing, walks in the snow, fun at the beach, cooking, eating, reading, or even writing. Felicitous combinations of good things to all!

Christmas Review No. 2: She Who Returns by Audrey Driscoll

Here is a lovely review of She Who Returns, by fellow writer JF Kaufmann.

JF Kaufmann, Author

The next in my series of Christmas reviews is the closing book of Audrey Driscoll’s Herbert West series, She Who Returns. I’ve read and reviewed the previous installment, She Who Comes Forth and I want to touch on this one, too.

The final book in the series is a well-plotted and fast-paced story full of thrilling twists and turns. Audrey Driscoll’s writing is quite elegant, smooth and atmospheric. I absolutely love the supernatural elements coiled within the story and I can’t help but notice the thorough research in Ancient Egypt mythology, language and history she must have done. Although not unexpected (where else would you find them if not in Egypt?) the paranormal components are original and intelligent.

What is really impressive in this novel is the setting, both in terms of time and location — Egypt in the early 1960s.

I can’t personally vouch for the time period, but…

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$fractal gold flower black and glowing blue background$

Fractals

Here is a really useful element for creating images: fractals.

What are fractals? Well, here’s what Wikipedia says (among other things): “…fractal is a term used to describe geometric shapes containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales.”

From that comes fractal art, which “…is a form of algorithmic art created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still digital images, animations, and media.” There’s lots more in the Wikipedia article.

If you go to Pixabay and key in “fractal,” you will be rewarded with a wealth of shapes and patterns. Some are beautiful, like the featured image. Some are weird. Many can be combined with other design elements to produce something unique, or at least make an ordinary image interesting.

fractal purple circles and swirls black background — I’ve used this fractal in a few of my creations…

Image #2 for Welcome to the Witch House story — …such as this image for one of the stories in *Tales From the Annexe*.

fractal gold circles and swirls — This conglomeration of gold circles and swirls was useful to suggest the supernatural in a couple of recent images.

Image for The Night Journey of F.D. story — This fractal, resembling an eye, was perfect for another of the *Tales From the Annexe* stories. All I had to do was add the title.

Here are a couple of fractals I haven’t incorporated into anything as yet, but I couldn’t resist downloading them from Pixabay.

fractal black background white circles — This would be perfect for a dark story.

fractal blue and green and yellow shapes suggesting tentacles — And this gorgeous one suggests a tentacle-bearing undersea entity.

I upload the fractal images to Canva and use it to assemble and adjust. (Canva also includes fractals in its photo library.) I do some cropping to size and fiddle with the degree of transparency. That’s one of the nice things about Canva–you can easily layer images and change transparency to make abstract shapes like these fractals into backgrounds or nearly transparent foregrounds.

A word of warning, though: messing around with images can eat up a lot of time.

Wordless Wednesday: White Foxglove

Silent Sunday: Daffodils

"King Alfred" daffodils early March 2022

Wordless Wednesday: Bigleaf Maple

Bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) at McKenzie Bight yellow leaves fall 2021

The Tree and the Stone, the Land and the Sky

Tree

Where is she?
Who stood beneath my greening boughs
With bluebells at her feet
Where has she gone?

Stone

Where is she?
Who embraced me
And sought within
For my stories and my songs
Where has she gone?

Land

Fear not, I hold her safe
Her substance cradled on my breast.
The hills are clothed in purple heather,
Bright streams bejewel them.
She is home.

Sky

Fear not,
Her spirit has returned to Light.
Star Bright, she shines
Forever in the hearts of those who knew her.

In memory of
Sue Vincent
1958-2021

Happy Holidays, etc.

To fellow Pressers of the Word, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Blessed Solstice, or whatever else you may call this special time.

Celebrate, read, think, and write! And let’s hope 2021 is better than 2020.

To the West Again

In mid-October we spent nearly a week near Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This visit was originally scheduled for March, but we postponed it when everything shut down.

Small Amanita muscaria mushrooms near the pond with Hosta leaves in background — I said goodbye to the garden and these cute mushrooms and headed west!

The autumn weather was a delightful mix of mist, fog, a bit of drizzle, a little rain, and a couple of glorious sunny days. Perfect for walking on sandy beaches, exploring sea-worn rocks, and immersive forest bathing.

Nelly en route to Tofino, Oct. 2020 — Nelly the Newfoundland en route; I couldn’t resist getting a photo with this sign, since people often say she looks like a bear.

I’ve realized that trying to take pictures during a walk often spoils the walk. I’m too taken up finding good picture opportunities to appreciate the overall scene. So I took almost no photos until the last full day of our stay, when I raced around some photogenic rock formations near where we were staying. The combination of mussel- and barnacle-encrusted bedrock, rounded boulders, smooth sand, eroding mussel shells, and plants making their living on the edge was irresistible.

Tide pool Cox Bay mussels and barnacles October 2020 — Stone, sand, mussels, and barnacles

Tide pool sea anemones, mussels, and barnacles Cox Bay October 2020 — A gang of sea anemones

Black basalt boulder Cox Bay October 2020 — A big basalt boulder looking like a Work of Art

Surge channel Cox Bay — A narrow surge channel going up into the trees

Mussel shells Cox Bay — Mussel shells. There are small beaches of “sand” made of pulverized shells, which are also used as path surfacing in places.

Mussel shells and beach grass Cox Bay — Shells and beach grass

Maianthemum dilatatum and withered grass Cox Bay — Beach grass, false lily of the valley (*Maianthemum dilatatum*), and (maybe) some sort of sedge

View between rock masses Cox Bay — An intriguing gap at low tide

Wave-worn rock and finely ground shells Cox Bay — Bedrock worn smooth, pulverized shells, and the water that did the job

Wild strawberry plants growing on rocks Cox Bay — Wild strawberry plants rooted in cracks in the rock

Water-worn boulders and bedrock Cox Bay — Bedrock, boulders, and sand

And here are three phone photos from a coastal rainforest boardwalk loop trail in Pacific Rim National Park. It’s one of my favourites (although Nelly the Newfoundland wasn’t too keen on all the stairs!)

Coastal rainforest with woodpecker tree — Towering cedars and firs, with a dead trunk thoroughly bored by woodpeckers.

Big Boletus mushroom and Deer Fern (Struthiopteris spicant) — A great big Boletus mushroom among Deer Ferns (*Struthiopteris spicant*). (Apologies for the fuzziness of the photo.)

Yellow heart-shaped leaf of Maianthemum dilatatum and cedar trunk — Yellow leaf of false lily-of-the-valley (*Maianthemum dilatatum*)

I love Tofino!

Pictures for Several Thousand Words, Part 1

Somewhere in the process of becoming an indie author, I discovered I enjoy messing around with images. I’m not talking about the photos of my garden I post on the blog. I hardly ever do any post-processing on those.

But ever since I found out about Canva, an easy-to-use graphic design tool, I’ve been creating images to represent my writings. Often, I complete one or more long before I finish writing the novel or story to which they belong. The image-designing process must use different parts of the brain than whatever it is that transforms ideas into words.

When I published four of the stories in Tales from the Annexe as separate ebooks in 2016, I made cover images for them, and I designed the cover image for the collection years before I needed it. More recently, while writing the the new stories that completed the set, I created an image for each of them as well. I didn’t need cover images for these stories, but I did need regular breaks from writing them.

My first idea was to include all these images in the book, but I didn’t want to swell the ebook’s file size to the point it incurred a hefty delivery fee. Moreover, not all e-readers display images in colour. I decided to feature them here on my blog instead.

Below are the images for the first seven stories, which are by-products, off-cuts, spinoffs, or supplements (I haven’t found a congenial word for this concept) to the four novels of my Herbert West Series.

They appear in “chronological” order, i.e., the first three happen during the time period covered by the first novel. The fourth, fifth, and sixth happen between Books 3 and 4 of the series. The last story of this group takes place decades later, following She Who Comes Forth, the novel that’s a kind of sequel to the series.