Hints on how A.E. Graves spends her imaginary spare time
I realize that rain isn’t considered that special, but I’m in a state with wildfires that have been burning for MONTHS, so, it is. SPECIAL. Exciting, even.
Image showing 48 hour precip totals as of 6 pm Thursday: pic.twitter.com/k5qFNwByJs
— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) October 22, 2021
There is more heading our way!
Twitter is mildly amusing at the moment, as many SF Bay Area people are wildly excited over the actuality of water falling from the sky.
The unfamiliar pitter-pat sounds on windows. The smell of petrichor. They are posting absurdly mundane videos celebrating droplets on windshields! Here in California, where fires in the mountains have burned for MONTHS, rain is a big deal.
Water! FROM THE SKY! 😄
A series of weather system will bring periods of light to moderate rainfall 🌧️ to the #BayArea & #CentralCoast through Friday. A more potent atmospheric river then takes aim on the region late in the weekend with widespread rainfall and gusty winds. Stay tuned!⚠️#CAwx #BayAreaWX pic.twitter.com/usmXHUzWfk
— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) October 20, 2021
We’d really like Wildfire Season to END.
It has been an agonizingly dry year. We only got about 30% of our hoped-for water from October of last year through September of this year. We’d really like to do better.
Here’s what the US Drought Monitor for California looks like (brace yourself, it’s bad):
If monthly numerical tables are more of your thing, here is NOAA’s data from our sad water year:
If you know people in the SF Bay Area or California generally, be prepared for their/our delight over a basic weather phenomenon that may be ordinary for you, but which feels like an incredible gift for us.
I’m 20,000+ words into revising my first novel(la), and… it feels like being employed! I am in my home office, at my computer, typing for hours on end, forgetting to stretch, and drinking lots of caffeinated beverages, so that seems about right.
My progress comes in streaks – I’m either in a writing mood (when I do my better work) or just plodding along doing more retyping than editing.
So far, I have about 47 pages of text with normal spacing, one space built in after each paragraph, and a 12 point font. Based on (gu)estimates from my small print first draft, where I’m on page 38 (of 134), I’ve added a light amount of clarifying and descriptive text, but haven’t yet made any big interventions in the story.
It is exciting to have gotten this far. I am aiming for about 80,000 words, so it is encouraging to know I’m about 1/4 of the way through this version of the rewrite. (But also: I’m only about 1/4 of they way through!)
During NaNoWriMo, writing 50,000 words over the month of November comes to writing about 1,667 words each calendar day, and so my 20,000 word progress equates to about 12 days of writing. Excluding days of reading and studying, this is my 5th day of just editing (and retyping), and my first with the new, ergonomic keyboard.
I need a nap. And more coffee. And then, to get back at it!
I always marvel at how lucky I am to live in San Francisco. While taking long walks with friends, I often say aloud that we are extraordinarily lucky to live here, in such a beautiful city, with such a vibrant and creative and international population, mild weather year round, and the remarkable influence of the bay and our famous fog.
October 16th was one of those days that inspires outbursts of gratitude, not only because the weather was warm and mild, but also because I also got to participate with friends in an ART EXPERIENCE! The brilliant Judy Chicago performed one of her Atmospheres installations: a gorgeous, colored smoke performance of vast size, here for the public in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
IT WAS FANTASTIC.
It’s not every day I come home starry-eyed and reeking of gunpowder, but this was one of those days!
The de Young live-streamed the event, and packaged it with a great overview of the exhibit. It’s a GREAT use of video, and I want to compel everyone I know to see it (giving me a moment’s overlap with the sort of zeal religious missionaries possess, which is a funny feeling).
It was gorgeous; it allowed me to follow my habit of photographing other people while they photograph; it was great to see so many people so excited about an art event; it was pleasant to participate in a masked group activity outdoors; my phone is filled with abstract colors and texts from the friend who participated with me; I left completely delighted.
Before I began my big project of rewriting my first novella into a proper novel, I laid out a monochrome photo book of horizontal images I’ve taken of recent architecture downtown.
Blurb is a local self-publishing, art-book-printing powerhouse that I’ve used for more than a dozen projects. I decided to try out their new, continuous-spread books with a subset of this body of work.
The book is printed beautifully – so beautifully, that I sent a copy to another photographer friend, to inspire him to use them as well! 🙂 (He will!). I’m really happy I laid this out and ordered it.
The flaws with the book are with my choice to make it so short: the samples I chose create a photo essay that doesn’t show off the range of architecture I intend to highlight.
I have the images to make it much more comprehensive, but need to re-shoot some reflections (I’m using a rangefinder, and I boggle it with reflections taken through wires of complex surfaces), and be very thoughtful in planning the layouts once I expand it. I’ll likely use Blurb’s regular premium book type (which is sewn/glued like ordinary books), to get a much longer book with a wider range of layouts than I chose this time.
This week, I had an early morning medical appointment, so I caught a commute train downtown. I was worried that it would be crowded.
It was not crowded. Which is a worry of its own.
I was happy to see the commuters who were present wearing what are now known as “soft” clothes (with a new meaning about clothes that are not simply made of soft fabric, but which are also largely unstructured and are made without hard fasteners; this distinguishes them from items that are now called, “hard pants,” for example), but was surprised that there still weren’t a lot of people. That was nice for being able to get a seat on the bus, but still eerie.
It’s still SO DIFFERENT. It still feels so unnaturally quiet here in my City.
One of the interesting elements of great cities is how lively they are: how there are always people out and about, day and night, because so much work (and play) of various sorts are happening. Even though SF has become a relatively sleepy city during my lifetime (which sounds like some veiled complaint about how it is hard to find somewhere good to eat in the middle of the night (ahem), but is more a commentary on how the music venue options have become so limited, as luxury housing displaced industrial and commercial corridors where theaters and concert halls can operate freely), it was very lively by day in the Before Times. It isn’t now. Not on weekdays.
The ripple effects on businesses downtown have been significant: all sorts of businesses, from dry cleaners to lunch-only restaurants to pharmacies to coffee shops have vanished, because the multitudes that had made their business a nearly sure-thing in the past aren’t around. If even national chain retailers have closed up shops, the impact on smaller, one-location businesses and small local chains remains remarkable.
I received goodbye messages from some local food vendors early on, and while restaurants normally fail at a high rate, some of them were big local employers with multiple locations, so it was still a shock. Also, going downtown now, their locations remain vacant. Not all of their signs, fixtures, and furnishings have been removed, likely because their collapse was swift, and there aren’t yet buyers for their gear or lessees for the space. It’s an uncomfortable reminder of how hard major disasters impact everything.
The weekends have more signs of life, as people who are working invisibly from home go out to parks, the waterfront, and shopping districts enjoy the fine autumn weather.
~~*~~
The U.S.’ international travel bans that I wrote of earlier will be lifted for vaccinated travelers in November, and some countries are opening up to Americans again.
While unvaccinated people are still permitted to fly, I am unlikely to board a plane.
It feels like it will still be a long while before I’ll move through the world with the comfort and relative safety I felt during the Before Times.
As a hobbyist postcard designer, I loved watching this video about a color photo postcard printer whose art department had an interesting influence on the way specific postcards looked, which is only noticeable if you see enough of them. I’m sharing the video, because I just love the story.
The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America
by Adam Serwer
published by One World (Penguin Random House), New York
2021
American political discourse has been disturbing and authoritarian in recent years, and the seriousness of it has made it tempting to look away and focus on small, manageable things in our personal lives. To help process the past US Administration’s role in all of this, I found it useful to read Adam Serwer’s excellent new book, based on essays he previously published in the Atlantic as events were unfolding, with new commentary introducing them. Named after an insightful essay which reflected on the hateful rhetoric that was embraced by the authoritarian Trump and his followers, this book provides insights and context for the horrors that have been unfolding around us.
I went through a pad of page flags while reading, which was unexpected, but Serwer’s insights are thoughtful and useful enough to revisit. He also cited other books, articles, and authors who can provide additional details and depth on our history, our power structures, and the tension-to-conflict between our stated principles and national behavior. (My to-read list feels infinite already, but some of these are quite promising.)
When Serwer interviews people who mistakenly believe that illegal immigrants receive amazing services and benefits which other Americans do not (much as I read elsewhere of the same demographic groups believing that black people received free cell phones under Obama, or that all black people are given free college tuition because of some big government intervention that I wish actually existed), their hysteria over immigration makes slightly more sense, even while knowing it is based on lies, and even while recognizing their position is a cowardly attack on the vulnerable rather than an authentic challenge the powerful.
Serwer astutely identifies the right-wing’s objections to “political correctness” as a strong objection that previously oppressed groups have standing in society to challenge their abuse. He cuts apart the idea of false, historical “civility” in which white men in power simply set aside the rights of others so that the powerful could remain comfortable, an indulgence that costs the rest of us dearly. I love this sentence:
In Ivy League debate rooms and the Senate cloakroom, white men could discuss the most divisive issues of the day with all the politeness befitting what was for them a low-stakes conflict. Outside, the people whose rights were actually at stake were fighting and dying to have those rights recognized.
I appreciate Serwer’s insights on US police abuses of (and more specifically for) power, how the brief history of policing within the U.S. has been problematic in a range of disturbing ways since the outset of public police departments in the 1800s, and how domestic police cultures have long held authoritarian leanings. His writing helped remind and clarify for me that publicly funded police represent the interests of the entrenched powerful, and those entrenched powerful (and those who look like them) benefit from a historically exploitative status quo that allowed them to come to power. This loyalty to power makes much more sense from observable routine events of police violence than an idea that the police exist primarily to support actual laws or the public at large.
Adam Serwer’s journalism and analyses make a great book, and this collection provides clear insights on the challenges and outright dangers we face in the U.S. Published this year, its essays take us right up to the current moment, and will remain highly relevant for the foreseeable future. I recommend it highly.
I had an interesting experience over the weekend, which was reading a novella that I wrote (!) in 2004, to see if I think it is viable for development into a full novel.
At the time I wrote it, I was concerned that it was too fresh in my mind to evaluate properly, so I set it aside and wrote three more novellas, one each in subsequent years, as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Then I allowed my demanding job(s) to take over my life again. Now that so very much time as passed, I thought I’d see if it is worth working on.
The answer, to my own surprise, is YES.
Editing and expanding on a draft novel is a HUGE project, and… I’m a bit alarmed and intimidated.
But… I’m already more than 50,000 words committed! Why NOT develop it?? I was briefly indignant while reading about some confident middle schooler seeking agents to publish the first thing they ever wrote, before realizing that nothing is preventing me from taking similar steps. (Aside from my career, haha!)
I want to spruce it up and build it out a bit more, since the feedback I got from another writer is that there SHOULD be more of it – it held his interest all the way through, and he wanted to read more to read within the same story.
Editing a novel can take months or years, so I’m unsure how to set a schedule for myself on this. But I know it is worth starting, at the very least.
** ~ **
Meanwhile, I spent most of my energy yesterday laying out a new photography book, and… I’m supposed to do the same today!
It has been a while since I laid one out properly, and there are some new features at my favorite book printer, Blurb, that I am testing out. (I’ll write about those once my prototype arrives.)
I have laid out and self-published photo books before: eleven of them, including nine volumes of my iPhone 1 photo diary (!) and two thematic/place-based photo essay books. Blurb, which is based here in my hometown of San Francisco, does a beautiful job in printing and binding them, and provides a great online storefront to sell and display them. Their services are superb.
My best book so far was just an ordinary travel photography book, which I know is an awkward genre. Local photographers do the best work of documenting their location, because they see it in all seasons and in all of the lighting variations that occur over a year – there are photos local photographers take that a visitor is sure to miss. Visitors are subject to whatever the weather happens to be. I was just an outsider-tourist visiting during a cold and stormy month, and will never see these sites in all the familiar glory of a local who loves where they are every day.
Just the same, the process of creating this particular book was good for me. I had to think about photos as a set, rather than individually; think about how to lay them out, and how page spreads relate to each other; and learned how to mix slightly higher resolution digital images (from my whopping 4 megapixel digital camera of the time (weeping sound)) with very low resolution ones (from my iPhone 1), which inspired me to use some special effects to make use of the low-res images’ softness.
While I was taking photos for this book, I was continuing my (ordinarily domestic) phone photo diary practice, which also resulted in a Blurb book as part of my photo diary series. This was educational in different ways, most relating to its different content from my efforts to follow conventions in my formal work.
My phone photos are created for my own satisfaction, rather than to attempt to impress others or formally document some monument, and so are casual. I take photos of details at odd angles that won’t be good for drawing; I photograph ads and menus; I intentionally take photos of crowds of tourists at tourist sites, and especially enjoy photographing other people photographing. That isn’t the sort of thing included in most artsy/destination books, but are true to my experience of a place. (Note: Sylvia Plachy does a GREAT job of photos of people at tourist sites, though she brilliantly captures their personal drama at a level I cannot hope to achieve!). My phone photos show that I take photos of ads, signs, trash, art museum displays, selfies, and things I want to buy in shop windows, and the result is more…. comprehensive? Realistic? Varied in subject matter and more contemporary in representation? Maybe all of those things.
Under self-imposed rules of my phone-photo diary series, I also had to include EVERY photo I took in the book, so there was no editing of either content or the resulting jpeg files (except for limiting myself at the time due to storage limitations, and awareness that I had this rule). This means the book includes images which indulge my personal quirks, meet social obligations, and capture extremely minor details that are not especially artistic. (I did use some of these as an appendix in the art book, to personalize the book with experiences without including images of myself.)
(Aside: the garden on the cover was especially fun for me: I took a photo OF the other tourists in the designated/popular taking-photos-patio shown here FROM alongside the popular view of the landscape (an image of that appears within the book), and there was laughter from my fellow tourists when they looked away from that view and noticed…)
** ~ **
Back to the present: I intend to produce three photo books this autumn:
I only have one of these three books laid out, uploaded, and ordered. I haven’t scanned a single Polaroid yet, so I’ve got lots of work ahead of me… Wish me luck!
Having taken so many precautions for the pandemic for so long, part of my brain has been eager to visit another country ever since my second vaccine dose kicked in, but before Delta made its special talents known. While in real life I have no plans to travel outside of California this year, my brain is still wandering.
Out of curiosity to see what the options (which I will not be availing myself of soon) are, I visited the CDC’s website.
So you’ll see what I’m looking at, I’ll paste in the map here:
Sure, we are a country with abundant vaccines, but we still manage to be in the worst possible tier, because: some Americans have… issues.
Even though we are in the worst tier, we remain fussy about who can visit us. So, contrary to the hopes a friend in Sweden recently expressed, or the plans of a new Irish pen friend to visit his sister here, or the absurdly optimistic entreaties of British Airways in their advertising communications to me about booking trips to Europe, here is our current list of banned nations:
The ENTIRE SCHENGEN ZONE is on the list!! This hits me because I used to have a job that required frequent travel between a team here (in California) and one spread between the UK and the Schengen area, and… that job would not be possible in pandemic times. I was lucky to have had such a unique job, and appreciate it all the more now that it is such an artifact of the Before Times.
I am all the more grateful in retrospect for the travel opportunities I had in the past.
