Looking directly toward the sun (behind the trees) at 3 this afternoon. The thermometer may read a little low, but not by much. At least I’m getting some writing done!
Archive for November, 2012
The quotes tweeted between November 1 and November 6 from @sueannbowling are all from Spell of the Witch World, a collection of three novelettes by Andre Norton. The story names are given before the quotes from that story.
Dragon Scale Silver
“A double wish carries its own price.” The Lady Almondia has worked magic to bear not only the son her lord wishes, but also a daughter. The birth of these twins will kill her.
“To live through another day takes all the wits a man has.” Jervon, speaking of his life as a warrior.
“The hatched fledgling cannot be fitted back into the eggshell from which it has broken free.” Elys, recognizing that she cannot return to a village which now has no need of her.
Dream Smith
“If a gift goes unused it withers and the world is the poorer for it.” Sharvana speaking to Collard about his gift of seeing the past and recreating it in metal.
“Let us claim this dream forever, and claiming it, make it real.” Magic again. Collard has wrought a miniature feasting hall for the crippled Jacinda, and the magic he has called on has put the two of them there.
Amber Out of Quayth
“The false must always have a grain of the true within it.” This is referring to the false amber, but it is true also of a lie if it is to be believed. Very appropriate for the election season just over.
“It would be so much easier just to stay here, and be found or die as chance decreed.” Bowling, Tourist Trap. Amber is on her own in the wilderness with an infected leg.
29 below Farenheit when I left to cast my vote. How about you?
Sunrise this morning will be at 8:54 am – still well after I get up – and the sun will set at 4:14 this evening. (Which means I have to arrange transportation to my OLLI classes with Van Tran, since I cannot drive home in the dark.) We’ll have just 7 hours 19 minutes of alleged daylight, but this time of year the sun never gets much more than 9° above the horizon.
Time for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) to kick in. (Personally, I think SAD’s an urge to hibernation triggered by the long nights, and makes perfectly good sense.) I use full-spectrum bulbs in most of my lights, especially the plant lights, which seems to help. Having something growing and blooming also gets me through the winter.
The weather remains cold, with nights below 0°F and days above. Some snow showers, but no heavy accumulation. I’ll check the snow stake as soon as it’s light enough; when it got too dark to see last night it was at 5″.
It’s a check-in month for #writemotivation, and I’m going to try to get at least the first round of edits for Rescue Operation back to my editor this month. She wants more of a story arc, and I realized that keeping the reader in the dark about Zhaim’s machinations behind the scenes isn’t working, even though the POV characters are in the dark. So I have to let readers know what’s going on behind Roi’s back. This will involve:
Rearranging some chapters. (done)
Write several bits from Zhaim’s POV. (2 written so far, 3 to go)
Rewrite several pieces to give more showing, less telling. (Started.)
Put in Jacyn’s POV and actually show the hijacking, instead of letting him tell Tod. (Decided where to put it, but not written yet.)
More of the grief over two former characters’ deaths, even after 50 years. (Thought about.)
The way I have it split up for writing purposes, there are 63 chapters of widely varying lengths. I’m working on Ch 21, which is a reasonable progression toward my goal.
This is the first volume of a trilogy, so there are definitely some loose ends!
Another fragment from War’s End today. Ginger is speaking as she works to free Kelty, while Madame Irela has just followed Bounce back to Coralie. If you’re interested in earlier fragments, click on “Index” above, and then on “Six Sentence Sunday.”
“That log should be safe if you want to sit down, Madame Irela, and I’ll have some insect repellent shortly.”
“What about food?” Coralie asked. “And it looks as if it might rain–shouldn’t we rig something to catch rainwater? And shelter from the rain?” She was hungry, and while she could see several things that looked like fruiting bodies on the trees, she had no idea if any were edible. She knew test methods–every nomad child did.
War’s End is the third book of the trilogy I’m currently editing.
Six Sentence Sunday is a web ring of authors who post six sentences from anything they’ve written. To find other great authors, click on the logo below — and we all love comments.
Red Dun. Notice how flat the color looks compared with chestnut.
The colors of all wild animals are a tradeoff between camouflage, which hides the animal from its predators or hides the predator from its prey, and display, which involves making the animal more attractive to members of the opposite sex or more threatening to rivals of the same sex. In equines, camouflage may involve blending into the herd (as in zebras) or blending with the background (often dry grass.) Bay, black and chestnut are not very good camouflage colors, but flatter, duller shades of these colors are.
Dorsal stripe on the same red dun as the first picture.
The dun gene flattens and dulls the coat color over most of the body, sometimes leaving head, lower legs, and manes and tails darker than the body. Both red and black pigments are affected. It also produces a highly variable degree of striping of the coat. In general a dun horse will have a dark stripe running from the mane to the base of the tail, which in some cases continues down the center of the mane (dark mane center with light edges as in the Fjord horse) and tail. (Dorsal stripes do occur on other colors, but they are rarely unbroken from mane to tail.) In addition duns often have zebra-like stripes on the legs (especially near the knees and hocks.)
Dun Fjord horse. Note that the dorsal stripe continues up the middle of the mane. This horse also has tiger striping (faint) on the hocks.
Less commonly, they will have spiderweb-like markings on the forehead, or a cross stripe over the wither area—a marking common in donkeys. All of these markings are grouped as primitive marks.
One early study of dun suggested that the dulling is due to a crowding of the pigment granules to one side of the hair. My own observations tentatively support this, but I am aware of no published studies—looking at individual hairs under a microscope doesn’t seem to be popular today.
Dun is thought to be the wild-type gene for horses, and it is definitely dominant to non-dun. Why do we think it is the wild-type gene?
Dun Fjord horse. Note that the dorsal stripe runs into the tail, and the faint zebra markings on the hocks.
First, cave paintings. Almost all show the darker head typical of dun, and some also show other primitive marks. Cave artists were limited by the available pigments, but their renditions are certainly compatible with the various types of dun.
Second, the wild horses that survived long enough to have their color recorded. These include the living Przewalski’s horse of Asia and the now extinct Tarpan of Europe, both duns.
Dun, though a dominant gene, is not that common in most horse breeds today. Why? During domestication, an occasional mutation to non-dun must have occurred. Human beings are attracted to what is different, and the earliest domesticators of the horse probably prized these intensely colored variants—to such a degree that in many horse breeds of today dun is either non-existent or very rare.
A darker shade of dun on bay. This horse had the dorsal stripe (clearer in another photo) and a clear shoulder stripe.
The words dun and buckskin are rather loosely used, and often treated as synonyms. Genetically, however, it is better to reserve buckskin for a bay with one cream gene at the cream locus, and dun for the whole suite of colors produced by one or two doses of the dun gene. The colors include red dun (dun on a chestnut background) various shades of tan with black mane, tail and lower legs known as zebra dun, (dun on a bay background) and various shades of dark slate gray to tan to silver with dark points known as grullo (dun on a black background.)
In my science fiction book, Tourist Trap, I have both wild horses assumed to be descended from some transplanted from Earth during the Pleistocene, described as striped duns, and a domestic mare, Raindrop, whose base color is grulla (feminine form of grullo.) Those striped duns are assumed to be duns of various base colors with very strong primitive marks. I might add that Raindrop’s color and markings correspond almost exactly with those of the foal in the last picture.
Year 4 Day 236
One of the bits of information that is in the computer files is that pregnant women sometimes crave particular foods, and that seems to carry over to the People. At least Songbird would very much like some dates.
The particular clone of trees I found earlier did indeed produce a fruit that the People relished, but most of the trees of that type do not. Since that clone does not currently have ripe fruit, I added testing of palm trees to my mapping–somewhat doubtfully, as the coastline I am now mapping is pure desert. Today, however, I levitated enough to get an overview of the area (and make myself very short of breath) and while I did not see any ending of this very salty sea to the north, I spotted a thread of green far to the west. A river? Could it flow into the tideless sea I seek?
It was indeed a river, and on its banks grew not only reeds, but date palms. And the river flows northward! I spent the rest of today checking for ripe fruit, feeling for high sugar content. And I found another of the trees with sweet fruit. It must be a rare mutation, so I made sure I memorized the teleport coordinates of that tree as well as gathering some of the fruit.
Shall I continue my mapping of the coastline of the salty sea, assuming that it will eventually meet with the destination of the river? Or start tomorrow from the river and follow it northward?
Whichever way I choose, Songbird (and Giraffe and Meerkat) were overjoyed to have the dates.
Jarn’s Journal is a fictional journal kept by a fictional alien stranded in Africa roughly 125,000 years ago. He is being treated as a god (much to his annoyance) by a group of primitive humans calling themselves the People. The story is the remote backstory to my published novels Homecoming and Tourist Trap and the trilogy I am currently editing. Jarn’s Journal to date is on my author site.
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