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[ritaxis]

Well, I got interested in the Library at Eggplant Productions, but I decided my first attempt, though it hit exactly 300 words, was not quite ready -- it needs to be pushed more in the creepy direction. I envision four interlocked submissions, which could be read separately, but which together make a bigger story.

Oh, hell, maybe I should just write it up as a full-fledged story.

I'm off to Point Reyes/Tomales Bay/Drake's Bay this evening, and I have to empty the camera first -- and I just took a whole raft of pictures down at the levee. I wish the camera was more quickly responsive. I could have gotten a great picture of mallards in their mating flight, and another of a flying crow. I did get some orioles hunkered down in an aspen (or something: I forget whether I recognized the tree). There are a lot more deciduous things by the river than there are in other places around here. I wonder if it has to do with the presence of groundwater close to the surface? I wonder if evergreens do better in dry summers? I wonder why I don't already know this?

I also worked on Afterwar. A whopping 240 words, for a total of 540.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Hello from Tennessee. We have a couple of friends in common, and I enjoyed looking through your journal.

If you are agreeable, I'd like to add you to my friends list.

Thanks, Jackie

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It's okay with me. Usually when people I don't know start reading what I write, they don't tell me, and I spend a while trying to figure out who they are. Not that it matters, right?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Well, then.

Thanks.

And I like your icon.

Jackie

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The story behind the icon is this. Among the most seminal things I read as a child was a story of H.G. Wells called "The Crystal Egg" in which a repressed little shopkeeper gets hold of an egg-shaped stone with a hole at one end. When he looks through the hole like you looke through the hole in a sugar Easter egg, he sees a vista of an alien landscape and intelligent aliens. To me, reading is all about the crystal egg, and so, therefore, is writing.
Currently, I have nine different visions in my crystal egg, most being earthly or Martian landscapes, and now this plum blossom, which is also an important thingy from my childhood because of the Arthur Waley translations of Chinese poetry and because of the fruiting hedge thing my great aunt planted along her drive (one of those long gravel country driveways that goes to a horseshoe or a turnaround in front or back -- in her case, a turnaround in back, under an immense native sycamore)

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Thank you for explaining more about your icon, which is even more enchanting now that I understand that one can see into different worlds.

What a delicate idea, so beautifully realized.