Francesca Forrest's Blog

There is a cardinal pair in our yard, and I love them very much. I drew them having a cup of tea.

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A mi me enseño a cantar la calandria y el cenzontle,
la calandría y el cenzontle y el pájaro cardenal
la calandría y el cenzontle y el pájaro cardenal

--Biomigrant & El Monte Adentro: "Voz emplumada del monte"
calandría = chalk-browed mockingbird (Mimus saturninus)
cenzontle = northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottus)
pájaro cardenal = northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis)

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Ah, four good things on the docket right now, two of which were recommended to me by other people.

1. Journey, by Joyce Carol Thomas

I was intrigued by rachelmanija 's write up , and when I said so, she said, "You specifically would enjoy it." And I DO. The language is gorgeous, and the story moves along. Rachel quotes the final line of a sermon in her post, but man, that entire sermon! Here's more from it:

"Death dealing is the devil's duty.

"The devil's still swishing his long reptilian tail, hoodi...

I went to a show the sea spirit (spouse of the tall one, mother of my little grandson) was in (show was a queer BIPOC group--the sea spirit's piece was about being nonbinary but claiming the title of mother), and before the show, there was music playing, and one piece had this really powerful chorus:

Aquí estamo', siempre estamo'
No nos fuimo', no nos vamo'
Aquí estamo' pa' que te recuerde
Si quiere' mi machete te muerde

(We're here, we're always here
We haven't left, we're not leaving
We're here to re...

Spent some time walking along the side of the highway today. I always feel strange and liminal when I do that because it's not something people generally do. The shoulders can be narrow, cars and trucks can be going fast--it's not set up to be walked along. It's a strange sensation to move through space in a way that no one is expecting you to. It can make me feel like I have superpowers: since I'm covering the space at a different speed, from a different vantage point, I'm able to notice thing...

On Mastodon they have various hashtags with various writing-related questions, and today, a question on one of the hashtags was "On a scale of from 1 to 10, how safe is your world?" (by which they meant the world of your writing project).

Several people pointed out that you can't really average out safety over a whole world, and still more people pointed out that safety is always going to be a matter of "for whom?" No matter what genre you're writing, if you have multiple characters, they can't a...

I let a lot of milkweed grow in my yard. In part it's for the monarch butterflies, in part it's so I can harvest the fibers, in part it's because I like the scent of the flowers. I've also enjoyed eating the young pods (carefully cooked) sometimes.

This year, the milkweed's been afflicted by a bright orange-yellow aphid called the oleander aphid.

(  beneath a cut in case seeing a whole lot of aphids isn't your thing  )

My approach to minor infestations of things has been to try to wash them off, but ...

"Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird," read the beginning of a Bluesky post that linked to a 30-minute Youtube video about birdsong and starlings' capacity for mimicry. A guy drew a picture of a bird in a spectral synthesizer, which then will produce the sounds that the lines indicate.** The guy played those sounds for a starling, and lo and behold, the bird copied it--such that when you look at the spectrogram, you see a picture of a bird that's very close to the picture the guy had drawn...

Two weeks running with posting about reading on Wednesday, whohoo! ... It won't happen again for a while.


The Tail of Emily Windsnap, by Liz Kessler

I wanted to read this after troisoiseaux recalled loving it as a kid and enjoyed it on a reread. I was intrigued by her description of Emily’s starcrossed parents’ romance and Emily’s needing to rescue her father from mer-prison (which is only half the story; the other half is Emily discovering she turns into a mermaid in water, meeting a mergirl who ...

The first I heard from behind me as I was walking along the boardwalk that crosses over a low-lying area on the way to the supermarket.

"No. No, if you've lusted after him in your HEART that's the same as ADULTERY ... Okay. But like Job. Job said--"

I couldn't quite get what Job said, and I'm surprised to hear Job referenced in this context (so maybe I misheard), since Job wasn't lusting after anyone; he just had his family wiped out in a divine thought experiment.

I took a covert glance behind me...

Look at this! Posting about books I've read or am reading on an actual Wednesday. Wohoo, winning!


(  The Lincoln Highway  )

(  Saint Death's Daughter  )

(  The Tail of Emily Windsnap  )

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