Flower Photographs!

You'll have noticed there are flower pictures above, which I will explain in a moment. First, though, a quick PDAP update:

After thumbnailing Chapter Six, I decided to jump into writing Chapter Seven. That led to a little accidental writing on Chapter Eight, which in turn led to a little writing on Chapters Nine and Ten and, well… now I have my whole story plotted out. I hesitate to pop an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence, but— no, you know what? Big breath, chest forward, I have the whole story plotted out!!!

I always knew where I wanted to get to by the end of the story, but those climactic chapters were a fog-enshrouded chasm. There's still a lot of work to do, but I feel like I've sent my first rickety suspension bridge across that chasm. I can walk from one end of the story to the other.

I'm going to keep writing over the next few days because (at the risk of investing far too heavily in this metaphor) there are still some missing planks, loose knots, and crufty lines to trip over. Once I solve those problems, it still won't be Golden Gate Bridge, but that's okay, I will once more have faith that the "simmering" process will do its magic. Because that's how the Golden Gate Bridge was built, right? By waiting. Long walks and waiting.

If you've been following this project since the start, you may remember that I said I was going to work a-chapter-at-a-time and embrace the qualities that improvisation brought to the project. I think that has been valuable, but I also need to start funnelling this story to a conclusion, and I want to get there in a satisfying way. I need to avoid making any loose ends and start paying off all the existing ones. If this project were open-ended, something I imagined I would be working on continually, maybe I'd stick with the improvisation and see where it led me. I've loved the surprises it's delivered so far. And I think that by writing lean, I can leave myself room for further improvisation. Actually, now that I type this all out, I suspect it would be stupid to pretend that improvisation won't play an important role, no matter how much planning I do now.

More on this next week, probably, before I get down to inking Chapter Five.

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I'm sharing some flower photography this week! Back in September, for our kiddo's birthday, we took a quick three-day trip over to Victoria, on Vancouver Island. He loves the ferry. Between the ferry terminal and Victoria, there is "Butchart Gardens," a long-running heavily-advertised tourism institution in BC. Neither my partner nor I had ever been, and we garden (verb), so we decided to take a look.

It's an extremely impressive series of gardens and also, for the most part, not really my sort of thing. The garden layouts are too formal and old-fashioned for my taste. I like things more natural-looking. The Japanese garden is extraordinary, though. Their only mistake there is that they let more than three people in at a time.

I took a lot of photos. I don't know why — I hate reviewing and sorting photos. I'm not even sure I like making photographs. I often think about a quote from celebrity portrait photographer Annie Leibowitz, "I wanted to be a painter but I didn't have the patience." On one level, I understand what she means. But I also disagree with it. Photography seems to involve much more patience than painting or drawing, depending on what sort of results you're looking for (that qualifier is probably the key). If you're photographing in a candid manner, then there seems to be a lot of gambling involved — what will I see? What can I make of it? Will I capture the moment I saw with my eye? If you're photographing in a studio, there's all the lighting and equipment and costuming and on and on. I don't especially like editing photos, either — if it didn't come out of the camera well, then I'm loathe to massage it into something its not (I get a lot of Lightroom demos in my Instagram feed; clearly people are good at this, but it's not a skill I've built yet). That's what drawing is for. And again, I hate reviewing photos.*

Still, it seemed like a good day to look at some flowers.

I'm writing this on November 6th, the day after the 2024 US presidential election, and my anxiety is high. (The way I understand it, "anxiety" is deep, usually baseless worrying. Worrying about what? Everything and nothing, all at the same time!) I'm trying really hard to focus on things I can actually affect, and I'm going to try to skip out on Social Media for a little while.

If you're in a similar boat, maybe these flower photos will help. I make no claim that are amazing works of art. They're just flower pictures. Flowers are nice. This is what some of them look like.

I've included full-res versions of the images as attachments. Do with them what you will! One of them might make a nice desktop or home screen wallpaper! That's what I use them for, mostly.

(Please consider them offered under a Creative Commons "CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike)" license.)

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Thought I might add my recent comfort viewing/listening regime, in case it's also beneficial:

• Taskmaster - the whole thing is free on YouTube. It took me a while to warm to this show, and now it is quite possibly my favourite thing. It's not a reality TV show, it's not a British panel show, it's not DOUBLE DARE, but it's not not those things. If you've never tried it, I can only say: give yourself a little time to get used to it. If you really don't like one episode, please try another episode from a different season. One of the secrets of the show is the chemistry between the different contestants, and you just have to give that element time to reveal itself. Curiously, it is a show that mostly gets better and better, series after series. The most recent series is one of my absolute favourites. Ranking of seasons available upon request. (I will happily talk on and on and on about Taskmaster.)

• No Such Thing As A Fish - a podcast about fun facts from the "elves" behind TV series QI. The facts are interesting, the humour is generally good. Studio episodes are notably better than live episodes. I just like listening to them tell me fun things and marvelling at the world. I sometimes put this on if I'm having trouble falling asleep — in a good way. It's interesting, but not consequential.

• What We Do In The Shadows, the series - I picked this up again on Halloween (thank you for the reminder, Carla) and remembered why I loved it. Earlier, I must have binge-watched too much of it too quickly, because I bounced off it hard. So I'm trying to parcel it out more carefully now. Except on election night, when I downed five episodes in a row. No regrets. The photography improves in Season Five. I love Nadja.

• Yoku's Island Express, a video game - recently I've been figuring out how to introduce Kiddo to video games, so I've been digging through the Nintendo e-Shop. That led me to this little gem, a combination between pinball and a side-scrolling platformer, set on a lush little forested island. It was on steep discount (and still is, as of this writing), so I snagged it. I love pinball, except for all the frustration. This game minimizes the frustration. It was a delight, and I thought it worth mentioning because a good game can be uniquely distracting. (Related: HADES also seems to be on sale right now. Without looking, I know that game has the most hours clocked on my Switch. I recommend using "God Mode" guilt free — it makes the whole game much more accessible.)

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All the best to you, lovely people. Hugs from me to you, if you would like them.

Until next week,
I remain,
big breath,

TC

* Footnote! One thing I did to improve my photo-reviewing experience was to buy a copy of FastRawViewer. It lives up to its name, and has great tools to make culling easy. For someone who is only a part-time photographer who does not want to devote time or energy to a complicated workflow (e.g., my previous workflow was simply "sort things out using QuickView in Finder"), this app is great. I use Lightroom Classic (from 2021 or so) to edit photos. It's fine.