... and Friday

One more shot from the Poulnabrone series before I go on to other things:



Weather is finally cooling off a bit here, though still above seasonal normal. More garden cleanup this weekend, which is good for thinking. It also helps to keep one connected with the seasonal rhythms of the world, which were more important to people in Gwernin's time than to many of us today. An article in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago about the early introduction of pigs into the New Forest to deal with a bumper crop of acorns is an example in point. Traditionally pigs were allowed to graze on acorns this time of year to fatten them for November slaughter. In the Triads of Ireland, "the death of a fat pig" is given as one of the "three deaths that are better than life", and in another Irish text a young man's early death is mourned as that of "a pig who dies before the mast [i.e., acorn crop]". Just an example of the things most of us don't know or think about, but which are relevant to my storytelling.

-GRG

LibraryThing Giveaway

I've started another e-book giveaway on LibraryThing, this time for the new Smashbooks version of Flight of the Hawk. You can see the giveaway here.

Also, a link to a little more information on the fascinating limestone terrain of the Burren, where yesterday's and today's pictures of Poulnabrone portal tomb were taken.



-GRG

...and Wednesday...

Running late on my blogging today, partly because I was dealing with a promotional giveaway of Storyteller e-books on LibraryThing. Smashwords is great for this - it lets me generate a coupon code for anything up to 100% off on a given book, which I can then email to the contest winners along with the url for the book page. Much simpler than sending out a lot of pdfs, and certainly more cost-effective than giving away physical books.

On to today's picture: a much-photographed burial chamber from the limestone terrain called The Burren in western Ireland. I'll get the name on it latter today, but I wanted to put the picture up now.



Hoping to get a little more writing done at the weekend.

-GRG

Monday morning...

...and Denver weather has drifted back to "hot" - or at least, warmer than normal. Yesterday we tied the record high at the airport at 90 degrees (set in 1892). The nights are very cool now, though, which makes up for it. Still no frost, so I'm still getting squash, although less tomatoes now. Started garden cleanup yesterday.

More new pictures on Flickr - here's a sample. This is the standing stone I used for the first version of the Druid's Son cover.



On the writing front I got some work done over the weekend for a change - a little additional material, almost finishing the current chapter in The Druid's Son, and a lot of thinking about overall plot and timelines (gardening work is good for this!). Now to sustain that momentum - that is the hard thing.

I showed the second proof of Storyteller Songs to a friend this morning, and she obligingly pointed out a typo on the back cover. Oops! Well, if there has to be one, that's the best place for it, since only people looking at actual hard copies will see it. My little sacrifice to the God of Mistakes.

And that's it for Monday.

-GRG

Storyteller Songs published

I've published it on Lulu and on Smashwords today. So far paper copies are available only on Lulu, but it should reach Amazon in about a month. Not that I expect sales - how many books do even well-known poets sell? - but I'll have hard copies to offer locally, and anyone else who wants it can get it.

Now back to work... I've been working on timelines today, working out when some things had to happen in order for other things to happen, so I don't paint myself into a corner. I know I have made one or two continuity mistakes in the past, but they weren't major, and anyway Gwernin's an old man, and also a storyteller... so he may make a few slips, or artistic emendations, in his stories. We all do it as we get older. How much do any of us really know about our own pasts?

Back to work now.

-GRG

More pictures

Uploaded another set of Irish pictures to Flickr. More standing stone / stone circle pictures soon. In the meantime, here's a different sort of archaeology. No precise dating for this structure, but probably 6th to 8th century.
-GRG

More equinox

Weather's finally cooling off a bit. Appropriate - autumn equinox at 6:10 pm Denver time (MDT). We've losing two and a half minutes of daylight every day - nothing compared to the five minutes a day in Juneau, Alaska, where I used to live, but still quite noticeable over the course of a week. Still no frost, and not likely to be for at least the next week. I need to put up some garden photos, but I'll have to wait until this weekend to take them.

In the meantime, another stone circle picture - this one is Drom Beg, from our Irish trip last year.

Equinox

Although the actual autumn equinox isn't until Wednesday, we celebrated it yesterday. Not a big festival in Celtic cultures, I think, and hard to spot the exact day unless you've set up some convenient standing stones...

I got the first proof for Storyteller Songs and spent part of the weekend reformatting it. Finally got a little more writing done on Druid's Son yesterday. It was a good day to stay in and write - Denver had record high temperatures, in the mid 90's. Cooling off a bit tomorrow, I hope - we've been having forest fires in the foothills due to the unusually warm dry weather for the last month. Normally we've had frost by now, but not this year.

Well, at least it's good for the squash and tomatoes.

-GRG

More photos

Still in the process of uploading August's photos to Flickr. Here's one from Uley Bury hill fort in Gloucestershire, looking west across the Severn Estuary to south Wales.


For more of this set, check out this link.

-GRG

Housekeeping

Lots of rearrangements and new links on the right sidebar. Pretty soon I'll have to stop fiddling with websites and start writing again...

eta: Playing with Flickr now... here's a set of photos from my last trip for standing stone enthusiasts!

-GRG