Three Moments of Delight

[dr_pretentious]

Not Quite Midnight, 2 July

When all the other cousins retired to their tents and the last of the aunts, uncles, and grandfolk retired to their beds in the house, Dan and I broke up the bonfire and stayed to make sure the scattered remnants died down without incident. We blew out the citronella torches and, in the new-moon Adirondack darkness, watched the stars. Nowhere else is the Milky Way so clear. I won the annual meteor count: Sarah 6, Dan 1. When we'd picked out the few familiar constellations we could, we made up our own. (It's a terrier. No, it's a clown. Really? Maybe it's the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert. You think?) And then Dan started looking for the Beltresin constellations--Loom, Vine, Dolphin, and Cart. We didn't find them to our satisfaction. I mean, we found stars we could persuade ourselves to see as looms, vines, dolphins, and carts, but somehow the nouns I'd thrown into the first draft of the manuscript had lodged themselves in our brains in some very particular way, and the constellations we were making up didn't look anything like the ones the characters see when they look at the night sky over Beltresa. How odd, that we both felt so certain of that. Either I married The Right Person, or I've driven him crazy in exactly the way that best suits me.


The First Hour of Full Dark, 4 July

So that Dan could get to work on Tuesday morning, we started the long drive home from the woods on the afternoon of Independence Day. Just as we reached the Garden State Parkway, all the cities and towns of New Jersey started their fireworks at once. (I guess they're glad to have us back, huh? Watch for me, will you? I'm trying to drive here.) We caught Newark's dramatic opening barrage, Nutley and Montclair's first long movements, a spark or two from Clifton, the rich middle of East or possibly West Orange, and all the glorious finales of Union County, with a final blast from Edison. There were a couple of moments when I counted six distinct displays all around us at once. Dan, being an ascetic at heart, drove bravely on, but many of our fellow motorists pulled over to watch. And many other drivers who really should have pulled over didn't. Dangerous, dangerous. I wouldn't time it that way again on purpose, but oh, it was something to see.


After Early Evening Thunderstorms, 6 July

If Meagan the Mariner tells me the lightning is far enough away for swimming, I believe her. Anybody who says the words "my wetsuit" or "my ship" the way most people might say "my shoes" or "my car keys" can probably be trusted about that kind of thing. Frolicking on the beach in the company of a marine biologist means squinting at tiny wiggling dots she's caught in the water cupped in her hands. (Look! Juvenile crabs! Ooh, they're still planktonic!) Perhaps no one in the world is so enthusiastic about aquatic snails as Meagan the Mariner is. For her, each speck in the sea has a name.

Comments

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I love you :)

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

You know, if this is how you write extemporaneously (did I spell that right?), I cannot wait until your novel is published.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

(And, yeah, that's how you spell that.)

extemporanity

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

aw, that blows my guess. :) i figured that was a two-draft post, taking 45 minutes to an hour, with certain word-choice aforethought.

Re: extemporanity

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I write way too many of those, but this one was as close to extemporaneous as my prose gets. In the moments of delight, one of my thoughts was, "I'm going to write something about this in my blog." The day before I finally did, some of the phrases started to come together while I was taking my daily walk. When I sat down to type it, I only read it over once for egregious errors.

I suppose that doesn't count as extemporaneity, now that you point it out. But after five years on the diss and two years on the novel, and after writing enough poetry to conclude that the average gestational period for a poem is seven months, anything I don't sleep on looks pretty speedy to me.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

We didn't find them to our satisfaction.

well, that's mostly due to being in the wrong place. ;) i'm surprised y'all couldn't find a cart; the old name for the big dipper is the wain, or wagon. but delphinium (the dolphin) never rises in our sky. neither does hydra, the snake, which looks somewhat viney, as does cassiopeia, a winter constellation. and the loom? the one we call lyra, the lyre, the chinese call the loom, but it's a winter constellation here.

why mention this? it suggests that wherever beltressa is, it's close by, since our constellations exist only from our point of view. maybe it's the mythical other earth, forever opposite the sun from us. :) if you'll say which constellations rise in which seasons, i could even make a guess which is their pole star.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Well, we could find a cart, just not the right cart, etc.

The Loom, the Vine, and the Dolphin are all among the things Vaia witnesses in Vol1Pt1Ch8, during Neren's funeral rites, so that puts them in the sky around the vernal equinox.

Kala tells time by the Cart in Vol1Pt3Ch... I haven't broken Pt3 into numbered subchapters yet. Anyhow, when she's on the roof and needs to give Aullann five minutes to make himself scarce before she goes down to trick the City Guard. So that puts the Cart rising along the ecliptic in the early evening right around the winter solstice.

I'm kind of pleased with myself that I didn't need to look at the ms at all to sort that out.

verisimilitude

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

i'm entertained you've got the sky that well nailed down. :)

i think the beltressan constellation ephemerides work out consistently in our sky, so i'll probably amuse myself with them tomorrow.