Happy start of the week. I was out doing yard work this evening and tried to resist grabbing my camera at sunset, but it grew so pretty I threw aside my gloves and dashed inside for my camera.
I’m glad I did, and I hope you are too!
Have a great week.
NaNo — you may have heard it, but what does it mean? Well, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, but it’s actually international, so perhaps it should be called InNo. Well, NaNo is how it started and will remain.
NaNo is a huge excuse to write a crazy number of words in a month, fifty thousand to be exact. It’s an excuse to ignore the housekeeping, survive on leftovers and take-out, drink too much coffee, get out of bed when it’s still dark, and write, write, write.
There are so many writers participating, like Sheri Kennedy, which makes it fun. I was up at 6 today to join friends on Twitter for two 50-minute sprints. That’s early for me, and it’s good for me!
I am working on the sequel to the novella I submitted. Sadly, it wasn’t a fit for the anthology, but that’s okay. It’s an international romantic spy thriller, and getting that novella done and turned in inspired me to do a series. I plan to write the sequel then go back and turn the first one into a novel. Onward!
To inspire us for the week ahead, here are some fresh new Autumn photos from Nevada:
We arrived in the mountains just in time to snap a few photos of autumn colors.
I’ve signed on for a higher level of volunteer work for my Romance Writer’s of America chapter. I’ll be turning over one or two other duties to take on a board position. I think it’s healthy in volunteer organizations to have some turnover of duties. I was doing the website maintenance and it looks like another member is willing to take that on. It will be interesting to see what she does with it. Also to see if my procedures make sense. I’ll find that out soon enough. Nothing like having someone use your procedures to find out what’s unclear.
Visiting up here in the mountains is special to me because I grew up here. I have very strong connections to place. It’s almost physical. Occasionally I’ll travel somewhere and feel I need to go back, but my strongest bonds are to the Sierra mountains around Lake Tahoe. I have friends I grew up with who feel the same — and they live here full time. It’s nice to see them and reminisce.
As for “work,” I’m making progress on the planning stages of the sequel to the novella that is on submission. I’ve decided to plan for one complete book rather than a trilogy as I thought. There will be an opening for further books should the first two prove popular.
I’m planning to finish the planning…LOL…in October so I can write a fast draft of the novel during National Novel Writing Month (NaNo). Are you doing NaNo? If so, find me as a buddy if you like.
What do you look forward to doing, enjoying or accomplishing this week?
No matter what you are planning to do, I hope you have a good week with good health.
Happy Friday locals and happy Saturday to my faraway timezone friends. This morning I actually went out to take photos. I dreamed of doing sunset photos of San Francisco for you yesterday, but house projects kept us at home. I like downtown Campbell so much you’d think, why don’t I just move there! Well, it’s not too far, so I can enjoy it easily, and now you can too.
I appreciate the care the town has taken for its historic district, especially when so much building is going on to squeeze more and more stuff into the area.
I’m also impressed by the flowers. I don’t plant many flowers, but they really beautify. At least we can enjoy the effort of others!
Have a fabulous weekend, and see you on Monday.
I can still say Happy Monday for another hour my time. Here are a few photos for the fun of it, nothing fancy, but it’s nice to take a visual break, eh?
A quick look at what has been keeping me so busy…
Have a great week!
Monday flew by quickly followed by the rest of the week. Fortunately a friend sent me something that inspired me about art and I took a break last night to have some fun with this image from Amsterdam taken three years ago.
Have a great weekend.
Happy Friday.
I haven’t been out to shoot, so I thought I’d revisit some old photos. I have been thinking about New York a lot…maybe because it’s been a year since we were last there. With a feeling of nostalgia as I went through the photos, I found myself skipping over all the shots of buildings and selecting these images to play around with. They evoke good memories of the feelings of New York. I hope you enjoy this bit of New York flavor.
Have a nice weekend!
These were opportunistic shots. We didn’t stop once, road warriors on a mission. But some of them turned out. This is coming up Interstate 5. I scraped the bugs off the windshield in post processing.
We don’t have clear skies in California in the summer any more. There were 2000 or so fires burning when I looked last, which was pretty soon after this episode.
Right after driving past Shasta, we saw heavy smoke, then we drove into it. It was horrible, it seemed like a pretty good rendition of Hell.
This smoke came into our car. It wasn’t until the drive back that we figured out that we have to put the fan on high, not level two, level four. Then it kept up with the smoke that crept into the car. On the way up we both had stinging eyes and developed some respiratory trouble.
But that’s nothing compared to the people living in Weed. Two hundred homes burned, a church, a new resource center and a school. Oh, and the main employer, a mill. One story was a couple coming back from somewhere, they see all this smoke, then they see cars driving the opposite direction covered with fire retardant. Terrible, and scary evacuating…the traffic jammed!
The fire had happened a few days before, well it was still ongoing, but the interstate was open again. I kept thinking, they would close this road if it wasn’t safe, right? Because we couldn’t see much. It was a weird feeling driving along at the whim of whatever was happening out there, but nothing like when the fire burned through the town and down to the freeway. Neighbors were pounding on apartment doors to get people out of there.
Miraculously, no one died. Whew.
I hope you have a safe happy week wherever you are.
Like I said in Monday’s post, I didn’t have much time to take photos during our short stay in Ashland, but I had noticed this historic hotel and used my few minutes to go there and take shots. The clouds were cooperating on Friday.
I liked it, particularly the way the light looked on it and with the hills in the background. The hills are so pretty around Ashland.
Just like in California, the hills on the western side of town are greener. I loved this house nestled in trees with the mountainside and forest in the background, just across from the Thomas Theater, Cabaret, and Green Square (where they do live music).
Then there was this cabaret, and with the clouds overhead, I thought that looked nice.
That’s it from Ashland. On Monday I’ll show you some Shasta shots I managed through the car window on the way.
Have a great weekend.
First a quick note: I’m on Casi McLean’s blog today talking about the relationship between photography and writing: http://casimclean.com/nicci-carrera-4/
We saw Richard II at the Thomas Theater in Ashland. Seeing Shakespeare at the Oregon theater festival has been a dream since college. Well, I’ve done it and I loved it.
I’ve recently gained a newfound interest in Shakespeare. For one thing, I’m drawing on one of his plays for a book, and for another thing, I read a historical mystery called An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, (reviewed here) which sparked an interest in history. Because of how much I enjoyed the fictional lens on history provided in this book, of the various plays being offered in this year’s festival, I wanted to see Richard the II, the first of a four-part series about the royal house of Lancaster (according Spark Notes, which I mention and link to below.)
Motivated by the fact that I was seeing the play, I spent a few hours reading the modern-day replacement for Cliff Notes: Spark Notes. Wow, this free resource did a fantastic job of explaining the play. I also read some of the history surrounding Richard the second. You do have to take a bit of what, well, more than a bit of what Shakespeare is writing with a grain of salt. It is after all historical theater, so there’s license for guessing some of the events and doing so in a way that amplifies the drama. That said, I have such a different sense of that period and of Henry IV, which they are going to do next year, presumably they’ll also do Henry IV part two the following year and the final of the series, Henry V in 2019.
Henry IV deposed Richard the Second, which is what the play is about. I’ve seen Henry IV as a movie, but knowing how he came to the crown definitely changes my perspective of him and I’m looking forward to continuing the enjoyment of learning.
The theater is small and we were right next to the stage. I will say as a point of caution, don’t sit in the first row because the stage comes out into the crowd and, I don’t know if this is usual or not, but there was a lot of say it don’t spray coming from the actors, let me just put it that way, LOL! I would opt for the second row or further back. I’m not sure anyone in the audience actually got sprayed, but given I’m a germ-phobe, that’s not something I would want to think about while watching the play, and I figured you wouldn’t want to either.
However I don’t want to leave you with just that point because the show was good. My husband is from New York so I asked him if the show was good, to be sure. He has very high standards. He pronounced it good, so there you go. They used modern clothes and they threw in some modern props, which was a little distracting, but actually once we grew used to it, we both felt that these elements enhanced the experience and accomplished what we assume was the purpose, which was to keep making Shakespeare relevant to current times.
I didn’t have much chance to take photographs. When I had time, it was smoky from the fires that raged in the town just south of Ashland. However on the morning we were leaving, the air was clear enough, and I did manage a few shots. Today I will show you a collection of fancy cars. There must’ve been a fancy car show this weekend because all kinds of cars were arriving in the parking lot of the hotel just as we were leaving. Or it might have been a hot rod club, but the first car that stopped us in our tracks was this:
What was a Rolls-Royce doing in the parking lot of one of the more modest hotels in town?
When we carried on and saw this, we thought, something was up.
We loved how the black surface of this Audi mirrored the trees, and you could actually see green on the black background.
These folks were nice enough to let me take a snap of their car while they were unloading.
Interestingly, after we had driven about 150 miles back into California, we stopped to get gas, and there was yet another fancy car, a vintage Ferrari circa Magnum PI. Since I already had the lens on, I was able to grab a snap. Here you go.
It’s Labor Day here, and I’m laboring on my romantic suspense novella. It’s due on October 4, so I’ll be concentrating now to finish it in time. Once that’s done and submitted, I’m going to start working on some short Sci Fi fiction under my Antonia Moran identity.
Have a great week.
Nicci Carrera 