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I set a fictional semi-monastic retreat in this place, where my character Ambrose lived and cared for Angharad, Elaine's mother-in-law in 'Sisters'.
I then read a series of comic fantasies by Heide Goody and Iain Grant, where a monastery was set on the same island, with a monk called Ambrose... spooky
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Life
is stranger than fiction, even the stuff I write.
Angharad
reminds me
of a writing episode a few years back. I was writing the episode of Drew/Gaby's race in Switzerland at the time of the Tour de France, all the tactics, crashes, mechanicals and so on. It was like de ja vu for almost a week, I wrote about a particular thing happening and the following day it actually did in La Grande Boucle, talk about spooky and I swear I wasn't sending my text to Dave Brailsford - honest!
I guess that much like there only being 3 film plots that all movies fit into, there are only a limited number of locations / actions / names that work within that framework. How many TG stories use the same character names for example, Alexander/dre appears very regularly in all manner of derivatives, Sandy, Lexi, Ali etc, etc, why? well it works easily within the TG genre. There are literary name subsets for just about every subset of society and woe betide someone who calls a judge Dave or an exotic dancer Camilla! My recent fiction reading is littered with these name/location cliches so the monk's name and retreat location are almost predictable (plus of course, can you be sure that the other authors haven't read your work?)
I tend to look at the whole subject as brilliant minds working alike.
Madeline Anafrid Bell
In The Mid 1980s.
I loved to write in English Class in the mid 1960s, but because of my very low GPA and Vietnam, did not attend College after High School. Later, in the late 1970s, I took a writing class to help my then wife get through Nursing School. I liked the class so much that after, I continued to write. This was before Computers but I finally did get a Dot Matrix typewriter. I finally wrote long story that proved to be prophetic. Many of the elements in that story have now happened. Scientists say the Ice will not melt for thousands of years, but I 'feel' it will be less than one hundred. In my area, Portland, Or. will be mostly under water. The Cascade Mountains will be the coast line with many Islands to the West. Eastern Oregon, now arid semi desert will be lush and full of trees.
I thought I had the tale saved in a paper folder that I have carried around for just yonks. The other day I decided to revisit the story and possibly submit it here. There are short snippets there but the story is not, much to my great disappointment.
Greta Thunberg Died for your Sins
So exactly what scientists are saying the icecaps won't melt for 1000s of years???
In the 1970's oil and auto manufacturing companies set out to hire a few scientists to deliberately muddy the debate about the impact of fossil fuels on the environment; spreading baldfaced LIES about carbon emissions and global warming, until nothing is fact, everything is opinion; so you might as well believe US, unless you want to pay a bit more for gas. Their fraudulent findings have succeeded in convincing the vast majority of conservatives that there is nothing to worry about, and even if there was it's all in God's hands; No organic lifeform could have any impact on the environment (remember when the emergence of plants changed the entire composition of Earth's atmosphere?); so we should just keep on doing what we're doing and not worry and certainly not regulate anything we do because everything is totally hunky dory and anybody who says differently is a "loony iib'ral tree hugging alarmist nutbag", so shut the fuck up + just crank up your air conditioner when the summer heat hits 44c in a few years, everything's fine!
These cynical calculating liars are the worst criminals history has ever known- KILLING the whole human race and a whole lot of other species for their short term profit, figuring they'll be dead in a few decades anyway so fuck all those stupid future generations- what have they ever done for ME??? No torture in the 7 Circles of Hell would be sufficient payment for their unspeakably self-centered crimes against not just humanity but Life Itself.
~Have a nice day. Veronica
.
"That looks easy, let's believe that..."
The Potato says:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o4jTclx61Tc
44C
You say 44C like it's some kind of extreme temperature. Those temps are common in several swaths across the US. Even in the somewhat more temperate areas of the south central portions of the US we are known to have a week or so of such temps during the summer. We just turn down the thermostats and blow up utility transformers. Now when lead starts boiling, that's hot!
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Instructor Nightmare
I'm thinking of posting some math nightmare scenarios I've envisioned, perhaps as a story. They usually involve gotcha students, or lawyerly thinking.
Instructor: The "summer solstice" is when the sun gets the highest in the sky. The "winter solstice" is when the sun is at its lowest point.
Gotcha student: That can't be. The sun is lowest in the sky every day at sunrise and sunset.
Instructor: Okay the sun's path across the sky is lowest at the winter solstice.
Gotcha student: The sun doesn't move across the sky. The earth rotates on its axis.
Flustered instructor: Okay, the sun's apparent path across the sky. What we view from our perspective.
Gotcha student: There isn't any apparent path across the sky. Nobody spends his time watching the sun all day.
-- Daphne Xu
Duplicate
Duplicate
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Duplicate
Duplicate
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
A Special Place...
A special place in Hell should be reserved for scientists who lie to the public about science -- their fields of expertise in particular. Three have come to mind, whom I won't name, at least not for now.
I also have problems with people who jump on reasonable and accurate approximations because they aren't exact. (Gotcha people, who attack understanding the subject.)
In relative velocity, someone just might understand Vac = Vab + Vbc. The exact formula taught too early, Vac = (Vab + Vbc)/(1 + VabVbc/c2), is mindless comprehensionless memorization.
-- Daphne Xu
Scientists say...
"Scientists say the Ice will not melt for thousands of years" is outdated now.
-- Daphne Xu
Writing the same story twice
Long time ago I wrote my first long story. I thought of it as a book, though now I'm not sure it qualified. I worked on it for a long time, and at some point I moved from one part of the country to another. I remembered that I'd written a lot of the story, but couldn't find the notebook. So I started writing it again from scratch, though not exactly from the beginning.
Thing was, I had a weird theory about plots at that time, so wrote the story backwards: meaning that I wrote the last chapter first, then the next to last, and so on until I got to the beginning.
After I finally finished the book, I was going through an old box of my things and found the original notebook where I'd started to write the story. Same story, same characters. To my surprise, I'd finished it before the move. The whole thing was there from beginning to end. I actually wrote the whole thing twice, not remembering that I'd finished it already.
I didn't compare the two... my partner at the time was VERY unsupportive of anything that didn't center on her, so I put the two versions away.
There was so much going on in those years that I'm not surprised that I'd forgotten. I did know by that time that it wasn't very good, and two moves later I tossed both versions out (I think).
Before I let them go, I was inspired with the PERFECT title for it. Imagine my surprise when a year later a major motion picture was released with the same exact title! And the movie was situated and filmed in the city I was living in at that time. It struck me as far more remarkable than my having written it twice.
It took a few days before I remembered that a friend, an actor, had a small speaking part in the film, and for some reason -- although he was not supposed to -- lent me the script to read, which is where I'd seen the title.
As to Bardsey Island, I'd love to hear how they speak, in either language. I took a gander in google, but didn't find any speaking parts.
- io
Accent
Here's a NW Welsh (Gog) accent, in English. There's a particular rhythm, a difference in emphasis, and the vowels tend to be single, rather than diphthongs, with a solidity to the consonants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlPzNvBpxGU
Here's Welsh dialects in Welsh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0muJdaEe3hU&t=3s
Imagine (from other stories) Sarah's family speaking like the person from Llanwnda. Annie's family is like the man from Morriston. Very oddly, the Patagonian accent sounds really, really Gog, especially in its rhythm, emphasis and vowel sounds. That is the accent I hear Enfys speak in.
We anchored there ...
... back in 1988(ish) after sailing back from Arklow, Ireland one night in a Westerly Pageant 25' bilge keeled yacht which sailed about as well as a pregnant duck! My friend kept it in Pwelli but was the only one on the Yachtmaster's theory course who failed, so relied on me to sail and navigate (no GPS of course - just dead reckoning)!
I sailed it alone all night on a dead run with a brisk westerly aiming for the Bardsey Island light, which meant I didn't need to watch the compass and could enjoy surfing down the waves whilst my companions slept down below. We took the inflatable tender and landed only to be mildly rebuked because apparently there was a fee to do so and we'd not bothered to bring any cash :)
O to be young(er) and foolish again. Thanks for reminding me.
R
Sailing
Just a gentle reminder that the island is not that far from Hell's Mouth...