Old ways made new
Dec. 4th, 2022 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12It's been a weekend of contrasts: Saturday was busy and full of people, with a trip into Cambridge to run several errands and go to the Mill Road Winter Fair, which was back after two years' hiatus due to the pandemic. This is one of my favourite regional events — it takes place on a long street in Cambridge which is home to most of the city's international grocery stores, a bunch of restaurants and cafes from South, Southeast and East Asia, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as various Italian delis and independent cafes. The street gets pedestrianised, there are parades and live music, and all the cafes, shops and restaurants sell food from stalls outside their front doors. Even if a shop isn't one that sells food, they tend to set up stalls selling things like mulled wine, sweets or baked goods, or even more elaborate street food for the day. We were spoilt for choice when it came to lunch, cobbling a meal together from several different food trucks, and drinking mulled wine as we wandered up and down the road.
Sunday was a much more typical affair for our household, with all the usual activities: swimming when the pool opened at 8am (with a cold walk home enlivened by various cats sitting in windows and a flock of swallows swooping back and forth across the morning sky, making a sound like gently-breaking waves in a quiet bay), stewed fruit and crepes cooked to the soundtrack of a Massive Attack album, writing Yuletide fic while the biathlon played in the background. I've just come back downstairs after doing my normal Sunday evening yoga, a stretchy slow flow to calm my typical end of the weekend anxiety.
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fandomtrees has a few days to go before it closes for sign ups. My tree is here, and I'd definitely recommend this fest as a low-pressure opportunity to create some fanworks, and hopefully get some nice ones of your own.
Robert Macfarlane's love of The Dark Is Rising is something I've always found very pleasing: I knew and enjoyed his nature writing before I knew we shared a love of Susan Cooper's children's books, and always felt he looked at the landscape with a similar eye to that of Cooper. So when I heard he was involved with a radio drama adaptation of the second book in the series, to be released around the same time of year as the story takes place, I was delighted. He's talked a bit more about his relationship with the books in a newspaper article for The Guardian.
I've just read one book since my last log — Servant Mage (Kate Elliott), the first in a novella duology. I'm not sure whether it can be described as 'epic fantasy' due to its brevity, but it certainly has that scale in terms of its sense of the sweep of history, violent shifts in politics, simmering revolutionary movements, and the interaction between the supernatural and people's everyday lives. All Elliott's strengths as a writer are on display here: comprehensive and well thought through worldbuilding, an emphasis on power relations and the terror and destruction wrought by those with social standing on those who lack power (and the foolish lies the powerful enforce in order to maintain their position), and a sense of people and societies grappling with vast, rapid political upheaval and social change. Elliott always has an interest in writing about what happens after the revolution succeeds, or the prophesied chosen one claims his kingdom, or the 'bad' monarch is replaced by the 'good' — she's never been satisfied with the standard fantasy trilogy closure, only with genuine justice. I'm looking forward to the sequel.
This is definitely a night to light a fire in the woodburning stove and burrow under one of the throw rugs — proper The Dark Is Rising weather, although hopefully not with the corresponding supernatural onslaught!
Sunday was a much more typical affair for our household, with all the usual activities: swimming when the pool opened at 8am (with a cold walk home enlivened by various cats sitting in windows and a flock of swallows swooping back and forth across the morning sky, making a sound like gently-breaking waves in a quiet bay), stewed fruit and crepes cooked to the soundtrack of a Massive Attack album, writing Yuletide fic while the biathlon played in the background. I've just come back downstairs after doing my normal Sunday evening yoga, a stretchy slow flow to calm my typical end of the weekend anxiety.
fandomtrees has a few days to go before it closes for sign ups. My tree is here, and I'd definitely recommend this fest as a low-pressure opportunity to create some fanworks, and hopefully get some nice ones of your own. Robert Macfarlane's love of The Dark Is Rising is something I've always found very pleasing: I knew and enjoyed his nature writing before I knew we shared a love of Susan Cooper's children's books, and always felt he looked at the landscape with a similar eye to that of Cooper. So when I heard he was involved with a radio drama adaptation of the second book in the series, to be released around the same time of year as the story takes place, I was delighted. He's talked a bit more about his relationship with the books in a newspaper article for The Guardian.
I've just read one book since my last log — Servant Mage (Kate Elliott), the first in a novella duology. I'm not sure whether it can be described as 'epic fantasy' due to its brevity, but it certainly has that scale in terms of its sense of the sweep of history, violent shifts in politics, simmering revolutionary movements, and the interaction between the supernatural and people's everyday lives. All Elliott's strengths as a writer are on display here: comprehensive and well thought through worldbuilding, an emphasis on power relations and the terror and destruction wrought by those with social standing on those who lack power (and the foolish lies the powerful enforce in order to maintain their position), and a sense of people and societies grappling with vast, rapid political upheaval and social change. Elliott always has an interest in writing about what happens after the revolution succeeds, or the prophesied chosen one claims his kingdom, or the 'bad' monarch is replaced by the 'good' — she's never been satisfied with the standard fantasy trilogy closure, only with genuine justice. I'm looking forward to the sequel.
This is definitely a night to light a fire in the woodburning stove and burrow under one of the throw rugs — proper The Dark Is Rising weather, although hopefully not with the corresponding supernatural onslaught!
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Date: 2022-12-05 10:17 am (UTC)no subject
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