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#FOTD: Lemon blossoms in our Tucson backyard
My mother always cooked with lemons. We had a lemon tree in our backyard when I was growing up in Northern California, and it produced lemons by the bushel basket. She even left a huge bag of lemons on the front seat of my car when I was in college, so my dorm-mates and I could make fresh lemonade. That activity was a wholesome departure from our usual shenanigans. The house we bought here in Tucson came with a sad, neglected lemon tree. We’ve been pampering it since we moved in–giving it lots of water, mulching it with compost, and, in my case, whispering sweet nothings to it as though…
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#FOTD: Trillium from my Portland garden
For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge, another throwback to my Portland gardening days. Taken April 7, 2007. I posted another trillium picture back in January, when I was looking over memories of times and gardens past. We don’t have trilliums here in Tucson–trilliums don’t have spines or thorns, and I believe it’s a local ordinance that anything grown here must be able to stab you. I don’t miss the rainy Portland winters, but I do–occasionally–miss slogging through my garden between showers to see if the trilliums were blooming yet. After months of grey and rain, I’d cling to any sign of spring the way an aphid clings to…
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#FOTD: African daisies
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#CWBC: Pair of barrel cacti
This week’s theme for Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge (CWBC) is Pairs. We found this pair of barrel cacti in the East unit of Saguaro National Park, about a half hour from where I live. Since moving to Tucson last October, I’ve found myself falling in love with cacti. They are fascinating, and I’m in awe of their ability to survive in such unforgiving conditions.
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Fiction writers, make your action beats multitask
“This deserted warehouse sure is creepy,” Shaggy said. “Yeah, it is. Now let’s split up and see if we can find the Ghostly Fisherman,” Fred said. “Ruh roh,” Scooby said. [several adventures later, usually involving Shaggy and Scooby running for their lives] “Let’s see who’s been scaring all the tourists away from Devil’s Cove,” Fred said. He yanked the mask off the Ghostly Fisherman. “It’s Barney Rumblefish, the real estate mogul,” Fred said. “I was trying to scare everyone away, so I could buy out old man Farnsworth for cheap and build a new luxury hotel in Devil’s Cove,” Rumblefish said. “And I would have gotten away with it if…
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Better Babies Contests: Eugenics at the State Fair
I’ve written before about what we writers call research, and everyone else calls farting around on the internet. Today I’ll share an example from earlier this week of where farting around on the internet research led me. Warning: disturbing content ahead. I’m polishing up my time travel romance, Vanishing, Inc., to get ready to query agents, and I wanted to add a funny date scene set in a traveling carnival. A little Googling, a few clicks, and I found myself browsing through an Arizona State Fair program from 1916. Pictures of the fair commissioners, rules for livestock judging, who was in charge of harness racing that year… and then I…
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Back in January, I announced my new pen name and gave this blog a new look. Behind the scenes, I also moved it to a new host so I could have more control over how it looked and behaved. But, of course, there was a problem. There’s always a problem when technology is involved. Always. It turns out that when you migrate a WordPress site from wordpress.com to wordpress.org, people who follow your blog via email no longer get emails. Yeah, I know, kinda defeats the purpose of following via email, right? I’m guessing I had quite a few email followers, because when I migrated my site, my hit counts…
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#FOTD: Budding cactus
Today’s entry for Cee’s flower of the day photo challenge is a simple snapshot, taken while I was on a lunchtime walk at work. It’ll win no prizes, but I couldn’t walk past this adorable blooming cactus without capturing it. Since moving to Tucson, I’ve become completely charmed by cacti. I’ve always been a lush cottage garden sort of person, but now that I’m surrounded by desert flora, I’m learning to appreciate the shapes and textures of these amazing plants. See the hint of rust and red in the spines? And the cheerful, whimsical shape of the plant and its pointy buds? I plead guilty to personifying plants, but this…
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#CWBC: Arlington National Cemetery
This week’s theme for Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge (CWBC) is Numbers. That theme plays out two ways in this photo: literal numbers on the headstones, the years of birth and death, but more powerfully in the numbers *of* headstones. A visit to Arlington National Cemetery makes tangible the number of people who have died in service to the United States, and of course there are many more who are buried elsewhere. It’s one of the few truly solemn places I’ve ever visited. One of our Tourmobile guides through Arlington was a former military man. As he drove us around the cemetery, he spoke of the shared sacrifice of…
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#CMMC: Up close and personal with a saguaro
The theme for Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge (CMMC) this week is Closeup or Macro. I fell in love with macro photography years ago, when I first bought a decent point and shoot with a macro setting and started taking closeups of flowers. I still take closeups of flowers, but it’s fun to get in close with other subjects too. I’ve written on here before about noticing the details of life and of seeing life through a macro lens, and the older I get, the more value I see in those practices. I live in the Sonoran Desert, home of the saguaro cactus. They are everywhere down here–along the freeway, on…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
