Quebecois Music

Quebec Trip 2017 Report, Part 1: Getting there

My grand Camp Violon Trad + Memoire et Racines Quebec adventure is sadly now concluded, but now at least I can have the fun of telling you all about it! So now let us begin the blogging!

I can’t give you a day-by-day report of every single thing that happened, though I took a bunch of notes in various forms throughout the trip, and I’ll be relying on those to write these posts. I did have wifi access at Violon Trad–but it was erratic and, well, I was kinda busy, so I didn’t try to do constant reporting of what was going on. So I took a bunch of notes instead on my phone and some in hand-written form as well.

This post is intro and will be all about just organizing to go on the trip!

Continue Reading

August 11, 2017 by
Main

In memory of my friend Susan Moseley

I have a lot I want to write up about my trip to Quebec, and in particular about both Camp Violon Trad and Memoire et Racines. This post, though, is about news I received while Dara, Vicka, and I were going to Memoire et Racines: i.e., that my friend Susan Moseley had passed away.

Some many months ago Susan had told me in email that she’d been diagnosed with a stage 4 brain cancer. That deeply alarmed me at the time, because yeah, I know from experience with brain cancer; it’s what killed my mother. For a while Susan hung in there, emailing me periodically and letting me know how she was doing. But I’d not heard from her much this year at all, and had not received any reply to the last couple of times I’d emailed her to let her know I was thinking of her. So I’d started to worry about whether her health had taken a turn for the worse.

Apparently it had, because while we were in Joliette for Memoire et Racines (and staying in the nearby community of Notre-Dame-des-Prairies), Susan’s daughter Clare sent out word to her mother’s Facebook friends about a memorial they’re having for her. Which served as my notice that yeah, they’d lost her. :/

I gave Clare my deepest condolences, and, since I can’t go to the memorial the family is having for her, I wanted to write up this post about Susan and what she meant to me, a longer version of what I posted to Facebook.

I first met Susan online via the Le Vent du Nord Facebook page, when I first announced myself as a new fan of the group, and inviting other fans to come and chat with me. Susan emailed me and we hit it off pretty splendidly. She was responsible not only for my eventual decision to try to go to my first Le Vent du Nord show–but also for that show turning out to be the one back in 2012 that took place right before Dara and I got double-married in Canada with our friends Elane and Bai. She even arranged to get us a bottle of champagne. It was awesome.

She was also a significant supporter of the 2012 Kickstarter I ran for the second edition of Faerie Blood along with the release of Bone Walker. And by supporter, I mean not only monetarily, but also contributing significant beta reading effort for Bone Walker. We’re talking old school proofreading, too. She printed off the entire manuscript and wrote her remarks up on it. And then mailed it to me. I was super impressed by this, though she modestly demurred about having done anything special.

Dara and I got to meet her in person only once, during the 2012 Great Atlantic Canada Adventure. But we did spend a lovely afternoon with her wandering around Toronto. And, as I recall, she was wearing a Doctor Who shirt.

She sent me print copies of her daughter’s wonderful Ensign Sue Must Die comics, all three parts thereof.

She sent me a double album of music by the Stringband, by way of furthering my familiarity with Canadian folk music.

She sent me a couple of adorable little fingerpuppets made in the likeness of Elvis (an obvious choice for me, of course) and Virginia Woolf (NOT an obvious choice for me). They are now living on our refrigerator, since they have magnets on them.

She sent me tickets for Dara and me to get into the Le Vent show at Hermann’s jazz club in Victoria, which has since gone down in my personal fangirl history as “the first show where I had the mammoth”.

And oh, her love for Le Vent du Nord. My own affection for this band got a lot of its initial fuel from her, just because she spoke so highly of these boys not only as musicians, but also as people. She arranged multiple gigs for them in Uxbridge. She gave them meals and crash space and in general, from what she told me, was an excellent den mother type making it easy for them to go make awesome noises at all her neighbors.

It was very, very obvious to me from her emails how much she loved them, and now, every time I see them play, I will think of her. And I’ll hope that a little bit of her soul will waft along with every note they hit.

Rest in peace, dear Susan. I’ll miss you.

August 5, 2017 by
Photos

Some thoughts about the Olloclip for iPhone 6

If you follow me on Facebook you’ll possibly have seen me periodically posting about how my neighborhood in Kenmore is overrun by wild bunnies in the summer, and this year is no exception. One of the things I quite enjoy about the walk up and down our hill when I’m doing my daily commute is looking for bunnies–whether they’re hanging out openly in someone’s yard, or ducking under bushes, or what have you.

I take pictures of them when I can. Like, say, this one!

Bun in the driveway

You might notice, though, that this picture is kind of soft and fuzzy, and I mean that in a “not just because it involves a bunny” kind of way. The reason for this, I have discovered, is because the iPhone (at least up through the 6’s, as well as the non-Plus 7, according to specs on apple.com) uses digital zoom. And digital zoom gets problematic the closer in you try to zoom.

The common wisdom I’ve seen is that if you want to take a pic with an iPhone, you need to not zoom at all, and crop to get what you want. This is fine if what you’re taking a pic of is pretty close to you. Like this bunny! (This remains my very favorite bunny pic I’ve taken to date.)

Bus stop bun

But if a bunny is more than two or three feet away from you, you kinda have to zoom to shoot it. Because if you try to get closer, it will very likely sense your presence and bolt.

Which brings me to how I saw Dreamwidth friend cruisedirector posting her own bunny pics! She’s got some nice ones here and here and here, and in general, I’m rather jealous of her zooming abilities! She informed me that Samsung rather gets the credit for this, and if I google zoom specs for Samsung phones, I see things like “10x optical zoom” for the Galaxy S4 and yeah, that’d be why she’s taking better bunny pics than I am. ;D

So then I got all “so what can I do to solve this problem?”

Googling around led me to learning that there are assorted third-party lenses that have been made for the iPhone. The top two contenders I saw in my research were the Olloclip and the Moment, and of the two, camera nerds I read up on have been saying that the Moment is the superior lens.

The problem for me though is that the way the Moment works, they expect you to glue a mounting plate onto the back of your device, and screw the lens into that. I was rather dubious about this–and moreover, decided that I didn’t want to go hunting for one of these, even though I’d read in an article I found posted on the Seattle Times from 2016 that indicated that these lenses would be on sale at the Apple Store in Bellevue.

So instead I opted for the Olloclip. And specifically, I bought this thing, which gives me a telephoto lens and a wide angle one. The telephoto one is the one I’m interested in, since it gives me some optical zoom capability… 2x optical zoom as well as a shallower depth of field. It’s super-easy to pop onto the phone, and I can flip it around to use the wide angle lens. Both lenses can line up with the front and back cameras.

The one drawback here is that I do have to take the phone’s case off, but I’m okay with that.

And so far, the one thing I’m not entirely happy with is that test shots I’ve done with notable amounts of sky in them have caused there to be a bit of a dark halo effect in the corners. So to account for this, I will need to practice aiming and then cropping to get rid of that.

Also, if I change phones and want to continue to have an external lens, I’ll need a different one because this one is specifically designed for the iPhone 6. So far though I’m okay with that, too! My current phone is still perfectly lovely and I won’t be updating it in the near future.

So for now this little toy should be perfectly lovely for my bunny-photographing needs, and I will also be taking it to Quebec with me–because I’m hoping the improved zoom will let me do better at taking pics of musical performances, too. 😀

Here are a bunch of test pics I’ve done with the lens clip so far (and if the thumbnails aren’t coming through for some reason, you can find them directly on flickr here):

Happy with the purchase so far. Playing with this is already fun! Looking forward to learning more!

July 17, 2017 by
Television

On our new incoming Thirteenth Doctor

Thirteen

Thirteen

So yeah, assuming you were paying even remote attention to the Internet yesterday, you’ll have heard that Jodie Whittaker will be our next Doctor, as of the Christmas Special this year.

Jodie Whittaker, comma, a woman.

In case you didn’t see that news before and you want mere coverage, here you go:

Doctor Who Is Finally Giving Us A Woman as the Doctor, and It’s About Damn Time and The Internet Had Some Truly Spectacular Responses to the 13th Doctor, Jodie Whittaker on The Mary Sue

Doctor Who’s New Time Lord: The 13th Doctor is Jodie Whittaker and The Moment Has Been Prepared For: Jodie Whittaker and the Future of Doctor Who on Tor.com (and note that the first Tor.com link has the trailer video where Thirteen is introduced)

Naturally, the BBC has a quite a bit to say about the matter, including a bunch of commentary from assorted Doctor Who stars.

Sixth Doctor Colin Baker has a particularly tasty reaction here:

Dara had to point out to me the significance of this–this is a paraphrase of Baker’s own lines after he regenerates in The Caves of Androzani. 😀

As for me?

This is the most excited I’ve been about Doctor Who in years. I watched the intro trailer, and felt a little catch in my heart at the simple visual of a key materializing in a female hand–and the TARDIS answering to a female presence.

The idea of a woman leading the adventure, of being blindingly brilliant, of having the sort of boundless compassion that leads the Doctor over and over and over again to standing up for humanity is heady and exciting. I am very, very much looking forward to seeing Thirteen show us what she can do.

And I’m very much hoping that she’ll open the door wider to a future where anyone can truly be the Doctor. I want to see an actor of color for Fourteen, are you listening, BBC?

But until it’s time for Fourteen, I’ll be there to see what new parts of time and space Thirteen will have to show us!

July 17, 2017 by
Other People's Books

Clearing the inbox before I go to Quebec book roundup post

Snarfed off the Tor.com ebook club:

  • Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey. Fantasy, rather renowned, and it’s been on my To Read shelf for a stupidly long time. Grabbed the ebook to up the chances I might actually eventually read this thing. ;D

And meanwhile my author friend userinfommegaera‘s got a lot of medical challenges she’s got to deal with right now, and selling books is hard enough when you’re NOT dealing with medical challenges. (She said, from experience.) So I grabbed everything of hers on Smashwords that I didn’t have yet, to wit:

  • Sojourn, Book 1 of her Tales of the Unearthly Northwest. Cop crashes his car and winds up in a ghost town–and his version of Brigadoon is not a carefree musical.
  • Much Ado in Montana. Contemporary romance. Which, I might add, has been previously featured on Boosting the Signal!
  • Cross-Country: Adventures Alone Across America and Back. Non-fiction. An account of the author’s travels across the country! If you like travelogues, you might want to check this out.
  • Homesick: A Time in Yellowstone Story. This is a novella, Book 4 of her Time in Yellowstone series.
  • New Year’s Eve in Conconully, another Tales of the Unearthly Northwest book.
  • Reunion, the third Tales book.

24 for the year.

July 15, 2017 by
Short Pieces

Adding a fifth story to Walk the Wards

Point of interest: I have decided to add a fifth story to the Walk the Wards book, a Kendis short I’d been playing with as a concept back before I wrote Bone Walker… and which I think now does deserve a place in this book.

Part of the reason for this is to just add a bit more length to it, to make it comparable to my other releases in word count. But part of it is also that with both a Jude story and a Kendis story in this thing, I can more legitimately call it book 2.5 of the Free Court series.

This Kendis short will be called “Diminuendo”, and is likely to be novelette-length, or maybe short story, don’t know yet, still working on it. As to what this story is about–it’ll be set between Bone Walker and Warder Soul, and will be the story of why Kendis is going to have a change of cats between those two books. More than that I will not say, because spoilers.

Relatedly, I can also report that all the other pieces in this book do in fact now have their own titles. Most of them I mentioned in this post, and to those I will add that Jude’s story is now called The Light Beyond the Gate.

Let it also be noted that Elizabeth’s, Oscar’s, and of course Caitlin’s stories are all also set in present day. Caitlin’s story is set very shortly after Faerie Blood, just long enough after that book that Christopher’s family in St. John’s have gotten the word as to what happened to him.

Let it be further noted that I’ll be reaching out to the same artist who’s done the cover for Warder Soul to do the cover for this release, too–as soon as I decide what I actually want on the cover. 😉

As of last night I’ve topped 34,000 total words written on this collection, and I’ve written about 6,000 words so far on this month’s Camp Nanowrimo effort. I continue to be hopeful about making decent progress this month!

More bulletins as events warrant!

July 10, 2017 by
Short Pieces

Still have not forgotten my novellas, I promise

I am chagrined that I may be one of the longest-running people ever to try to finish up Kickstarter rewards owed, but I promise, folks, I’m still working on those novellas. Or, rather, working on them again, given how challenging it’s been to pull any words out of my brain at all this year.

It has however become clear to me that before I can legitimately work on Warder Soul, book 3 of The Free Court of Seattle, I really need to finish the novellas first–in no small part because one of those stories introduces Caitlin and Gabien, who will be important supporting characters in Warder Soul. And I need those characters clearly settled in my mind before they join Team Kendis.

So I’m trying to buckle down and get these novellas done and dealt with. I’d actually started trying to do this last month, instituting my usual strategy of “by god I need to get at least some words into Scrivener” when the words won’t come: setting a stupidly low goal. That’s helped.

But more effort is needed–and so this month I’m participating in Camp Nanowrimo.

This is run by the same folks who do the main Nanowrimo event every November, but it’s a bit more relaxed and groovy in that you can set whatever writing goal you want. So if 50,000 words is too daunting, you can go lower.

I’ve set my goal to be getting 25,000 more words into the novellas. And so far at least I can report that the stories as a collective whole have now topped 30,000 words.

A Power in the Blood is finished–that’s the story about my psychic chick of size who helps a Warder find out who killed his sister. So this effort will be focused on:

The Deepest Breath of Song: A painfully shy young man in a tiny coast town learns there are strange creatures indeed in the nearby ocean–and the town’s Warder needs his help to protect them.

The Plight of the Warder’s Daughter: Caitlin Hallett, daughter of the Warder of St. John’s, wants her chance to see the world before she must commit her powers to protecting a city. But her father Thomas is ill, and there’s no one else in the family powerful enough to take over from him, so he won’t let Caitlin go. When another young member of the Warder lineage comes to St. John’s, Caitlin must choose between seizing the same chance Gabien Desroches has taken–and her love for her city and her father.

As of yet untitled: The story of what happened to Jude when she went to Faerie with Melisanda ana’Sharran, during the events of Bone Walker!

Note also that one of the biggest backers of the 2012 Kickstarter WILL be having an important character named after her in these stories, and a second side character is named after another backer who won the “kill off a character named after a backer!” draw!

So more on this work as events warrant, y’all. And if any of my fellow writers out there are doing the Camp Nanowrimo thing, let me know, hey?

July 6, 2017 by