Wrapping with Cloth

Last year I shared my adventures wrapping gifts with bandannas. Bandannas remain part of my repertoire, as do purchased cloth bags and larger swatches of cloth that I give neat edges with pinking shears.

But all of those options stem from the Japanese furoshiki or “bath spread.”

They first came into use in the Nara Era to bundle one’s clothes while bathing in the public baths. The technique was borrowed by merchants as a convenient way to transport their wares. And then the furoshiki became a decorative covering for a gift.

Modern-day Japan is reviving the furoshiki.

This video shows two ways to tie a furoshiki. The first is new to me! I’m tempted to re-wrap some of my already wrapped presents, because it looks so cool. 😀
 

 

Here’s a few more furoshiki techniques.
 

 

And one more video:


 
Have fun with it!

For more green living tips:
Great Soap & Etcetera Quest
Green Housekeeping
Bandanna Gift Wrap

 

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An Autumn Branch

Twelve dancing princesses in the fairy tale of that name descend a secret stair – not dancing while descending, however 😀 – and pass through three magical woods. Depending on the version in your book, the first glade of trees features leaves of bright copper, the second, flowers of shining silver, and the third, fruits of gleaming gold.

Fifty princes have sought to learn the princesses’ secret and failed.

When a modest gardener boy takes up the quest, he secures an advantage: a cloak of invisibility. Hidden by its powers, he follows the princesses to their midnight revels.

As proof of his journey, when he returns from the underworld, he breaks a twig from a tree in the copper wood.

This branch in my own garden reminds me of the gardener boy’s earliest prize.

Autumn beauty

For more photos:
Tree Rocket
Blossom

 

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Visitor’s Surprise

Mira’s Corner is a nifty little blog chronicling the adventures of the inner journey and the many ways the inner world dovetails with the outer.

So why am I telling you about Mira’s Corner? (Beside the fact that it’s cool!)

Because Mira kindly hosted a guest post of mine last May, and I suspect many of my newest readers have never seen it. Now’s your chance, because I’m reproducing it here. 😀

Edited to add: I just tested the links to Mira’s blog and discovered that it is now a private site, not open to the public. She’s a neat lady who comments occasionally on The Passive Voice. Perhaps you can catch up with her there.

*     *     *

New York Sunset Panorama

Mira let me know that memoir and humor are appropriate topics for her Corner. So I’m “speaking” as a raconteur, although my humor tends toward dry and understated, rather than laugh-out-loud. I bring with me a tale of big-city misadventure (sort of!) married to its alter ego, pastoral steampunk fantasy.

How, you may ask, do urban high jinx tango with bucolic shenanigans? Not an obvious mix!

I will tell you.

It becomes more comprehensible, if you understand that:

1) my tale touches both my real-world history as a would-have-been grad student and my fantasy novel, Troll-magic; and

2) it involves neither city streets nor woodland groves, but a bedroom in darkness and a stranger.

Have I got you interested yet? Grin!

Kazuma Nitta performs a Kubudo Kata with a staffI was twenty-three, proudly sporting an architecture degree, and looking to make a career switch to psychology. I know—pretty strange; an unpleasant encounter with a nude pin-up poster in the all-male architecture firm where I worked one summer re-routed my destiny.

I applied to clinical psych programs (where the profs found my architecture education hard to swallow). Rutgers invited me to interview. I was thrilled. An interview at a tough program means you have a chance of being accepted.

I burbled the good news to all my acquaintance, including the master of the dojo where I studied martial arts.

He said: “Rutgers is just across the river from New York City! You have to visit Eamon!”

Eamon (name changed to protect the . . . almost innocent) was my teacher’s teacher. He’d traveled to Okinawa, Japan, the origin point for the martial art we practiced, in his dedication to become great. He headed up his own dojo in New York. Naturally, I must take a lesson from my master’s master.

“He’s got an apartment right there in the city,” declared my teacher. “He’ll be delighted to put you up!”

The arrangements were simple. My teacher phoned his teacher. I participated in a follow-on conversation to learn details for driving and parking (both challenging elements of the Big Apple). All was set.

When the day of my interview arrived, I left Virginia before dawn, arrived at Rutgers in plenty of time, and participated in a completely boring dialog with my interviewer. She asked only the predictable questions. Why are you leaving architecture for psychology? Are you crazy? (Well, no, she didn’t ask that, but you get the idea!)

Rutgers Newark CampusMy more interesting conversation took place after an accidental encounter in the hall. I have neither memory nor idea of how I wound up talking with a psych professor who was not (alas) in the clinical program, but I’ll always remember what we talked about.

I’d been wondering how a person’s will to do something was translated at its most basic level from intention into action.

When I’m sipping tea (my beverage of choice) and I form the intention to bring the mug to my lips, what is it that bridges the gap between “I will do this” and actually doing it? I suspect that’s an unanswerable mystery, the same sort of question as “what is the meaning of life?” or “what came before the Big Bang?”

But it turned out this professor had been wondering the same thing! We had a great discussion. And I like to think he put in a good word for me when the admissions committee reviewed all the applicants for the final cut. (No, I never did make it to graduate school, but that’s another story!)

New York Skyline

So what does all this have to do with the city and dark bedrooms? Well, it doesn’t. Mere prelude. 😀 Now I’ll get on to the meat of my tale.

I drove into New York utilizing the precepts culled from my big city acquaintance: floor the accelerator as soon as the light turns green and whenever there’s clear space in the lane ahead. It worked well for me as a new adult.

Adrenaline spike and elevated heartbeat? Pure amusement park fare.

I survived and arrived.

There must have been dinner in there somewhere, but my memory skips to the class in Eamon’s dojo.

Honestly, it was just like class in my own teacher’s dojo: same routines, same exercises, same types of feedback. Intriguing to meet different personalities in the students and the teacher, sure, but hardly worth heading into NYC rather than home.

One sole difference stood out. In Virginia, class started at 7 p.m. and finished at 9:30 p.m. In New York, class started at 9 p.m. and ended shortly before midnight! Late city hours. Eamon’s day wasn’t done even then.

Manhattan Skyline at DuskHe ushered me into his apartment, showed me the guest room that would be mine, bade me goodnight, and departed to the rest of his evening. Okay.

I showered, grabbed PJ’s, read a little to unwind, turned out the light, and went to sleep. We’re finally getting to that dark bedroom!

I roused some time later to feel the far side of the bed dipping as someone climbed in.

I froze, even as my heart started to hammer.

I suppose he wasn’t a complete stranger. I knew it was Eamon, who I’d first met that day. But what on earth was I supposed to do? He was a fifty-gazillion black belt, and I was utterly alone in a big city where I knew no one.

I froze, and I stayed frozen. Waiting to see what would happen next.

What did happen?

Utterly nothing!

Eamon settled in on his side of the bed, never getting anywhere near me. (The bed was immense, bigger than a king.) He never spoke. I didn’t either. I don’t know how long I lay there in fear, waiting, waiting . . . but eventually I fell asleep.

Looking over Central Park

In the morning, Eamon was gone—gone from the bedroom, gone from the apartment. I dressed, quickly packed, summoned my car from the garage, and drove all the way back to Virginia.

I don’t know why Eamon didn’t explain that his apartment possessed only one bedroom. (He didn’t give me a tour, and the layout wasn’t obvious, so I hadn’t guessed it on my own.) Why didn’t he offer me the living room couch? Or take it himself, if he felt inclined toward graciousness?

I never told anyone what had happened. I’d taken no harm. That was enough.

But when I wrote Troll-magic and arrived at the moment where Lorelin awakens in darkness, in the bedroom of an enchanted underground palace, to feel some stranger climbing in on the opposite side of the bed . . . well!

The the scene almost wrote itself. I’d lived it, after all!

*     *     *

Have you ever experienced what should have been danger, but (miraculously) wasn’t? Did you wish you’d handled it differently? Or were you satisfied with your choices? I remain befuddled by my own pseudo-escape. To this day, thirty years later, I’m not quite sure what to make of my NYC adventure. But I loved putting the scene into my story!

Troll-magic is available as an ebook.
Amazon I B&N I iTunes I Kobo I OverDrive I Smashwords

Or available as a trade paperback from:
Amazon I B&N I Book Depository I Fishpond
Mysterious Galaxy Books I Powell’s Books

Or you may order it from your local bookstore!
ISBN-10: 1977600166
ISBN-13: 978-1977600165

For more about Troll-magic, see:
Bazinthiad’s Fashions
Magic in the North-lands
Radices and Arcs
Character Interview: Lorelin
What Happened to Bazel?

For more author memoir, see:
Waterfall and Fairytale
Writer’s Journey

 

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The Heliosphere

gout of plasma against black space

Devouring Light started from the idea of spectacle. Somebody – Mercurio – was creating a grand display involving the constellations. Draco, the dragon. Ursa Major, the great bear. And so on.

But what would this spectacle celebrate?

No mystery there. That was part of my initial inspiration as well: our sun’s birthday.

The next question was trickier. How would our sun – Sol – mark his birthday?

Possibly he did so in Earth years. Earth being the only planet in the solar system with humans on it lends these “Gaian” years a certain distinction.

But the universe of Devouring Light features many other beings: the spirits of stars, those of comets – all the celestial bodies of the cosmos, in fact.

And Sol is so very old when measured in Earth’s years. Using them as birth markers would be like humans using seconds.

My decision: Sol wouldn’t use the movements of anything within his own system to signify his anniversary. What about outside the solar system?

Posing that question yielded an immediate answer. Or, rather, another question which generates its own prompt answer.

What does the sun revolve around?

Our galaxy, of course.

There was Sol’s “year.” The time it takes for him to travel once around the Milky Way.

And how long is that? In Earth years? Being human myself, not celestial, I think in terms of Earth. And I had some research to do.

We know the age of our sun: 4.6 billion Earth years. An odd measure, when you consider that Earth herself was likely still a part of the dust cloud around Sol when he ignited. But that is how we measure long spans of time.

Our knowledge of the number of times that Sol has swung around the galaxy center is less precise. One circuit requires between 225 and 250 million Earth years. Sol has made the trip anywhere between 20 and 25 times.

Since I envisioned Sol as a fully grown “young man,” not a youth barely emerged from his teens, I chose the longer figure.

Sol was turning 25. Excellent!

photo by NASA Goddard Space Fight

With this important question answered 😀 , I could call this blog post complete. But you know I’m not going to do that! In the course of my solar research, I learned a bunch of cool things about our sun. And, while I’m perfectly capable of sharing them all with you, I won’t do that either.

Instead I’ll tell you the one cool thing that was utterly new to me and that proved to be important to my story.

The heliopause.

What, you may ask, is the heliopause.

I certainly didn’t know what it meant when I first encountered the term.

It has to do with the solar wind.

Now, I’d heard of the solar wind, and I thought I knew what it was. But I didn’t. Not really.

Because the solar wind is plasma.

What? Plasma? I thought plasma existed only in conditions of great heat and pressure. Like in the body of a star.

Well, that is a common place to find it. Although it also occurs in the instant of a lightning strike.

But what plasma is . . . is a mass of ions. That is, atoms stripped of their electrons, so that the electrons swirl through the plasma solo with their negative charge, while the nuclei – protons bound with neutrons – also swirl through the plasma with their positive charge.

And the solar wind is this plasma hurled off the surface of the sun and out into space.

Wow!

Obviously, the solar wind is very “thin,” with only a few particles within a lot of vacuum. Almost like a vapor or a gas. But it’s plasma, not a gas, because the particles have a charge. And it packs some punch. Think of the solar yachts posited in SF stories, with sails catching the solar wind.

Luckily, because the plasma particles have a charge, they get bounced by Earth’s magnetosphere. But that’s another topic! Maybe a future blog post? 😉

image from Nasa Blueshift

So . . . the heliopause.

The solar wind blows a long, long way. All the way past Pluto to nearly 100 astronomical units (100 AU).

To refresh your memory, one AU is the distance from the sun to Earth.

At 100 AU from our sun, the solar wind runs out of steam and ends, contained by the pressure of the interstellar medium and the stellar winds that roam the galaxy.

The bubble created by the solar wind is known as the heliosphere. It has a ripple in it, shaped like a pinwheel or a ballerina’s swirling skirt. It’s caused by our sun’s spinning magnetic field. And the heliosphere has turbulence at its edge, where the stellar winds press inward, while the solar wind presses out.Artist's Conception of the Heliospheric Current Sheet

That area of turbulence is known as the heliosheath. And the great curve where the turbulence ends, the solar wind ceasing completely, is the heliopause.

Why did I care?

Because my dragon constellation, Draco, does some “flying” at the heliopause. I needed to know what he’d encounter there!

Not being a scholar, Draco calls the entire end zone the heliopause, rather than using the precise terms: termination shock, slow-down region, stagnation region, and depletion region. But his wings feel the strain of the turbulence regardless!

For more about the world of Devouring Light, see:
The Celestial Spheres of Sol
What Do Celestials Wear?
The Graces
Roman Dining
The Oort Cloud
Mercury the Planet
Draco the Dragon
The Simiae

For more about our sun, see:
Sol

 

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Calling All Indies

Are you an Indie author?

Do you write science fiction or fantasy?

Do you want to expand your audience of readers?

D.J. Gelner and I are creating an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories for release this spring.

The idea is that some of his readers will become my readers. And some of my readers will become his readers.

And some of our readers will become your readers!

Readers

D.J. writes powerful, dramatic stories with “gotcha” kickers at the end. I write epic fantasy in which the stakes are high and my protag’s personal world is reshaped whether victory or defeat transpires.

I know my fellow Indies create some pretty amazing stuff, too!

Here’s a summary of our anthology project:

Genre: science fiction and fantasy

Theme: zoo

Use this as a writing prompt – your story doesn’t have to be set in a zoo or even to have to do with animals. Think of “zoo” as a springboard to get you started, not as a rigid limit. We welcome extremely creative submissions!

Wild Creatures

Number of Stories: We’re shooting for 10-15, but we are flexible. We will not omit a story, if we think it fits – if your story doesn’t, we encourage you to indie publish it!

Word Count: up to 9,000 words per story

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2014

Interested?

I’m really excited about this project, and I hope you will be, too!

Email us at zooSFFanthology (at) gmail (dot) com for more information.

D.J. and I look forward to hearing from you!

Update: January 31 has come and gone, and D.J. and I have received an in-box full of great stories! As I write this note, we’re reading and enjoying. Soon we’ll begin chosing exactly which stories to include in the anthology. I’ll keep you posted – with more updates – as we make progress. 😀

Update 2: Quantum Zoo released June 14, 2014 with a great splash! Many, many readers bought it and the positive reviews started pouring in. A common theme in those reviews: “I don’t usually like short story collections, but this one is great!” The anthology continues to sell steadily, carrying the names of the contributing writers to ever more readers. It’s done better than I believed was possible. After all, this whole project was an experiment. I’m calling it a success.

Writing

For more about Quantum Zoo:
Pin Board for Quantum Zoo
Quantum Zoo: “A King in Exile”
Launch Day: Quantum Zoo
Quantum Zoo: “Skipdrive”
Quantum Zoo Party!
Quantum Zoo: “Demon Rising”
Quantum Zoo in Paperback!

 

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