As I understand it, tonight is the official Harvest Moon — the full moon closest to the equinox and the beginning of fall. It will be in the sky all night, from around sunset to around sunrise, doing everything a full moon should do. I saw it earlier, white and round and bright.
I’m going to throw pictures from two different occasions at you — maybe three — interspersed with various thoughts I’ve been writing down and saving up. So this post will be somewhat like what would happen if you visited me on an autumn night, and we pulled our chairs up to the fire.
Bridgewater BookFest, Bridgewater, PA, September 14, 2013. Nearly 40 authors gathered in the huge Authors’ Tent, signing books and spending a happy day hanging out with a book-loving public. Many thanks to the organizers and all who were there!
Entirely new subject — I warned you this was going to be all over the place! — this week, one of my creative writing students, a high-schooler, wrote:
“Imagination is the noise of race cars in an empty room.”
Isn’t that great?
Niagara Falls, September 8, 2013. My first time to go there. Really impressive! We stopped there on our way back from a wedding in Rochester, New York.
This is absolutely true: I met a person recently who lives on Windy Ghoul Lane. That’s an honest-to-goodness street name in this area: Windy Ghoul Lane. Wouldn’t you love to have that address? I would! I only saw it written; I didn’t hear it pronounced. I don’t know if it’s windy as in “the wind that blows” or windy as in “twisty, a winding lane.” In either case, it’s a road with “ghoul” in its name. It’s a Hallowe’en address, and people get to live there year-’round! (This joins the ranks of fantastic western Pennsylvania road and street names, which include Elfinwild Road and Oberon Drive. Out here, people don’t waste the opportunity to name a street something good. I never knew it was possible to have so much civic fun, having grown up among streets named after trees and Presidents and the occasional Native American people.)
The gargoyles go to Bridgewater BookFest. They were quite a hit with the crowds!
I observed something interesting about second languages this week. Julie and I both have a second language that we used for many years, to the point that we dreamed in them and often thought in them. Occasionally even now, the Japanese word for a thing or a situation or a social relationship will pop into my head and out of my mouth before the English. I finally noticed a pattern of when it’s most likely to happen. It’s when I’m focused on something, such as doing work on my computer, and I speak in response to something outside my area of concentration. For example, I was working on student papers the other day, and Julie was nearby, and I sneezed. Immediately and unconsciously, I said, “Shitsurei,” the Japanese equivalent of “Excuse me” in that context. At another time on another day, I was similarly concentrating, and Julie thanked me for something, and I said, “Iie!” (“Not at all!”). We conferred about this phenomenon, and Julie agrees that that’s the way her Russian and Ukrainian seem to emerge, too. There’s something about that buffering — that distance of having to respond when you’re not fully present, mentally — that tends to throw the switch of the secondary language. Interesting!
Niagara Falls
I read an intriguing article today. It claimed that the #1 thing that draws readers to a fiction writer’s web site is when the writer offers exclusive short fiction there related to his/her own published work — for instance, spinoff stories . . . prequels . . . stories about minor characters in a novel who become, in the short pieces, the main characters, with stories of their own. The author might write a follow-up to a book s/he has out there — what became of the characters twenty years later? Or something set earlier: how did the villain become the villain? Or what happened to the characters between Books 2 and 3 of the series?
Giving away candy definitely helped to attract people, too. And so did those wonderful illustrations by Emily Fiegenschuh for “The Star Shard” in CRICKET! And that’s the earliest I’ve ever carved a jack-o’-lantern.
So let’s take an informal poll here. I’d love to hear comments from you, Friends of the Blog. If I were going to try writing a spinoff story for exclusive publication here on my web site (I’d be sure to notify you through the blog), what would you most like to see? [I’m not promising anything yet — just speaking hypothetically here, as we warm our feet and the logs settle with a flurry of sparks in our imaginary fire.]
Atop the American Falls at Niagara.
Think it over. There are almost endless possibilities. A story about Cawdor as a young werewolf . . . a tale of how Wiltwain came to join up with Master Rombol . . . an account of the job Conlin did just before the one that brought him to that little Illinois town that’s not on any map . . . We’re just talking here, but what would you like to see if I were to attempt something like this?
This is a model I built of the balloon-ship APOLLYON for THE FIRES OF THE DEEP. I had fun that summer, building models to put off the actual hard work of writing. Heh! This was the second one I made — to scale, according to how the ship is described in the book. I went to a craft store, bought balsa wood, measured it, etc. Since most of the book takes place aboard, I wanted to know, for example, what a character standing on the war deck could see. Could s/he see the bow? You get the idea. I started this one in Illinois and finished it in Niigata.
So, at Niagara Falls, we also walked across the bridge into Canada and saw the falls from that side. The view is better from there; but on the American side, you can get very close and personal with the falls on a walking tour called “Cave of the Winds.” (Disclaimer signs announce that there is no actual cave.) You are provided with a raincoat, because you can walk right up to where the falls is falling on you:
The Hurricane Deck at the American Falls.
On the Hurricane Deck, a spindly wooden contraption built on the lap of the American Falls, the spray blasts over you. You venture forward, water pummeling your chest, your shoulders, your head. All around you is whiteness. You can only open one eye at a time, and then only briefly. But you’re in the parlor of an immemorial Presence, so you press all the way into the corner of the platform, close enough to thrust your arms into the forge where thunder is folded and hammered out. You tip your face upward, not caring how much water is sluicing down your collar, and you look straight into its white eyes, this mighty Thing that was equally roaring centuries and centuries ago. The fury is breaking around you; the Falls knows your shape, and you know its vastness.
The Hurricane Deck
Quite a place, Niagara Falls.
The American Falls
There must be gold at Niagara Falls, because rainbows end right there. You can see where they end. The Maid of the Mist churns right through their feet!
Horseshoe Falls, Canada
Boat pilots there know their stuff.
Horseshoe Falls, and God’s bow
Horseshoe Falls (the Canadian side)
“I do set My bow in the heavens . . .”
Penultimate photo of this post:
Bridgewater BookFest, 9/14/2013
And finally, one of the very best photos from our wedding day, taken by the amazing Marti Aiken:
We were only crossing the tracks to get back from a location, not having a session there. It poured rain in the brief interval between the wedding and the reception, when we were scrambling around taking pictures. This is one of our favorites.
Happy Harvest Moon to all!
Rich S. says: 
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