Ree-flections
This newsletter is very late this week – by several days. My main, big, huge, colossal reason is that my LittleOne started school this week. Hence the issue’s title of New Chapter! Things are: so far, so good!
I hope you’re enjoying a good start to the year, I hope my words find you well in your world, and I hope you enjoy this issue.
Writing and Creativity Finds
The 2022 winners of the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest – which challenges authors to write the most “atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written” – have been announced. Browse them by category here . Yes, there are categories.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the ‘spine collector’, the mysterious shadowy figure trying to steal books before their release – with sinister undertones and seemingly no clear motive. The mysterious shadowy figure has now been caught and the motive is no clearer. Here’s a good discussion about the ‘collector’ and the possible whys . Here’s an earlier article (possible paywall) written before the ‘collector’ was apprehended. Also, there now seems to be a copycat (possible paywall) on the scene.
AI (artificial intelligence) image generators are trained by systems which scrape and mine all available, existing online content. This includes people who retain copyright on their own art. Where to, from here? Well, lawsuits are underway for a start.
This is a lovely one for the start of the year – an overview of Mary Oliver’s take on creativity and the creative self (‘the third self’) , and where and how it sits within us, and how we find it. “I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light.”
Something I created
A lighthearted way of walking
She had a lighthearted way of walking
Like a dragonfly flits over a sunspeckled stream
It was easy to see
The delicate stems of riverbank flowers nodding to her
Easy to notice
How the shadows of leaves and sun beneath
Glimmered and swayed and played
Beneath her feet.
Backstory: One of those moments where I was trying to be in the present, and to appreciate the tiny things that make life important and beautiful. No prizes for guessing the subject of this one 😉 Shared first on Twitter (I think).
A Book or Piece of Art I Love
The Universe by LittleOne
Occasionally, I can lure LittleOne into watching some art painting vids on YouTube. They are usually labelled as ‘easy for beginners’ to which I usually have to say ‘ha!’, but I nevertheless enjoy watching the edited versions of these paintings coming to life.
After one such clip , we were inspired to pull out our poster paints and paint.
LittleOne specifically wanted to try the technique of loading a paintbrush with white paint and tapping it across another paintbrush above a dark setting to create scattered drops of white to look like stars.
The technique worked and I’m happy to report that LittleOne created beautiful star effects, but then immediately and gleefully blended said stars into the scene, so there could be another round paint-tapping star-making.
After several rounds of this, this was the end painting. With the note that I ran it through my photoshop app a few times to bring out the glitter in the paint, to make the white-paint stars look brighter, and to tweak the hues of colour at the edges.
LittleOne liked this photoshopped version the best. I adored it! So here you go!
Random Interests and Inspirations for Stories
There’s apparently a lost continent beneath my childhood island of Mauritius. It’s called Mauritia .
I hadn’t really heard of quolls before, but I was fascinated to read how a family of quolls managed to take a long, unexpected trip all the way from Far North Queensland (top of the east coast of Australia) down to Melbourne (bottom of the east coast of Australia). They’re back home now, so a happy end to that big adventure.
A brownfield rainforest arising out of a combination of geopolitical events in the 1970s, lucky re-wilding, a feeling of an abandoned city and a growing tourist attraction – all within 30 miles of London. Yes, this is a real place . And the word ‘brownfield’, which I’d never heard before, seems to be as accurate as it soundsl
Thank you
Du fond du coeur, thanks for reading x
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Ree-Imagined Worlds 
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