Life in a Northern Town

For the past few years, I've done a little photography project that I call Monday Melt: every Monday in April, I go around the property and take pictures, so that I can compare them to past years and see how our spring is coming along.

(And yes, I know it's not Monday, but I took these pictures on Monday; I'm just now getting around to dl'ing them from the camera!)



As you can see, we have a ways to go yet.

( A couple more pictures and comparisons to past years under the cut )

Two new posts over at my (not so) top-secret romance-alias blog, one on my current romance-related projects and the other on upcoming anthology open calls I’m thinking about writing for. I continue to remain undecided whether having a separate romance alias is a good idea or not. Part of me says yes, part of me says no. And it adds an extra level of pain-in-the-ass to submitting things, though I suppose I’ll get used to it. I reserve the right to quit using it and revert back to my regular name if the pain-in-the-ass elements become too much to bear.

(I was also amused to notice that the Dreamspinner Press anthology in which I have a story also has a story by another “Laylah”, with an H. I had thought about tacking an “H” onto my name for my romance alias, but decided not to. I suppose it could be her real name, but I’m not laying odds. I am, however, the ORIGINAL Layla, if not the only one! 36 years and counting. Accept no substitutes.)

The weather is warmer than usual (which for us, means it’s about 10F rather than -30), so I’ve been getting out in it as much as possible, taking long walks with my faithful canine companion in the falling snow. My usual walk with Lucky is down to the mailbox and back (it’s on the highway, about a half-mile from the house). I almost never go beyond the mailbox with him, and clearly, everything further out has been mapped “Here there be dragons” in his dog brain, because he starts out chipper and then the farther we go, the more he attaches to my leg like a 60-pound remora, until I’m tripping over him.

The warm weather is supposed to hold for the next few days (actually, they’re predicting freezing rain for Sunday … aaiiieeee!), so with luck, he’ll have a chance to get used to it. I really do need more exercise.

And I am gleefully, joyously DONE with the final rewrite on my urban fantasy novel! I am letting it sit for a few days while I procrastinate write a query letter, and then I’ll do a final pass for errors and start sending it out to agents. I am SO grateful to everyone who’s helped me with it so far. Apparently, it takes a village to write a novel, and I couldn’t have done it without mine.

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

… because I’m hearing them again tonight.

I think that what really gets to me about the sound of wolves howling in the Alaskan night is that it’s such an … alien sound. The sounds that dogs make are usually comprehensible to us human beings, because we’ve bred and raised dogs to communicate with us as well as with each other. When a dog barks or howls or cries, you can usually tell, in a general kind of way, what it’s trying to say — if it’s hurt or scared or angry or happy.

Howling wolves do not sound like that. It’s a rising and falling warble that just doesn’t convey anything in human. When I first heard it on Friday and thought that it was a dog, I thought maybe it was hurt or trapped. But that’s not quite the right sound, either. It’s clearly speaking to other wolves, and while I imagine that we could learn to decode the high-level aspects of its language if we studied them, it’s not something that we start out with the slightest ability to understand.

Living around wild animals has sometimes made me stop and think about the fact that humans from even the most wildly varying cultures can understand each other on a fundamental level. We might be misled by (stupid) beliefs about cultural superiority or whatnot, but we can always tell if other humans are sad or angry or happy. Even if the cultural trappings are different, we can enjoy each other’s music and understand each other’s sense of humor.

But meeting a wild animal in its wild environment gives you a very strong impression of meeting an adult from a different species. That’s always how I feel when I’m out and about in the woods and happen to come face to face with a fox or moose or whatever. They’re not trapped in an artificial childhood, as domestic animals are. They have grown up, and they clearly have their own lives and their own way of comprehending their world, just as we do. It’s hard to describe, but it’s a very different feeling from interacting with a domestic cat or dog or horse.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

Flood waters wash out Alaska Railroad, parts of Parks Highway. The place where it's washed out (actually down to one lane and in danger of washing out, not 100% closed) is in the Nenana River canyon north of the park entrance, which I have to say is scary enough to drive through even NORMALLY. The idea of driving through the canyon with the river nearly at road level and undercutting the road is not a happy thought.

SO. TIRED. Autumn is really hitting us with a vengeance, but I finally have nearly everything battened down for winter. I got the garden harvested on Friday, and then we were hit with our first frost Friday night (a major, unforecasted, plant-killing frost, too! If I’d been one day later with the harvesting … I definitely feel like I dodged that bullet by a hair!). The greenhouse is all cleaned up and ready for spring, the chickenhouse is repaired, tools and things are tucked away, we have a load of coal coming next week … there are still a few things I haven’t done (my planters of pansies are still blooming, so I think I’ll wait to put them away until they die back), but all in all, I think we’re basically ready for winter. Which is good, since it’s starting to look like it might be an early one.

On the creative front, I want to start making more posts about writing. This would be easier, I guess, if I was actually selling things, so I could announce story sales rather than just rambling about the writing process. But … I feel like I’m getting closer? I have a novel that I plan to start submitting to agents this winter (it still needs one more rewrite), a handful of short stories that are currently being shopped around, and a novella that I just finished rewriting this week. Sadly, the comics have been suffering, because I’m still having a lot of trouble shifting back and forth between “comics mode” and “prose mode”. I do plan to work on that! And to post more in this blog, in general.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

Today's News-Miner has an interesting article on wolves killing other wolves. I'd been under the impression for a lot of years that fights between wild animals over territory or mating were unlikely to result in death, but that's actually very much not the case; even herbivores often fight to the death. Of course, even a small wound can mean "death" in the wilderness. It does interest me, a lot, that wolf packs pick fights with each other and go straight for the kill, not fighting to wound. We've obviously bred a lot of the aggression out of domestic dogs (most breeds, anyway).

I find wild animal behavior fascinating. Of course, animal behavior is so politicized that it's difficult to get information that just reports what animals do without drawing political conclusions about it (and I'm under no illusions that the News-Miner article isn't editorializing, either).

Wildlife yard report: Moose, hares, foxes. The moose, a cow and calf, seem to have moved on. The hares are everywhere; we are obviously at the apex of the lepine population cycle. There is a little flock of ptarmigan hanging around, too, though I haven't seen them lately.

Heavy snow today. Big fluffy flakes.

It's SNOWING. On the 12th of May! I'd like to file a complaint with the weather, please...