Yesterday, surrounded by all this white, buried in snow, hating the brightness, I wrote a vignette set entirely in the dark. In the London sewers and tunnels below Copp's Hill in Boston. It was sort of like working on one of the vignettes for Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus, in that it's no more than 2k-words – 1,819 words – and was written in one sitting. I could add that it takes place in a single location. Technically, that's true. The Copp's Hill stuff is the narrator's memories. I stole the title from Blake. "Forests of the Night." And I kept going back to Blake throughout the piece. It's furious, bitter, devoutly pornographic, and inconsolable. "Forests of the Night" will be featured in Sirenia Digest #86, which should be out in the next couple of days.

So, yeah. That's what I did yesterday.

The world is even brighter today than on Saturday. Cloud cover would be nice. Currently 30˚F.

In the night, some douchebag/s knocked the head off snow cat.* As the hipster nitwits (and dorks who want to look hip) are wont to say, "This is why we can't have nice things."

After the writing yesterday, we went for a walk in the snow, just as the sun was going down. In most places, I sank in up to my ankles, sometimes my knees, but I saw drifts that were at least three-feet high. The cold felt clean and real. Like a paper cut. There are photos below (including some Spooky took earlier in the day). We had a dinner of eggs and canned corned beef hash. We played Rift while I wondered about people with actual social lives (I last saw a friend face-to-face in December). We went to bed early (for a change), and I read about ill-fated Antarctic explorers. Appropriately. Before sleep, Spooky read me Robert McCloskey's One Morning in Maine. But she was stoned and had a migraine and was half asleep and kept making up words that weren't actually there.

The snow plows have yet to reach our street. Someone on snowshoes went past a little while ago. Real snowshoes (sorry, but the Southerner in me must gawk, slack-jawed).

Okay. Photographs.





A street that has been plowed.



Victorian icicles.



View north, towards Westminster.



Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow...well...maybe snow. And, soon, Saturdays.



This would be a beautiful shot of Dexter Training Ground, if not for the ugly, candy-colored playground in the background. I may try to Photoshop it away.



Nothing candy colored. Just winter.



Spooky does, indeed, hate having her picture taken.



View towards the Armory (to the south).



More than a hundred and twenty-five years of icicles, surely.



Some unfortunate Time Lord's Port-o-Tardis, stranded in the snow.



The day ends....



Glaciated,
Aunt Beast

* Snow cat's head has been restored.