Stranger Things

Just finished watching Netflix's new show, Stranger Things. I'd describe it as The Goonies meets The X-Files. Go watch it, it's fantastic.

Whale Watching

We also went whale watching on our trip to Iceland. I had never seen a whale before, so this was really special for me. 

We saw two humpback whales really close up; one was only about ten meters from the boat!

 Our tour was at Eyjafjord, where they had a 99 % success rate.  I'm not sure of the name of the company, but it's good to have an experienced captain, otherwise you can't get this close. They also made a point of not following a whale too long so it wouldn't get stressed out.

Whitman's Civil War: Writing and Imaging Loss, Death, and Disaster Week 1

Whitman's Civil War: Writing and Imaging Loss, Death, and Disaster, the free MOOC from the University of Iowa, starts this week.

I read up on Walt Whitman, and he's actually kind of fascinating. Born in 1819,  he was an American poet and journalist. His sharp pen and outlandish opinions about things like women's property laws and labor and immigration issues got him in trouble many times, costing him multiple jobs. He also passionately opposed slavery. It's speculated that Whitman was bisexual or homosexual; he denied it, but who wouldn't in the 1800s? His main work is Leaves of Grass, a poetry collection that pioneered free verse and shocked his contemporaries with its sexual content.

During the American Civil War, he worked as a volunteer nurse, and the course will be focusing on his wartime poetry, prose, and letters and how he wrote about all the horrors he witnessed; but this is a writing course, so the point isn't only to learn about Whitman, but to explore the ways of writing about loss and disaster. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

There's still time to sign up if you're interested...

Drabble Time!

Just a quick heads-up: one of my drabbles is up at SpeckLit today. If you want to check it out, clickety-click here.

Iceland part 1

I just got back from a trip to Iceland, and it was amazing. Volcanoes, glaciers, hot springs; it's truly the land of ice and fire. 

We did the Iceland Complete circle tour because we were nervous about driving in a foreign country, but you can also rent a car and do the tour on your own instead of joining a tour group. Some of the roads were a bit rough but not too scary, so next time I think we'll rent a car. (Yes, next time. I'm already dreaming of going back...)  

This tour gives you a little bit of everything, which is nice, but a lot of the time you could have stayed at a place for a lot longer and not run out of things to do. 

At the start of our visit we took a special bus from Keflavik airport to the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal bath and spa. It's very popular (for obvious reasons), so it's good to book ahead. They store your luggage while you bathe, and you can rent towels, bathrobes, flip-flops, and even a swimsuit there.

We lucked out with the weather, as you can see. The water is really warm, like a hot bath, but even in the summer, Icelandic weather is quite cold, so it wasn't a problem. When you're finished bathing, the same bus company has buses going to Reykjavik, so you don't have to go back to the airport. 

The surrounding area is quite barren, with lava fields all around. My friend said it looks like Mordor, and I think she's right. A lot of the scenery felt like it could have been straight out of The Lord of the Rings movies. Did you know they also filmed Game of Thrones in Iceland, the scenes that happened beyond the Wall, I think.

When our tour officially started, we got to see geysers at the Geysir geothermal field. The water's boiling, so you have to be very careful walking around. The guide said that the ground shifts and if you go off the path it can suddenly give way and you'll be up to your ankle in boiling water. Ouch!

So many beautiful waterfalls! This one is Gullfoss, the golden waterfall. 

Seljalandsfoss. 

You could walk behind the waterfall!

We stayed overnight at Vik. These are the Troll Stones. There's a legend that trolls were trying to drag a ship ashore, but then dawn came and they turned to stone, and that's how the stones were formed. (I don't know why the ship turned to stone, too, but you can't be nitpicky about mythology.)

Countryside around Vik. They had some nice hiking paths on the hills we'll definitely try next time. 

I have so many photos that they didn't fit into one post, so stay tuned for part 2 next week!

Medieval Smackdown at Turku Castle

 

It's tournament time! This weekend knights have taken over Turku Castle to compete for the Finnish championship in medieval combat sports like jousting, sword fighting, skill at arms, and buhurt (that's the one in the picture. It looked fairly painful, but the name's got "hurt" in it, so . . .).  

They had some lectures about medieval combat on Friday, which were really interesting. I took pages and pages of notes, 'cause let's face it, I'll be writing about knights at some point. 

These modern knights study their craft from medieval manuscripts and try to use gear that's historically accurate when they can. The suits above are modern, of course, but the armour in the shots above is real. This is as close as you're going to get to seeing medieval knights fighting. For a fantasy fiction writer, this is a golden opportunity for research. 

Wouldn't it be cool to have a writing course with these guys as the special guest stars? I'd love to have them recreate a fight scene I wrote and tell me how I could make it more realistic, like a write-the-fight-right kind of deal, but with more swordplay. Hmm . . . Maybe the powers that be at Suomen tieteis- ja fantasiakirjoittajat could make it happen? For Worldcon, maybe? Pretty please, with dragons on top?

The tournament will continue tomorrow if you're in the Turku area and feel like watching a bunch of guys (and gals) whack each other with swords.

Book Recommendation: The Works of Leena Krohn

                               

Leena Krohn is a Finnish writer of speculative fiction. Her work is beautiful and strange and always surprising, so if you like weird fiction, you should definitely check her out. Tainaron: Mail from Another City, a series of letters sent from a city of insects, has been available in English for a while now, but a collection of her work was released last year, including some of her novels and short stories. Her work veers towards literary fiction, but don't let that put you off; this is the good kind of literary fiction, thoughtful but engaging.

I started reading one of her books, Hotel Sapiens, a story about people living in a hotel run by sentient machines on an apocalyptic Earth, and just fell in love. Then I picked up DreamDeath, which is also awesome. The protagonist is an anesthesiologist with insomnia, who works at a cryopreservation facility called the Freezer, the local hospital, and also DreamDeath, a euthanasia facility where you can go out with style. Dreams also figure into the narrative as she reads the dream journal of her great-great-grandfather (not sure about how many greats are in there).  We also meet some of her clients, who all have different reasons for wishing to die or to live forever. Then there's the real world that's crumbling into chaos and cruelty. It's an exploration of life, death, and the quest for immortality, but engaging and readable, not as heavy as you'd think from the subject matter.

I love how the books are structured. It almost feels like they're composed of short stories that explore different aspects of the theme and then all tie together in a greater whole. There's a delicious irony about her characters, like the blind ophthalmologist, or the anesthesiologist with insomnia, and some of the characters are just plain weird, like the shadow that leaves its human and lives on its own.

The real irony is that many of her books are out of print and hard to find in Finnish, while the English ebook is available to everyone. I've had Tainaron in English for a while now, but it felt wrong to read the translation when I could read the original. I actually lucked out, because I recently found it at a second-hand bookshop I popped into on my way to the library for said book. It was meant to be!

If you want something different, Krohn is definitely that. I just hope the power of her work isn't lost in translation. Have you tried something of hers? How was the translation?