My Media Attempt (Self Skills Future part 2)

Ovidia--every other Tuesday

I was still waiting for the WIP's structural edits, so decided to attempt another 2 week project. It seemed like a good idea at the time: I didn't want to take on anything big with the editorial changes/ corrections/ curses that would warp my mind forever descending on me at any time; surely I could learn how to create and post a scrolling story in a couple of weeks?
Isn't that something young people are doing all the time?

Anyway, it seemed like a good idea. I needed to make it a project because I'm not good at learning new stuff without a defined outcome (sorry, I'm Singaporean) to anchor it to.
Plus without a deadline, I tend to end up procrastinating under the excuse of learning/ practicing.
So: Project Target: make and upload something, however crappy, before my next MIE post!

So I downloaded free trials of Canva (creating and editing videos) and Procreate (for creating the images I wanted to animate) and went to YouTube to watch how-to videos.

I thought it would be simple--pick what I want to do, come up with a story, visualise and animate it and post the results...

First off, it wasn't so easy.
Or I'm just not very good at figuring out apps.
And then I had trouble coming up with characters--so I fell back on Aunty Lee (from my first series)

This is Aunty Lee with her famous pineapple tarts.

And Margie (from last fortnight's project story).

And I thought maybe I could figure things out, given enough time...

So of course that's when my structural editor's feedback & notes arrived (Friday)

Just before my panel at the Singapore Writers.

Thank you to MJ Mohammad for coming and for this photograph!

So all in all, I'm linking this mini story that's not quite a webcomic and not quite animated but thanks to it I've tried 'creating' clay protagonists, created a canva account and inserted text over a background, learned about time lines and saving to JPG vs PNG vs MP4...

And here's the result! I just hope this link works!

Now I'm heading back to face the first round of edits. Please wish me luck!!

Comic Relief

Annamaria on Monday 

Two weeks ago, introducing an opinionated post, I promised to put up something silly "next week."  I write my blogs on Sundays, to launch at midnight on Monday.  And when that following week rolled around, Brother Jeff (whose post had just preceded mine) put up a bunch of jokes.  I, therefore, thought it best to save my silliness.  Besides, last week I had something else I wanted to say that jibed current events.

Therefore, I waited until today to keep my promise.  Silly me, here jokes I considered worth saving. 

   And here to top it off is what I consider is my best joke.

I Continue to Love Iceland Noir

Eleven years after attending my first Iceland Noir festival (the second ever held) I still love participating in this celebratory gathering of so many wonderful members of the international crime writing community. So much so that when I had to withdraw at the last minute this year, I found myself lingering over old photographs capturing Barbara's and my memories of that magical island and the many lifelong friends we've formed there over the years. 

Back in 2014 I'd never been to Iceland before, and found Reykjavik, its people, its ambiance, and its nightlife combining to create a sense of what legendary Berlin or Paris must have been like in their heydays.  Or, less esoterically expressed, perhaps it’s just as simple as what I overheard a young American telling his girlfriend in a coffee shop, “It’s a cross between Bar Harbor, Maine and old Amsterdam.”  Whatever it is, this place has all the right vibes.

Here are some photos I took back then, though I never did get around to taking any of its vibrant, sophisticated (as compared to Mykonos) nightlife for we were too busy partaking to photograph.  

The festival itself remains a delight, filled with interesting speakers putting on their “A game” just for the joy of being here, and a knowledgeable, appreciative audience.   What more could a writer ask for?  Don’t answer, just look at the photos.

The first thing I saw after passing through immigration.

The first thing I saw upon leaving the terminal at 7AM. 

The strong, windswept, colorful, enchanting town of Reykjavik.

Off in the distance in that last photo is a church steeple, one that offers spectacular views of Reykjavik from the town's highest ground.  I found a balance in the place...and decided to leave my mark alongside the awe-inspiring site. Most though thought I should have left the beret instead.

But what of all the MIE'rs over there in 2024?  Here they come, Annamaria, Yrsa (a co-founder of the festival), Zoe, Michael, Stan, and moi.

And now it's off to book our place for 2026!

Jeff—Saturday

The unlikely heroes

Another Remembrance Day has slipped past us, and both world wars move slowly from living memory.  The cenotaph in the village is covered with wreaths of red poppies to remember the fallen, and two large wreaths  of purple and silver to remember the animals who served and fell alongside them.

Extra poignant, as most of you know we lost Mathilda this week. A wee rescue dog with a heart of pure joy. She was always in the waiting room in the clinic on a Tuesday, the patients loved her. Those who were lonely,  not allowed a dog due to their living conditions,  too ill to look after one, Mathilda became their dog. Patients turned up without appointments to see the dog, they brought treats,  cake, presents.   For such a boisterous wee dog,  she was oh so gentle with the 90 year olds.  While my dad was in  the dementia unit, Mathilda would visit  the  care home and it was lovely to see the eyes of the residents light up at the sight of malteser eyes and a tail  that never stopped wagging.

Animals give us such comfort to our souls in normal times, I can't imagine how  much that is magnified in the horrors of war.  I've blogged before of the 'Animals in War Memorial' in Hyde Park in London.  There's a parade  in that monument - from elephants to rats. 

There's a medal called The Dickin Medal that is awarded to animals  who have served in wartime, even pigeons.  It sounds strange but a small animal, flying under the radar, bred to carry very small cargo (generally coded messages), across sea and land, through barrel zones - they played a vital role when other lines of communication were destroyed.... it makes one wonder how many lives they helped to save. 

White Vision was such a pigeon.  She was a Scottish homing pigeon, aboard a flying boat that was brought down by enemy fire and forced to ditch off the west coast of Scotland in 1943. Her flight through atrocious weather helped rescuers locate the stranded crew.

 White Pigeon was bred in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland and was lent to National Pigeon Service where she was stationed with No. 190 Squadron RAF at Sullom Voe in the Shetland Islands.

 On 11 October 1943, the flying boat, the Catalina, was forced to ditch in the North Sea near the Hebrides. The radio was out of action, the terrible weather made it nearly impossible for other planes to locate the crew. 

So White Vision was released carrying a message that indicated where the aircraft had gone down. She flew a long distance over open water, through strong winds and poor visibility. Her successful delivery of the message allowed rescuers to pinpoint the location of the stranded airmen and without doubt, they would have perished  in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic without her.

 The odds against White Vision making that flight success fully were immense, she had a reputation of being a very determined little pigeon.

The PDSA (People's Dispensary for Sick Animals) Dickin Medal, instituted in 1943 by Maria Dickin, is often called the “animals’ Victoria Cross.” It's the highest award for gallantry that can be given to an animal serving in military conflict. White Vision was one of the first pigeons to receive this honour. 

According to the internet her citation reads: “For delivering a message under exceptionally difficult conditions and so contributing to the rescue of an Air Crew while serving with the RAF in October 1943.”

 There's a small postscript to the story about her legacy in Scotland.  She was bred by the Fleming brothers of Motherwell, and she gave the Scots a sense of pride in her achievement. Her medal highlighted the importance of ordinary creatures in extraordinary circumstances.  

And survival, of us, can depend on the instincts and endurance of animals.  Here, where seas are rough and the skies unpredictable, the flight of White Vision was a testament to resilience against nature’s harshest challenges.

 

The Twang of Surprise

Karen Odden - every other Thursday 

In my very first post I talked about how I came to the Victorian period. Today, I want to talk about why I stayed. The short answer is I love the Victorian period because, despite studying it for twenty-five years (since grad school in the late 1990s), it continues to surprise me. 

It’s a long period, from 1837-1901, nearly 64 years, and most scholars divide the Victorian period up into three parts – Early, Middle, and High – because trying to make generalizations about the Victorian era would be like us making generalizations about the US from 1961 to 2025. Obviously, this is fairly useless. 

The twang of surprise when I discover something new about the Victorians zaps an energy into my brain. Sometimes it’s not big enough to sustain a whole book. Sometimes it’s just a short story. I used to think, Oh, no one else will find that interesting. But experience has taught me otherwise. Now I pay attention when I feel startled and intrigued. 

This happened a few years ago, when my daughter Julia was studying for a semester at Oxford. I went over to visit as her semester was winding down. (I joked, "Oh, honey, I'm coming over to help you with the ... um .. language barrier as you pack up and travel home." She laughed.) It was a late afternoon in December, dark and spitting rain. We dodged into the Great Scotland Yard hotel, on the former site of the detective branch, for a drink. Imagine my delight when I walked into the lobby and discovered glass cases full of Scotland Yard memorabilia! Boots belonging to thieves, mug shots, knives, truncheons, police whistles (below), photographs with short explanations, and more. 

Then we went through to the bar, called The Forty Elephants. Given the hotel's Victorian theme, I imagined the name had something to do with British imperialism in India or Africa (where elephants live). But in the bar hung some images of beautiful women, in bejeweled 1920s garb. Thank goodness for the square black-and-white QR code on the table that said, “For more information.” 

I was wildly curious. 

To my surprise, the Forty Elephants were an all-woman thieving gang out of the Elephant and Castle area, in Southwark, south of the Thames. Their heyday was the 1920s, and Scotland Yard tried for decades to shut them down, finally succeeding after WWII. 

Originally, Elephant and Castle was a stagecoach inn, in the 1700s, located at the hub of six (or seven, depending on how you count) roads, coming in from Dover, Canterbury, and various parts of London. It was known as a hotbed for thieves. Just imagine … you’re an unwary traveler who arrives, tired and hungry, by stagecoach. You appear well-to-do. You enter, and someone offers you a warm chair by the fire, a glass of wine (perhaps laced with laudanum), and you have a good meal and fall asleep. In the morning, you wake, to find all your belongings gone, including your hat, coat, and boots. But this was largely the men’s province of crime, along with dragging (pulling luggage off stagecoaches) and mugging. The women wanted a domain of their own, and they found one -- in the new department stores in the West End. 

With the rise of these stores, thieves found a new place to work. The women used sophisticated methods for thieving. They had special long pockets sewn into their skirts. They had fishermen’s mesh sewn inside their coats. They practiced tucking jewelry into their hair. They used muffs. They even had dresses with false arms sewn in, so the real arms and hands could be stealing stealthily. They had two-sided cloaks that they could flip for a quick appearance change. And they practiced their dodges. 

This intrigued me enough to write a book about it. I set my book (An Artful Dodge, coming in June) in 1870s London because that’s my era. But the impulse came from that moment of surprise, followed by a glass or two of wine with my daughter, on that rainy night in London.

How do you feel about surprises?

 

Michael Harrington, A Sentimental Story

Annamaria on Monday

The results of last week's election outcomes have dominated political discussion, including lots of chat about the newly elected mayor of New York being a Democratic Socialist.  My mind and my heart are full of memories.  I am writing some of them down here.  Mostly about friendship with a brilliant and delightful person who was a founding member of the party New York's new mayor claims as his own.

You can find out lots about Michael here.  Below are snippets of what I have been reliving over the past couple of months.

In 1973, my dear departed David and I moved to the West Village so that my five-year-old daughter could attend PS3, a progressive NYC public elementary school.  As so often happens with families, when she met and became best friends with Alexander Harrington, David and I also became friends with his parents: Michael and Stephanie.

Image: NY Historical Society

Here's a thumbnail sketch of who they were.  Michael was well known as the author of the 1962 book The Other America, which is credited with inspiring Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.  He was a professor at Queens College.  Stephanie was a freelance writer whose articles were regularly published in The New Yorker, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Harper's, etc. etc, etc. All of that, and they were both warm and charming.  And on the same wave length politically with me and David.

When it came to our backgrounds, Michael and I joked that we "went to different schools together."  He in Missouri and I in New Jersey.  He was 13 years ahead of me, but like me he went to Catholic school in elementary, secondary, and college.  By the time we met, we were both atheists.  He once said to me, "We've left the Church, but we will be running along beside it for the rest of our lives."  He was so right!  I have heard echos of him voicing those words all my life.

The two families spent a lot of time in one another's company.  Play dates.  Dinners.  Time in park, with kids in the sandbox and parents on a bench, in discussion. We went to the country with the kids (our one, their two).The four of us never ran out of things to talk about.

For a couple of years we looked for a town house we could buy jointly and divide between us, but we could never find one that would divide evenly, except Bob Dylan's two houses side-by-side.  But we couldn't afford them!

Once, when I was working on a strategic planning project with a client in Nutley, NJ, I lost track of time.  Suddenly, it was too late to take the bus back to NYC in time to pick up my daughter from school. I knew Michael would be going to get Alexander, so I called him and asked if he could collect my daughter too, and then I would pick her up from his house asap.  "Wait a minute," my client said.  "Michael Harrington is going to pick up your kid from school for you?"  When I said Michael would, my client said that he would drive me to New York himself if I would introduce him to Michael. I didn't have to take the bus that day!  Michael signed my client's  copy of The Other America that he just happened to have on his office bookshelf.

As the children grew, they drifted apart. Alas, all too young, Michael became very sick.  Stephanie and he moved away to a place where it would be easier to care for him.

Stephanie went, also too young.  And David too. Over the years, I've thought about our friendship from time to time, as one does. But then, starting with this year's Democratic mayoral primary, the words Democratic Socialist kept coming up in connection with Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.  And there they are again!  My friends of long ago.  In all their loveliness.