Rosemary Kirstein

But YOU can.

Everything works… In Firefox, anyway. Possibly not in Internet Explorer…

Yep: at Starbucks, getting some writing in before hitting the gym.

Me plus coffee (not pictured).

I cannot, alas, skip the gym. The six months of overtime from hell has left me weak and knotted up. Luckily, gym-time is reading-time, so there’s a built-in reward!

Hey, I got a car! I’ll post a picture of it shortly. 2002 Subaru Impreza GT. Power everything, plus sunroof. I’m still recovering from the monetary shock. I have to rethink my plans for the rest of the year.

Other news: usually my friends Ann Tonsor Zeddies and Geary Gravel and I get together for a few days after some convention, but this year we all skipped Boskone, so we just went ahead and met con-less.

We normally spend an evening doing collages… then last year we tried masks…

This year, while wandering through the craft store looking for supplies, I spotted some boxes made to look like books and had a brain storm.

Voila:

Well, heck -- I guess you can collage any damn thing!

Ann’s book-box seems to be called “Every Hour Should Be Happy”

Of course, I'm a sucker for maps

And within:

A nautilus is a cephalopod. Ann knows from cephalopods.

And:

Geary’s box seems to be called The Alchemists.

After Geary's first novel

Something of the wonder and mystery of that novel is reflected here...

Of course, this is an actual scene from the book, and one of my favorites.

My contribution:

This seems to be called The Black Box

But not, I must point out, the black box from a crashed airplane.

It's the programmer's black box.

With a black box, you know what goes in, and you know what comes out...

...but what happens between is invisible.

Something is there.

I really like how these turned out. In fact, I like mine so much that I really wish I’d executed it more carefully and precisely, and made it a more worthy object to preserve. But we tend to throw our collages together in fits of inspiration, outracing any hesitancy or self-censoring, and and perfection is not the point.

Still, I might make this a Thing I Do.