Inspiration, Tennyson and memories of Alaska

Inspiration is an odd thing: fluid and viscous, and utterly unpredictable. Killing time, I was leafing through an old edition of Palgrave's (the version of about 1920, alas nothing vaguely like the version available today), and happened on a fragment of verse:

...bright and fierce and fickle is the South,

And dark and true and tender is the North.

It's Tennyson, and it's ... odd, to say the least. Dark and true and tender is the North. A frisson travels the length of your spine; the hair begins to stand up on the back of your neck. You see visions (at least, I do!) ...

Of course, I'm probably biased ... when I think 'north,' I usually think of Alaska, which is where I met the other half of my family, met and married my husband. And oddly enough, 'bright and fierce and fickle' is a pretty darned good description of Australia, especially in our summer months. Naturally, me being me, when I get story visions, it usually means science fiction or fantasy, or a combination of both. Hmm.

The story-generating gears are creaking right now. Something will come of this, I'm sure! I even found myself looking at images on the Internet, trying to find something embodying what I'm halfway seeing.

If there were a "photo of the day," this would be it:

Alaska winter fantasy ... not one of my images, guys. It's a wallpaper, from one of those desktop themes sites
where you slog through 87 ads to get to the content. Don't recall the URL, sorry. If anyone knows it,
let me know and I'll add it in right here.

There's a story out there, tickling on the periphery of my mind, itching like a mosquito bite on the very edge of my imagination. It'll come to me.

Which is all very well, but at the same time, each day I try to use this computer (a Dell Inspiron laptop, by the name of Pandora ... gotta give it a name on the home network, and when I got it Avatar was red-hot news), I realize how much it needs some work done to it. Nothing I can do locally; it's a workshop job, for sure. Dang.

So here I am with my mind happily meandering through Alaskan memories -- a good enough excuse to paste in a photo of myself! It's an eons-old shot, scanned in recently and uploaded to the travel blog I've been tinkering with for the last few years.

Most of the posts on the Meander to the Max blog feature road trips around South Australia and just a little bit interstate, but one series of posts is entitled Alaska Memories. The snapshot at left (which Dave took just off the side of the road on the Parks Highway, in ... golly, I think it had to be 1999), is from Four Seasons in One Post.

Good memories -- rich memories, too. People have asked more than once why I don't write something set in Alaska; and the most honest answer is, the Alaska I knew is now almost 20 years old. Things change a lot in two decades. If I were to write something set in Alaska, it would have to be set in an almost historical context --

Which sounds incredibly weird. I recently took part in a discussion regarding how fiction might be categorized. Just where does one draw a line, on one side of which is 'contemporary,' and on the other side is 'historical.' Turns out, many (most?) people these days are calling 1960s fiction historical. Whoo. I was eight or ten years old at the time. Ouch.