A window frame like this is a good way to test lens distortion and/or your post-processing workflow. As much as I hate it, Adobe Lightroom did a reasonably good job compensating for the lens distortion.

1/1000sec at f/8. Nikon D780, VR 28-300 f/3.5-5.6G at 82mm.

I have always had a strangely strong relationship to places. It’s difficult to verbalize, but having a deep familiarity with a locale has been a fundamental way I relate to the world. This extends into mapping fantastic places I’ve read about upon the physical world.

For example, when I spent some summer months of my tweens on the Gulf Islands near Vancouver, the archipelago became Earthsea in my mind. Around that same timeframe, I lived near Altadena. When I “discovered” Tolkien’s works, Middle-earth started imprinting upon the local terrain.

The San Gabriel mountains formed an excellent stand-in for the Misty Mountains. In winter, the clouds sit on the peaks, in Spring, the “June Gloom” does the same, and in the summer, the mountains were nearly hidden by the swirling smog of the late 70s.

The area is filled with places that mapped across those worlds. There’s a windy road above a tributary to the Arroyo Seco that goes through forests of oak and deodar, and in the early evening when the sky grows dark the lights in the windows of houses on the lower slope twinkle mysteriously. It was exactly what Rivendell looked like in my mind’s eye.

As I’d read, local places would overlay. The craggy entrance to Colby Canyon with its guardian trees, the steep drop-off ridges around Mount San Gabriel, the rough-hewn tunnel just down the trail at Eaton Saddle, the rustic cabins among the bright streams and white alder groves in Sturtevant Canyon, the high forested ridges above Ice-House Canyon — all mapped to places within the Lord of the Rings for me.

Decades later, when the blockbuster movies came out, I opted not to see them. The images in my head and the mappings to places I know were too important to be overwritten by Peter Jackon’s vision.

(Disclaimer: this photo has been digitally altered beyond just adjusting color and exposure. I removed telephone poles, a power pylon, and a lot of wires.)

Descanso Gardens are ridiculously photogenic at any time, but on a slightly overcast spring day?

I write a lot of short stories which I then fail to get published anywhere. My idea of what makes a good story is apparently well out of step with what the reading world finds interesting.

My stories often start with an image or phrase that pops into my head. In some cases, this seed grows rapidly in the first writing session. In other cases, it sits fallow for a long time. Stories tend to accrete slowly over time – it often takes me several writing sessions to even know what I’m writing about. Sometimes they never resolve and a chunk stays unfinished. Other times, the characters or stories let me know where they want to go, and I finish them. It’s not a fast process. Most stories end up taking months to write at a few paragraphs a week.

When I’m in “the flow” when things are developing quickly, I’ll often awaken late at night with scenes or entire paragraphs bubbling up in my mind. If I rush, I can commit them to paper in the morning, but often I’ll let the specifics fade away. I suspect my semiconscious mind is busy world-building, and that will add depth to whatever specifics I end up writing later.

In the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, there was a group of four or five writers considered the Queens of Crime: Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngiao Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Josephine Tey. Christie gets most of the glory in the US due to the Hollywood adaptations of her novels, but recently I’ve been reading through Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg mysteries.

Anyone who has read Christie (even the modern, bowdlerized versions) knows they’re chock-a-block with racism, classism, and antisemitism, and, sadly, Sayers suffers from this as well. Unlike Christie, Sayers brings to bear her Oxford education, so her novels and short stories contain frequent allusions to and excerpts from writers ranging back into classic Greece and in a variety of languages. Like Christie, the plots are convoluted with any possible suspects and countless red herrings.

In her 1925 short story, “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will” (originally published Pearson’s Magazine, volume 60), Sayers includes a full crossword puzzle that Lord Peter Wimsey and his associates must solve to locate the referenced will. Normally, I let this kind of story just wash over me. I don’t try to solve the murder and I don’t try to analyze the clues. But in this case, I thought I’d try to solve the crossword.

Of course, British crosswords are different than the NY Times style with which I’m more familiar. Furthermore, the number of classical references quickly overwhelmed me. I wasn’t able to complete it. But maybe you will? I took the layout, clues, and solution and laid them out in a convenient PDF for your puzzling pleasure.