On My Mind in December
Winter Solstice Landscape. Colab with Adobe Firefly.
It’s winter solstice today. The shortest day and the longest night of the year. The hibernal solstice. In ancient times viewed as the symbolic death and rebirth of the Sun or a Sun god. Cultures with cyclic calendars tied to the solstice celebrated a "year as reborn" with rituals linked to life-death-rebirth deities and themes of "new beginnings". This year I think many of us are hoping for a fresh start, a clean slate, tabula rasa.
The Ebb & Flow of Creativity: I’ve been creating a few new album covers for Dark Sven’s new music releases on Spotify.
Current Colab: Collaborating with Adobe Firefly on a series of generative AI images.
Pen and Ink: Janice Hallett writes clever and funny, whodunits. A journalist, communications writer, and screenwriter, she wrote her first novel when “screenwriting dried up” as a way to get her ideas out there. She can’t plan. She’s tried planning her books, but she can’t. It takes the joy out of writing. Starting with a blank page and vague ideas, her ideas and characters spring up as she writes. I hope to find her epistolary novel The Christmas Appeal under the tree! Interview: The Appeal writer Janice Hallett: ‘I wrote about bubble bath for 15 years’
On my Palette: frosty blues with shades of yellow and starry white.
On my Radio: Mythical Creatures. Fantasy writer Rhianna Pratchett takes us across an enchanted British Isles to find mythical creatures and uncover what they can tell us about our history, world and lives today. And Starborn: How the Stars Made Us and Who We Would Be Without Them by Roberto Trotta. Book of the Week. Cosmologist Roberto Trotta reveals how stargazing has shaped the course of human civilization.
On my Balcony: snow, hellebore, ivy, and checkerberry.