Passion Fish

Modern Adaar.

Today has been one of those self-deprecating days, so I tried to fix it by photographing my Inquisitor a bit. Heh, at least I made one good thing!

when someone tags your post "#unreality" and you screenshot the tags and say "what are you talking about? this is real" because you consider the post easy to discern as not real and find this joke funny you're actually just causing paranoia for people who now feel like they can't trust the unreality tag. not everyone has the same reality discernment skills as you. what's "obviously" a fictional story to you may not be obvious to other people.

Germán Hernández Amores, 1823-1894

Ophelia, n/d, oil on panel, 56x38 cm

Pern Portfolio - 1978, Isis/Yggdrysil Press, Edited by Anne E. Zeek

(Cover art, 'The White Dragon', by Bev Zuk)

Pern/Anne McCaffrey themed anthology of art, filk (science fiction folk music), short stories, and some non-fiction articles. Notably McCaffrey wrote the forward.

It's thankfully one of the Pern fanzines to have its own Fanlore article, so you can read more about it there: link. Fanlore has some better scans than my phone app, but here's a few favourite pages of mine.

I'm almost certain I picked this up to get hold of the story 'Canth's Choice' (Canth searches a Queen candidate) being mentioned in multiple other places/fanzines, but I can't remember where those places were. Mostly it popped up on my radar of Anne approved fanzines that use the official characters in multiple stories since there's also an AU version of Moreta's story in there we all. At the time it was published it was advertised as the 'only approved' fanzine and all.

For anyone who'd like a read of it since it's an Anne written piece, here's the whole forward:

At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseum, I only started to write a short story about dragons: 478,000 words and six books later, I do not seem to have exhausted the subject material nor, mirabile dictu! the patience of my readers.

Looking back to the auspicious day in May 1966, when I first thought (for an entire day until GiGi returned from school) about creating the Pern dragons, I can see where all the numerous and tenuous threads (pun intended) came together in their creation. At the time, I considered making an interesting human-animal partnership, full partnership, because who needs 30-35 foot fire-breathing dragons flipping about with no controls. The strongest control one can exert on any sentient creature is love. Hate and fear are controls, too, but I have never espoused their use and have found in dealing with the variety of animals who appear seeking sanctuary in my domain that love and kindness, with a dollop of necessary firm authority, are the best of all controls.

Another factor, dominant in the dragon-rider association, is the partnership, the total symbiosis of a telepathic link that cannot deteriorate by semantic misunderstandings; a support and encouragement which is so rarely, and briefly, enjoyed by humans with other humans, or, due to the brief span of their years, with dogs, cats, horses, racoons, otters, and whatever other sorts of animals occasionally link up with us. Man's most crushing fear is that of solitude, of not being 'understood' by his peers. Dragons always love and understand, support and encourage.

It is this factor which has caused the dragons, and the firelizards, to have such a strong appeal to readers. Again, I repeat, it was not a conscious selection on my part. I maintain that a writer, or in my case, a story-teller, is born, not made: though the craft can certainly, and ought to be, refined and improved with usage and experience. A writer works every day and every minute, even asleep. The continuous input is stored in the best of all computers, the human brain, to lie in storage, to be retrieved when necessary, often unconsciously, for the need of the writer to express what drives him/her to write that particular story.

The Dragons of Pern, and the men and women who are their partners for life, are then the product of the forty-odd years of living I had done up to the point of their creation, my love of animals, my interest in and compassion for companions on this ravaged planet of ours. The success of my 'brain children' has been a source of never-ending astonishment to me. I'm as proud of them as I am the children of my body. May they all live long and prosper.

Merry Doll Round Fang - I still haven't decided on a name for her. She's been painted by the amazing Andy (Angel Toast Aesthetics).

'Falcon' kinda circles around as a possibility, but then I think it's too generic for such a soulful face.