Tuesday, October 02, 2007

A happy holiday

Well, I am back from a break in Sydney-town - should anyone be asking where I have been you may say I have been there, with my wife, re-energizing.

But now I have returned.

So there we go...

Given that I was born and raised on the south central coast of Australia (and that I am an indoorsy kind of fellow) I have never seen the marvel I saw on Foresters Beach on the New South Wales central coast. There had been a storm a few days before (or so we - my wife and I - were told by a stranger - a fellow walker - along the strand) and washed up on the whole length of the beach were dead, sun-dried blue bottle jellyfish. Their air-sacs were like brittle plastic, that popped loudly when trodden underfoot.

Later we found more recently washed specimens still firm and rubbery, spasming and curling in on themselves when touched. The largest would have been no bigger than an apricot, fitting neatly in the palm of hand, yet their bright blue stinger stretched out across the sand for three feet or so.

Nature-nerd that I am, I was astounded and amazed and immediately inspired as to what such things might be in the Half-Continent: small mucosa spawn, living, mindless buds released from their "parent". Storms wash them ashore where, depending on the species, some might wither and die; others dry and become dormant - waiting to be washed into the vinegar seas again some other storming night, revive and grow into terrors. Yet others might actually take up home on the shore, slowly burrowing to make treacherous toothy or sucking pits of themselves to trap crabs and gulls and the occasional careless limb (this might be too Star Warsy, hmm...)

I have visions in my head of some story of such a wash-up of these gelatinous spawn. I see the local fishers and sea-side village folk come down to the beach to squash and hack and burn the little, defenseless jellies, wishing to destroy at least some of the sea-monsters while they are vulnerable and spare later griefs. This might all get written down someday. Hmm... again.

Meanwhile, I have to pop off to spend the afternoon with my editor as we go over some of the last tweaks to MBT 2, Lamplighter. Almost there folks, almost there. As to the excellent questions posed last post, they have really got me thinking (and indeed one of them is answered in Book 2) and I shall get to them.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

welcome back

madbomber said...

gday mate,

good to see you back. We had some folks that were losing control with your sudden disapearance!

I've never been to the East coast, but according to the lifesaving show thats on TV, those jelly fish are the scourge of every Summer at the beach.


cheers bomber
If they are to be HC animals by crikey someone better be hunting them, there has to be no worse monster!

Anonymous said...

animals
mabey a steve erwin char?

Anonymous said...

Definitely too starwarsy - although you could try to change it to something like a trap door spider...

if the H.C has boats with giant mucles and everything inside to power them, why do they not havve trains and cars? it seems logical that they could make some kind of auto mobile using that technology.

D.M. Cornish said...

Logical at a certain point in history to people of our culture perhaps. One has to be careful of assuming every other culture thinks just like ours and would come to the same conclusion as ours. I might cite that gunpowder is often cited as a Chinese invention but it was Western Europeans who took the idea and extrapolated it to produce firearms as we recognise them.

Also you'll find omnibuses mentioned in Foundling - slow, gastrine powered vehicles for the transport of folks driving about Boschenberg - I just do not make a big deal of them.

Even more so, in the many many pages of my notebooks exists drawings of Half-Continent versions of cars - but that is all many centuries in the future from Rossamund's time.

D.M. Cornish said...

I like the trap-door spider idea, btw - no sarlacs in the Hc, thanks!