A few Parisian pictures.

I will probably upload the pictures on Facebook later, but I wanted to post a couple here, with comments. I took these on the surprisingly good RetroCam app on my Android phone - I much, MUCH prefer Hipstamatic, but I don't have an iPhone and getting my iPad out is such a hassle for quick pictures. Still, this camera did not actually disappoint. I like the polaroid effect, and it does great things with contrast.

The house where Sarah Bernhardt was born - we came across this place completely by accident, since we had lunch shortly after our arrival in a place just across the street and then spotted the plaque. Still, pretty cool. I like Bernhardt.

One of the buildings of the Sorbonne. I really like this shot. I like places where everything is old and beautiful, except the subway, which smells.

Because I'm easily amused, I come bearing Happeh Hasidic Child versus Angreh Hasidic Child. I didn't actually buy either book, but they looked hilarious. The second one obviously says 'KVETCH', by the way, and deals with Yiddish.

Les Deux Magots - an overpriced café where Sartre and de Beauvoir supposedly hung out back in the day. Also possibly Racine, but not at the same time, and that may be made up.

The inside of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I really love Gothic architecture, even if I dislike the heavy, incensey scent that always seems to hang around in those old churches.

I also love stained glass windows. Same church.

And a closer look at the star near the front. I really, really like this picture a lot. This camera app does a good job for contrast shots like this one.

Notre Dame. We didn't go inside... yet again... because the line is always crazy long. I need to investigate if there is a way to pre-order a ticket online, because I really want to see the inside. At least I've been inside the Sainte-Chapelle before, I guess - the line for that one was crazy as well.

Another view. I love the architecture of this church. It has a fairly interesting floor plan.

The gargoyles, seen from below. This picture turned out a lot trippier than it was intended, but I like it. They really are a fine example of the nutty side of Gothic. I love them.

Inside picture of the restaurant we had dinner at. The food was nice, but the menu was littered with weird French shit. I can say that, I'm Belgian. I don't want obscure meat on the bone, I don't want soup made out of shellfish, and I don't want to suck marrow out of a bone. I realize those don't sound that weird. I'm going to be quiet now. Good food was had.

I actually forget what this was. My mother and I have a tendency to just... walk through random gates. One day someone's gonna shoot us as trespassers, or something. But hey, it looks pretty.

Then, we went to Jewville, kind of - but only kind of - getting lost on the way. This was an old synagogue in the Rue Pavée. I like Judaism for many reasons, but one superficial one is the fact that a star is just a much nicer and less horrifying religious symbol than a cross. I mean, who are you gonna kill using a Star of David? An insect? (Six legs! You could conceivably crucify an insect on a Star of David! I'm going to be quiet now.)

We had lunch at an interesting Israeli falafel place. For some reason, I turned into a photography noob, and this is the only picture that turned out decent - the little Israeli flags on the wall just beside us. The food itself was good, but way too much. Which tends to happen at falafel places.

Of course, there were also heaps of bookstores - one was called the Temple Bookstore, or something like that, and it was beautiful. Of course, I made random purchases, some of which can be seen here. I bought Le Petit Prince in Hebrew/Yiddish - if you turn it over, it has the Yiddish text. This is good, because I can read Yiddish if I read it out loud. Mostly. The postcards are illustrations from Medieval Hebrew manuscripts. Score!

The red Christmas trees on the sixth floor of the Centre Pompidou. I oddly liked them.

And the view. This was the Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre. I really like how well you can see the hill.

And the Eiffel Tower. We didn't go there - I've been to the top three times before, and it's usually crazy crowded - but I figured I had to at least see it to make the Paris trip complete. :)

Okay, this turned into a much longer post than was intended, but oh well.

Epiphany

This is the book I bought using my gift card. It's called The 3 AM Epiphany, by Brian Kiteley, and it lists a total of 201 exercises for aspiring writers. I like it because the prompts are not of the 'write about a childhood memory' variety - most of them are much more detailed and much more interesting. Some are technical (dealing with different voices and points of view, or how to construct a paragraph), others are topical (such as the sections on biography/autobiography, or on history) but none of them are particularly easy. It's a good book that I think will help me a lot. I'm currently editing the first response I wrote.

Writing

I've been writing fiction for most of my life, really. I wrote fan fiction before I even knew what it was, since as a child, before I fell asleep, I used to tell myself stories using the characters from my favorite books. I only found out that it was a real thing that other people did too when I stumbled across the Draco Dormiens trilogy (Harry Potter fanfiction) when I was thirteen or so. It's been a slippery slope from there.

I evolved later to writing mostly original fiction, though even now, I occasionally write a one-shot to some book or tv series I enjoy. It's fun, particularly if one is the type of person who gets inordinately attached to fictional characters. I miss them when the book, the series, the movie is over, and so I enjoy keeping them alive in that way.

I did NaNoWriMo three times in high school. My first novel was a fantasy story about the sunken island of Atlantis, and though it was not the best thing since chocolate, it had certain elements that I still find interesting, such as the question whether gods and goddesses die when nobody is left to worship them. A friend of mine reminded me of that question yesterday, since it's being explored in a book series he is reading, and it made me think of my story. Which had, of course, a tragic ending.

I don't recall what order I wrote my other two NaNo novels in, but one was a historical novel set in 1960s England, starring two characters who had switched identities as teenage girls during the War. They were both French, and one was Jewish and fleeing to Canada (or someplace? I don't even recall) whereas the other was simply being evacuated to England, and they switched identities at a train station. I feel like this was based vaguely on a children's book I once read, but it also featured a murder and a bunch of really messed up secondary characters. I never finished that story, because I fear it was pretty juvenile and uninformed. My intentions were good, but I should have done more historical research. I'm still, however, fond of Sarah Schopenauer, and maybe one day I'll tell her story in another way.

The other book was actually pretty interesting. It mixed three story lines, one set in the 1500s, one set in the 1880s and one set in the 1920s, all three in England. The 16th century narrative dealt with the mysterious death of Lady Amy Dudley, who was the wife of the Earl of Leicester who may or may not have been the lover of Elizabeth I (and, at least at one time, probably was). The other narratives deal with the descendants of a distant relative who came to live with her during her final years. This story really had some potential and I had a good time writing it - it came pretty close to being finished, and I may pick it up again.

I haven't written an original story in a while, but one of my Christmas presents (once again using the Amazon gift card my friend gave me) was a book of fiction writing exercises. I hope to post some of the results on here, if I deem them un-bad enough.

My first thousand words?

I am mentally ten years old, and apparently prefer learning through children's books. A friend of mine was kind enough to give me an Amazon gift card for Christmas, and this was one of the four books I purchased:

It's really quite cool. I have a shaky history with vocabulary-list-style books (read: I buy them and then do nothing with them) but I'm hoping to get at least something out of this one. Even apart from my interest in Judaism, I really like Hebrew as a language and I would love to be fluent some day. It'd probably be good to learn words that are not 'mi chamocha ba'eilim, adonai' or 'eshet chayil' (though I found an Eshet Chayil song on Spotify that's awesome, but I don't think I am very much of an eshet chayil, so there you go).

We will see how it goes.