An odd late night thought

Apropos of nothing in particular, it strikes me that there are certain similarities between Aras in karentraviss's City of Pearl and Constantine in Robin McKinley's Sunshine. They're both inhuman but at least somewhat human-friendly compared to others of their kind, powerful and scary and graceful and possessed of long, violent pasts, and form some kind of bond with the female, human protagonist. For that matter, they both have incurable, communicable conditions that make them effectively immortal, though Con was human to start with and has become less so, while alien Aras has moved closer to humanity. On the other hand, Aras would presumably be horrified by Con's obligate diet!

karentraviss, would you care to comment? Might there be vampires somewhere in c'naatat's story-ancestry, or am I completely off-base? Please feel free to ignore me if you'd rather not discuss it.

Hmmm

CNN headline: "Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider"
http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/19/poll/index.html

Regardless of political alignment or lack thereof, that made me giggle.

Stormy weather

That active region I mentioned a few days ago? Since then, it's produced three or four middling X-class flares (the biggest ones), a bunch of smaller flares, and some fairly impressive Coronal Mass Ejections, the things that cause solar storms.

http://www.solarmonitor.org is a good site, though I'm not sure how dial-up friendly it might be.

Also, I believe the phrase is 'GIP'.

ETA, 7.20 UT; now that's what I call a flare! X7.0 or thereabouts, which I think is the largest we've seen in a while -- since the glory days of region 10486 back in October-November 2003, if I'm reading the tables right. The strange thing is, I was watching the GOES trace when it started, and I had a feeling this one was going to be big. Maybe it was the way it just seemed to get steeper as it went up. If this one comes with a CME to match, and it isn't too far off to the side, there might just be a good aurora in a day or so.

More noodles

I took my box-o'-plot on the bus again this morning, stocked with some blank white (plot) and pink (character background) cards. So what did I get all day? Blue (worldbuilding/backstory) ideas, that's what. I had to swing by the bookstore at lunchtime for fresh supplies.

It isn't all there yet by any means, but tantalizing bits keep floating into view, fragments of a fairly intricate backstory without the pieces I need to fit it all together. It seems the wainscot-people, tentatively labelled 'shipwights', have their own motives and history that don't have a lot to do with human wars. This doesn't help much with getting Claris a spine, unfortunately. It did occur to me that she does in fact have good-to-her reasons for protecting her backstage team, but those might not apply to Jorik, whom (I think, but this is a relatively recent revelation) she's never actually met.