More noisy neighbours!

The crows have gotten a lot quieter now that the young have been out of their nest for a few weeks, but for the past few days we’ve been enjoying watching our newest noisy neighbours, a family of merlins. These small falcons are sleek, graceful flyers with loud high-pitched repeating calls (something like klee! klee! klee! klee!). Like the crows when they had new fledglings out, the merlins seem to be most active (and vocal) in the early morning and right before dark.

(catching the last rays of the setting sun in the top of our neighbour’s cedar tree– also the best neighbourhood lookout spot)

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Real manga?

I’d love to write a real manga/graphic novel, but making personal photos into comics (with the help of Comic Life) is about all I can manage at the moment. I asked real manga artist Nina Matsumoto (who did the manga me I use for my avatar) to create a manga version of some scenes from my novel, Manga Touch, and this is what she came up with:

 

It was so much fun seeing these scenes from my imagination transformed into visual format, I could definately get excited about creating a whole manga story (especially if Nina did the illustrations)!

My comic summer

Playing with my new Comic Life software (as you can see from the fuzziness of the text, I haven’t quite got the knack of how to publish a comic):

 

Where do you stand on doors?

Photos of picturesque doors have become a bit of a chiche in recent years. There is even a Simpsons episode in which Bart and Lisa go antiquing with a new gay friend of Homer’s, and Bart photographs doors.

I admit that I too like to photograph doors. Perhaps it’s their mundaneness and, conversely, their universally symbolic quality. Doors are an ordinary part of everyday existence, but they can also imprison and hide secrets or they can open to freedom and new possibilities. They contain thresholds over which we may fear or yearn to step.

Here are some doors that caught my eye in Vancouver this past year:

And one more that I stumbled across when I was somewhat lost in East Vancouver recently: