Moonlake's Fiction Space

23 days Italy, Switzerland and France trip on trains- France part 1

The first leg of our French journey was spent at Annecy. I felt a little anxious about this because I had bought the Geneve to Annecy train tickets online (and stupidly bought a specific connection rather than a normal point to point) but when I remembered about the Lausanne-Geneve tickets the day before, it was already too late- I never learnt to use the ticket machines and just queued up for physical tickets everyday in the SBB ticket office. So we got up really early on the day and had to wait for 7am for the office to open. Luckily, at the ticketing office, I found out that we still had plenty of time. To be honest, I could not remember much of the attractions at Annecy because it was so small a place and nothing stood out in my memory. Even going through the photos, I did not think Annecy was that different from what we had seen at Switzerland. I think we snapped exactly one photo of Château d’Annecy (or what I assumed was the Chateau) and then bridges and colourful houses and a big mountain range at a lakeside park (forgot the name). For dinner, I ordered roasted bone marrow for Mum (Mum eats beef bone marrows which is a Chinese dish) and BBQ pork breast for myself. Unfortunately, the bone marrow happened to be coming from a big mutton bone and was too fatty for Mum’s taste whereas my BBQ sauce had a tomato base and tomatoes are not part of my usual diet because I’m born with an aversion to sourness. Epic food failure contrasting with my initial high hope for French cuisine.

The second day at Annecy was given to visiting Menthon-Saint-Bernard and Tallories. We got to the bus stop without mishaps but I was trying to find bus line 60 to no avail. Luckily, there was a Sibra (the bus company) office right nearby and there I found out that the line 60 no longer exists and has been replaced by line 20 which does not come until 11am (we had already missed the 9ish one; this bus runs for about 2 hours and then there’s a break of about 2 hours until it starts running again). We boarded without mishap but there was really nothing at Menthon-Saint-Bernard except the Chateau and we could not find a way to access it on foot (we kept coming to a sign that pointed to a car-only path towards it) so we did what we did with all the castles we came across: snap a photo of it from below and zoom in with the photo. It started raining in the afternoon so we gave up going on further to Tallories and just returned to Annecy by bus. We ordered half a dozen snails in croquilles (pastry) and meuniere perch fillet for dinner. The snails were okay but out of the four that I ate (Mum was already down with the cold and had a smaller than usual appetite), I only tasted one with a definite meat texture (which I felt was a bit chewy and akin to calamari meat) while the rest just tasted like the whole dish was just creamy garlic sauce. As for my meuniere perch fillet, I guess I had too much expectation for it but being used to steamed fish, a slowly cooked pan-fried fish was not that special. Sure, the fish meat was soft but not a style of cooking that I would be falling in love with.

Sometimes I lose my way…

This is from Write New Headlines by Andy Stanley.

Sometimes I lose my way. Usually in the small things but then that’s usually how it goes.

Sometimes I lose my way. More often I stick to known paths. That’s what you do if you’re direction blind. And prudent.

Sometimes I lose my way, in time.

Sometimes I lose my way. I snap free of the reins.

Sometimes I lose my way, like I’ve wandered into a dark tunnel.

Sometimes I lose my way, more often I find myself a way out, somehow.

Sometimes I lose my way. I’m a great believer in self sufficiency, perhaps too much.

Sometimes I lose my way. But I will find my way out, somehow.

Sometimes I lose my way. That doesn’t make me special. We might all be partly lost, in different places.

Sometimes I lose my way.

Sometimes I lose my way and come to somewhere unexpected. But I can’t safely do that except maybe in a shopping centre.

Sometimes I lose my way, not down a rabbit hole, or not a literal one anyway. I only recently realised the saying came from Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps.

Sometimes I lose my way. I cannot read the compass at all. But I’ve got a compass app on my phone now. Not really put it to use yet.

Moonlake’s Writing Updates- December 2024

I have to be honest and say that I had to revisit my Writing Goals for 2024 post in order to write this. In short, I did not meet my broad goal at all. I’m still at draft 0.83.

In terms of the finer goals, the first is redundant. I had definitely gone past the mid-point for both my protagonists and I had not really had time to refine the mid-point explicitly and I don’t think that’s the crux that will push the novel forward at this point in time. The second goal is… well, I had expected that I would have a round of structural analysis on the WIP this year but the truth is that I didn’t. It’s hard to say whether this is a good thing or not.

Not a particularly fruitful year overall but something to be expected given my two trips this year. Onwards to 2025!

Moonlake’s Book Discoveries : December 2024

Fantasy

The Sisters Mederos by Practice Sarath

I do like this book in that the two Mederos sisters are well developed and you can easily throw in with the two of them in their quest to restore their family. An okay reading experience, not sure if I will come back for more.

Mystery

13 by James Phelan

This is certainly a fast-paced thriller and I wasn’t expecting the ending which definitely invites for more. I will go onto the next book if not for the upcoming holiday and then it will be whenever my whims take me. But a solid work from the author.

12 by James Phelan

I have forgotten the previous novel somewhat but thankfully there was a “previously section” that moved me seamlessly into this book. In this book, we continue with the adventures of Sam and the ride with him is certainly enjoyable. I can now see that each book possibly ends with a cliffhanger for Sam and not sure how I feel about that but I guess time will reveal all.

11 by James Phelan

We continue the chase with Sam and I’m still on board so that’s good. I was pleased by the fact that the conclusion to the cliffhanger in the opening of this book is different from 12.

10 by James Phelan

I was expecting a different 13 to be revealed than the one featured in this book. Still, I might not be wrong yet. By now, I feel like the books are a little formulaic in there always being a cliffhanger ending that invites you to jump to the next book. My verdict on it is still the same as when I encountered it in the first book of this series: I don’t hate this ploy but I don’t love it either. But I’m still on board with the series.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

To be honest, I found the book a bit too slow in pace for my taste. I actually wonder whether this would be different for someone else who actually knows about the actual case this is based upon. Still, the fact that I stuck to the end means that it is well written enough to keep me engaged.

23 days Italy, Switzerland and France trip on trains- Switzerland part 3

The last leg of our journey in Switzerland was based in Lausanne. By that stage, I was feeling like all Swiss cities looked remarkably similar and had no appetite for photos (my enthusiasm was not high in the first place compared to Mum). We tried to visit the Sauvabelin Tower but after getting off at the right metro station, found that it was still too far away so we gave up and went back. Later (when we were back at the hotel) I googled again and found out that we saw the tower in the distance before we gave up. But to be honest, I did not find it particularly attractive as a place to visit so no loss. We grabbed something for lunch at the supermarket. We had dinner at Leonardo, a restaurant that I had reserved and their sauteed clam was the one dish I was looking forward to for this entire trip. And it turned out to be excellent so we went back to it the next day and ordered two saunteed clams for dinner. On the first dinner though, I ordered the tagliolini with black truffle cream to share with Mum and we both found it a bit too creamy for our taste such that we were only able to eat the top layer of it and the waitress though that we really disliked the dish and I had to explain that we just naturally have a small appetite (which is also true).

The second day was spent at Gruyeres. In retrospect, that was a total waste of time and we had to change trains to get there with the wait time between connections usually being half an hour. The only positive thing was that there are no ticket inspectors on regional connections unlike the connections between cities (in Switzerland, if you take the intercity trains, there are bound to be a ticket inspector every single time, on the clock. And it feels like each one does things a little differently, from just wanting to scan your half fare cards and stamp your tickets to wanting to look at passports in addition to the above). And there was not much at Gruyeres.

And that concluded our 9 days in Switzerland.

Chinese Lore- a selection of mythical fauna (24)

Fei Fei

Physical Description:

Shaped like a racoon dog but a white tail.

Special Properties:

Adopting it as a pet removes anxieties.

Long Chi

Physical Description:

Looks like a horned pig.

Special Properties:

Consuming its meat prevents nightmares.

Flying Fish

Physical Description:

A pig-like fish with red patterns on its body.

Special Properties:

Consuming its meat makes you not afraid of thunder and helps you avoid being injured by weapons.

Xie

Physical Description:

Looks like an angry dog with scales and hair like those of pigs.

Craft and Curiousity Reads 2024

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

I first learnt about this book through the UBC online novel writing courses and I was rather curious about it but the curiosity was not that acute that I searched for it straight away. In fact, it was only because I saw it in my library’s online catalogue that I decided to put it down for my Curiousity Read for this year.

I ordered this book from my library and I’m currently in the top spot for it but I’m still waiting on it.

The Banned and the Banished by James Clemen

I did not think this series was great in terms of prose or any other aspect as I’ve previously blogged but it was third person limited with a reasonably sized party of protagonists that I thought I could learn something from.

I had barely started running over this series from the start alongside my other fiction reading. One thing I’m struck with straight away is the high stakes at the start that has been driving the book. Not necessarily something I can replicate but a good illustration of stakes at work in a novel.

New Experience: GMing

This is only peripherally writing related but due to the unexpected real life circumstances of one member of my gaming group, we are running one-shot games until December when he goes away. So for the very first time, I signed myself up for being the GM (game master) of a game using a premise that I thought up ages ago (I did intend to dip my feet in GMing sooner or later, it just came up sooner. I thought my very first game would be a different game, one that I adapted from a Chinese online novel).

The game premise was a combination of inspiration by a FB game called Criminal Cases: Time Travel and my own imagination. The world premise is as follows:

The game is set in Earth in the near future, where a dimension incursion was repelled with the use of new time travel technology. However, the technology itself was later captured by the invaders which gave rise to a disrupted timeline. So a band of fighters was formed who constantly wage wars with the invaders across timelines in various ways with the help of subsidiary characters summoned from history or stories.

The fighters operate in units of 4 as a hit team, with fixed roles within the team. They embark on missions with a range of explicit objectives that all ultimately contribute to thwarting the dimensional invasion.

In this setting, PCs are at least partially robotised which makes rotation across roles possible: you just need different calibrations to your mechanical body parts for the different roles. There is also good camouflage technology to make the most outlandish subsidiary characters blend in at any given timeline.

I ran two sessions before my trip and it went okay according to player feedback. I had hoped to use this experience to strengthen my shortcomings in descriptions and this is too early to report back on how the experience would help. But that is one goal I have in the back of my mind besides having fun with my friends.

I want to keep it short and sweet today. More forthcoming as need be.

23 days Italy, Switzerland and France trip on trains- Switzerland part 2

Day 12 started our 3 days’ stay at Interlaken. The first day was spent at Interlaken and Brienz. We had breakfast at Cafe de Paris where we had two plain omelets. Since that was rather filling for us, we skipped lunch. There was really nothing at Interlaken (it was also raining that day) so we did some random pics and moved onto Brienz in the afternoon. I think the focus of the Brienz was the village and around the lake.The lighting was not right around the lake so we ended up taking more pictures of the houses instead. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and I ordered three dishes- half a Cantonese style roasted duck, prawns and mushrooms plus vegetables. The roasted duck was too dry and the mushrooms were so salty to be almost inedible (I’ve actually experienced this before when I joined a Eastern Europe tour in Shanghai but I forgot since that was a few years back). And true to Switzerland being high in living costs, the bill came up to 111 Swiss Franc!

The second day was our big day visiting villages near Lauterbrunnen and for that I bought two Daily Saver Pass but somehow selected the digital ticket option that nearly got us into trouble (more on this later). We basically visited Lauterbrunnen in the morning and did Staubbach Falls. Originally we planned to go up to Murren via the Grutschalp cable car but it was apparently down for maintenance until June so we caught a bus up to Stechelberg instead. We had to change cable cars at Gimmelwald and I was originally apprehensive about the cable car but in reality it was a huge cable car jam packed with people so I could always choose not to look outside much. I was also prepared for it being really cold since Murren was at a high altitude but in reality it felt all right. Our down jackets and two layers of turtlenecks were more than enough for it. We didn’t shoot much photos of the Alps because we were very reluctant to get outside the set pathway and it was raining on and off that day so that lighting was not too good either. We had lunch at Murren where we shared a prawn spaghetti. I originally had visiting Wengen as the next day’s activity but we wrapped up Murren early so we had a bit of rest at the hotel and then after discussion we decided to do Wengen too. And then we had the fright of our life when the ticket inspector would not accept photos of the Saver Day Pass (the morning ticket inspector did accept it since he could still scan the QR code from the photos) because he was sticking to the rule books and apparently we could have taken a pic of someone else’s tickets even though each ticket had our full name and date of birth on it. Luckily, an Asian girl sitting right across from us was kind enough to share her wifi with me so that I could show the original email, phew! But I was determined to never get a digital ticket again if I could help it, it was just always such a challenge for me who came very late to switching to a smart phone and never learnt to use anything besides the basic function of web browsing on it (I didn’t get a local SIM card because this trip involved us being partly in Switzerland which was not part of the EU and I didn’t want to switch between 3 SIM cards and hold onto such tiny things at the same time and the experience with data roaming at Italy made me even forget that I could open data roaming on my phone. Plus, the ticket inspector was just being pushy and totally unhelpful.) We were going the flexible approach with dinner for this day because my extensive research could not find which place was best suited to our tastes. In the end, we opted for a supermarket food dinner costing 6 Swiss Franc in total.

We had an open day for the next day and because I was worried about the train transfer at Bern and I googled to learn that Bern was very close, we visited Bern on the last day of our stay at Interlaken. Because the main goal was to check out the Bern train station, even though we got a free map from the tourist’s center, we basically only visited a church at Alstadit and the signature clocktower and then called it a day. Mum found the capital city very old and dilapidated and I pointed out to her that it was because it was the Alstadt that we mainly visited. We had MacDonalds for lunch for short of anything else that appealed. For dinner, we had seafood pizza at the restaurant just below our hotel (it was not owned by the hotel though). The topping was not quite full but passable. And given Mum and my small appetite, I finished my half and ate a small piece for Mum while she threw away about ⅓ of hers, clearly sick of our alternating diet between pizza and pasta/spaghetti.

Remarkable Women in ancient China (22)- Wang Zhenyi

Who is she:

A female astronomer

Notable Life Events:

Born in 1768, to a highly learned family. Specifically, her grandfather had been a local governor while her father had turned to studying medicine after failing to qualify as a government official through the imperial examination. Her grandfather taught her astronomy, her grandmother taught her literature and her father taught her medicine, geography and mathematics
When she was 16, she and her father went traveling around China and such an experience broadened her horizons. When she was 18, she became pen pals with many female scholars and focused on exploring astronomy and mathematics through self learning. She kept postponing her marriage until 25 when she married Zhan Mei, a renowned scholar and calligrapher.
She became renowned for literature as well as her knowledge in mathematics and astronomy and she even taught male students
In 1797, her grandfather passed away in the region where he worked and she went to stay there for 5 years during which she studied from his stores of books and learnt riding and martial arts from the wife of a Mongolian general
She passed away in 1797 at the age of 29, childless. She gifted away all her written work and drafts to her best friend who passed onto her nephew who organised and published her work.
Her contributions in astronomy and mathematics included
- Works on sun and moon eclipses as well as rotation direction of various planets in the solar system
- Being expert in the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometry and she has an essay on applying the Pythagoeran theorem to triangles which is proved to be correct

Moonlake’s thoughts on her:

This is clearly a woman who knows what she wants from her life and works to cultivate that. I have great respect for her.

English Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Zhenyi_(astronomer)