murmurations and jaguars
Delightful readers,
Today I bring you ebooks, some images of me reading aloud, and a gorgeously evocative bit of mathematical vocabulary.
Ebooks first! North Continent Ribbon is now available on Kindle, Apple Books, and Nook as well as via the publisher. Tell your Kindle-ecosystem-embedded friends! (And ask them to review the book if they liked it!)
Last Friday, Michael DeLuca and I headed to Booksweet to read aloud and talk about the process of imagining a world. We had a cool crowd! One of Michael's friends took some lovely pictures. Here I am making one of several attempts to shape a continent with my hands:
Michael and I talked about the problem of fitting a huge social movement into a conventional story structure. He described Jaguar Mask as his own attempt to imagine what it would be like to become a revolutionary. For his character Felipe, who has literally been wearing different masks all his life (the jaguar, a conquistador, a cayman), the question is what it would feel like to stop hiding. I really enjoy all of the incompatible layers of Felipe's self: the shared apartment overflowing with books, protest flyers, and the products of a laboring coffeemaker, the beloved old car whose overpriced stereo is camouflaged beneath highlighter-scribbled calendars, and, underneath it all, the real jaguar.
In a completely different aspect of my life, I've been getting ready for a workshop later this fall on the mathematics of murmurations. That's a number theory phenomenon named after the flights of starlings. Quanta Magazine has a nice article with both kinds of pictures. (If you're one of the people who is absolutely over the large language models hype, note that the "AI" involved in murmurations is old-school bread-and-butter machine learning, not the new tools that waste a bottle's worth of water every time they generate an email.)
Here's Kosmas trying to convince you that he is nothing like a jaguar:
Very sincerely yours,
Ursula.