The construction came back before seven in the morning; my day has been all awry. I can't remember the last time I got two nights of real sleep in a row. One every weekend is not a viable ratio. Falling asleep on the couch in the evening instead of watching a movie with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch does not count as makeup.
Since no one asked, my slowly accumulating collection of good bog/marsh/fen stories non-comprehensively includes Jenn Grunigen's "The Seaweed and the Wormhole" (2014), KJ Charles' Spectred Isle (2017), B. Pladek's "What the Marsh Remembers" (2021), Steve Toase's "The Ercildoun Accord" (2022), and now Katie McIvor's "We Bleed Water" (2022). I don't know if I would include Andersen's "The Marsh King's Daughter" (1858) except that a passage from it frightened me as a child as much as Seamus Heaney's "The Grauballe Man" (1975):
I fell asleep, and I dreamt—I seemed to be again in the vast Egyptian Pyramid; but still before me stood the moving alder stump which had frightened me on the surface of the bog. I gazed at the fissures of the bark and they shone out in bright colours and turned to hieroglyphs; it was the mummy's wrappings I was looking at. The coverings burst asunder, and out of them walked the mummy king of a thousand years ago, black as pitch, black as the shining wood-snail or the slimy mud of the swamp. Whether it were the Mummy King or the Marsh King I knew not. He threw his arms around me, and I felt that I must die.
I note that it didn't occur to me immediately to include Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) in this list, even though I read it just as young and wasn't frightened and the swamp is right there in the title. I never thought to look for film adaptations; there are at least three. Of course the silent version produced by the author's own production company is lost.
I don't think I remembered to share Chrystabell and David Lynch's "The Answers to the Questions" (2024) with anyone but my husbands last month when it was released, but I liked it.
spatch does not count as makeup.Since no one asked, my slowly accumulating collection of good bog/marsh/fen stories non-comprehensively includes Jenn Grunigen's "The Seaweed and the Wormhole" (2014), KJ Charles' Spectred Isle (2017), B. Pladek's "What the Marsh Remembers" (2021), Steve Toase's "The Ercildoun Accord" (2022), and now Katie McIvor's "We Bleed Water" (2022). I don't know if I would include Andersen's "The Marsh King's Daughter" (1858) except that a passage from it frightened me as a child as much as Seamus Heaney's "The Grauballe Man" (1975):
I fell asleep, and I dreamt—I seemed to be again in the vast Egyptian Pyramid; but still before me stood the moving alder stump which had frightened me on the surface of the bog. I gazed at the fissures of the bark and they shone out in bright colours and turned to hieroglyphs; it was the mummy's wrappings I was looking at. The coverings burst asunder, and out of them walked the mummy king of a thousand years ago, black as pitch, black as the shining wood-snail or the slimy mud of the swamp. Whether it were the Mummy King or the Marsh King I knew not. He threw his arms around me, and I felt that I must die.
I note that it didn't occur to me immediately to include Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) in this list, even though I read it just as young and wasn't frightened and the swamp is right there in the title. I never thought to look for film adaptations; there are at least three. Of course the silent version produced by the author's own production company is lost.
I don't think I remembered to share Chrystabell and David Lynch's "The Answers to the Questions" (2024) with anyone but my husbands last month when it was released, but I liked it.
