White desk with pink notebook, roses, keyboard, and gold paperclips that Francesca Varela uses to copy edit for romance, science fiction, and fantasy authors

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  • Fairy Terns

    1–2 minutes

    Fairy terns fly out to sea each dawn. White-winged and delicate, they travel in small caravans, drifting softly above the waves and white-caps. All day, they relish the sweet sun on their backs, and the fine salt spray on their bellies, but then the sun burns low, upon the flat, mottled Earth, and the fairy

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  • Time of the Crow

    1–2 minutes

    Along the river, at the time of pale-blue, the crows flow like black curtains, thousands of them, tens of thousands, enumerable and warm and beating. Just by looking at their wings I can feel the soft mist, the growing west wind, and I can hear the traffic growing dimmer beneath me. We course through, and

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  • Animal

    1–2 minutes

    How long has it been since you sat with your back against a tree, and looked up at the dark, straying rivers in the sky? How long has it been since you knelt at a streamside, and listened to the soft water sing of mountain snow, of old times and canyons walls, and the kind,

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  • Coastal Forest

    1–2 minutes

    There are times when the forest seems to exhale clouds, when fog rests so heavily on the tree-tops that the space between them vanishes, and the whole of the forest becomes a white-frothed ocean. There are times, as well, when sunlight finds its way to the ferns and fawn lilies, to the dense, secret streams

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Francesca Varela specializes in copy editing for romance, science fiction, and fantasy authors