urban alienation © Lilly Schwartz 2012

First of all, and entirely unrelated to the picture: Today I have finally finished the first draft of my novel! Interesting enough I had the ending written ages ago and now I finally filled in all the gaps. For me this is great news, because I have been meaning to write a novel for quite a while and never succeeded in finishing even a first draft. I have tons of partly written stuff lying around, but somehow it never worked out. This time I also had problems, but I overcame them and now I have 85,000 words and the complete story all written down. Of course it still needs lots of editing. I’m extremely happy about this first step though!

I took the picture while showing my parents the area around here. I don’t know what this factory used to produce, but now it has dance studios inside. It lies right along a canal and therefore gave me an interesting perspective on these pigeons. For some reason red brick factories always get me thinking of unions,  strike action and alienation. When I was editing this picture, I noticed immediately that none of these pigeons are interacting with each other. Near such factories even the pigeons get alienated …