Category: Daily Life

Recent Reads: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

August 31, 2023

This is one of many books I’ve bought because someone on Twitter (in this case, fantasy novelist Stephanie Burgis) recommended it. For a platform notorious for Not Selling Books, I gotta say, I’ve bought an awful lot of books because of it. RIP Twitter. Anyway. IRREGULAR WITCHES is a contemporary rrrrromantic fantasy, I guess, because there is a romance storyline of some importance, but it’s really about Found Family, and like a lot of what I’ve been reading lately, it was a balm to my weary soul. It’s the story…

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The 1980something cover of THE WESTING GAME, featuring chess pieces on a puzzle with missing sections, beneath one of which is Uncle Sam in a casket.

Recent Reads: The Westing Game

August 24, 2023

I first read Ellen Raskin’s THE WESTING GAME (affiliate link) when I was about eleven. It was the first, and I believe remains the only, book that I have ever finished reading, stared at a moment, and then gone back to the beginning to read again immediately. I then read it again many, many times in my tween and early teen years, but I don’t remember re-reading it for…well, a very long time. But it came up again recently, possibly in context of Ellen Raskin as a cover designer, and…

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prawn-fried noodles in a takeaway carton, with chopsticks sticking into them

NOODLES!!!!

August 20, 2023

oh my GOD the noodle place is back at the Temple Bar Market!!!! Honestly I can’t tell you how happy I am about this. It’s a little food booth at the Temple Bar Saturday market in Meeting House Square, and I always used to order prawn fried noodles even when they weren’t technically on the menu. (Prawn skewers were, and othermeat-fried noodles were, just not prawn fried noodles. BUT GUESS WHAT’S ON THE MENU NOW!!!!!) The guy always remembered my order, because it was different. He used to give me…

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Ask the Author: writing styles

August 18, 2023

Ask the Author – The Question: What makes an author’s style of writing unique? This will sound sort of trite, but: personal experience. Here’s the thing, and this, again, sounds trite, and indeed, it’s overused, but it’s also true: no one can write the story that *you* can write. Because everyone’s personal experience shapes them differently, and they approach stories differently. I have an exercise I do when I teach creative writing classes. I give everybody the same 5 sentences, the opening of a fairy tale type story written in…

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Recent Reads: Regency Dragons by Stephanie Burgis

August 17, 2023

I’ve had the first of Stephanie Burgis’s Regency Dragons books, SCALES & SENSIBILITY, on my shelf for over a year. I admit I’ve been kind of afraid to read it because I was afraid it would trigger an overwhelming urge to work on the sequel to MAGIC & MANNERS, and I haven’t had time to do that. But this summer she sent me the sequel, CLAWS & CONTRIVANCES, for an early read because I was having a very bad week, and she hoped it might cheer me up. So obviously…

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