a celebration!

Last week I had to go down to Dublin, and a friend brought me out to lunch to celebrate having signed with an agent. We went to Bar Italia, which is fantastic btw, and when the waitstaff arrived to ask if we’d like to look at a dessert menu, my friend said, “Yes! We’re CELEBRATING!” They asked what we were celebrating, and I explained I was a writer and I had just signed an agent after looking for one for a very long time. They gave me, and then my…

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on the topic of flavors

Look, this is neither here nor there, really, but some friends have suggested I’m some kind of weird supertaster/smeller or something because I find wine and coffee and several other foods so off-putting*. I’ve never put much credence into it, but: I can’t use some of our silver forks because as they oxidize they begin to smell like garlic, and it’s disgusting when I’m eating not-garlicy food. Nobody else in the house notices this. I can only use certain dishwasher tablets because there are some lemon-scented ones that leave a…

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a list of petty complaints

Complaint #1: I play Tetris on my phone in “solve a level” mode, not ‘marathon’ mode. They have recently raised the “buy ten more lines to see if you can complete this level” from watching an ad or 200 ‘coins’ (which you earn in-game by completing levels, or can purchase) to 1000 coins. This has caused me to swear in my soul that I will never buy another goddamn ten lines or watch another goddamn ad, because that’s too much escalation. 300, even 400, I coulda maybe gone for, but…

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genuinely insanely busy

Hello, mes amis. I have been genuinely, insanely busy for the past two months, and my “no really I’m going to get back into blogging” has suffered badly for it. I have Eastercon to write up, STILL, most of two months after the fact, but I kept putting it off because I was finishing the 6th Dublin Driver book, which I did, and delivered, on April…21, I think. And then I accidentally banged out two novellas. Yeah, no, that’s not normal, is it? I literally finished DEATH OF AN IRISH…

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old, and not hip

I’ve developed the bad habit of watching stupid little “styling” reels on FB, very few of which are any good at all. This last one was “what I thrifted vs how I styled it” – literally a shot each of the dress, jewelry, handbag & boots, which she then…put on. There was no ‘styling’. Why do I do this. I mean, in this particular case, it was actually a good look. She’d made good choices. But I think ‘styling’ is a wild overstatement for what she was doing. I was…

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