I managed to do a little more work on Called from the Ashes the other day. But a minor character popped up to delay the story. I thought I was just about ready to start the “history” part – which is meant to be the main part. Then a kid in the audience piped up and asked Harry if it was true that she once brought some people back from the dead. Brat! Shut up so we can get on with what we want to get on with! Honestly! Now I’ll apparently have to deal with that in some way before I can go...
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"One thing you can be sure of: antiques and sex are scary," muses Jonathan Gash's womanizing antiques dealer, Lovejoy. "Which one's more frightening than the other, I don't really know, but they run it close."
For many writers, of course, the answer is easy: sex is scarier. At least, writing about it is. For romance and erotica writers, the sex scene is usually a requirement for the story. Sex can be an important part of stories in other genres as well, and learning to write about it can be...
I had A Thought about the next part of This Dark Road. I couldn’t decide whether it should be told by Thel or Jann, or maybe by both. And I thought maybe Chael, or even Zani, or even Zania. But why not Sharrec? I can get into his back story from his point of view, rather than just having him info-dump it to Thel. And the beginning, something like this:
I don’t think I knew I would [fall in] love [with] Arathel Corthinn-Aldien the first time I saw her. I don’t believe in love at first sight,...
5 out of 5 stars. Fantasy mixed with historical fiction mixed with mystery mixed with romance, with some steampunk-ish elements sprinkled in. In other words, practically everything I want in a book, all together. Great world-building, interesting characters, and suspense to keep me turning pages. Plus, it's one of those rare fantasies that has sequels but doesn't end with a cliffhanger. I'm looking forward to reading the next book!
I thought I'd share the "beginnings" (air quotes intended) of the new Morstan/Karbegla book, not-so-tentatively titled Called from the Ashes. No real spoilers, since most of this is just stuff I wrote to orient myself and probably won't end up in the actual book.
“What is that?”
Of course it was obvious to all of us standing there on the beach what the thing was, even though I’d guess the majority of us had never seen a ship in real life. But it was something straight out of history books....
The other piece I revisited this year was chapter 11 of P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins, titled “Christmas Shopping”. It begins with Mary, Jane, and Michael getting off the bus:
“I smell snow,” said Jane.
“I smell Christmas trees,” said Michael.
“I smell fried fish,” said Mary Poppins.
The magic of Christmas, indeed. They’re at the “Largest Shop in the World, and they were all going into it to do their Christmas shopping.” Jane and Michael busy themselves choosing oh-so-appropriate gifts – a...
I was reminded of these family gatherings when I re-read, a week or so ago, the Christmas stories in Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, which was published between 1819 and 1820. This series centers around a Christmas in England, where Irving lived for several years. The first essay, simply called “Christmas”, is mainly a lament for “those honest days of yore,” when “the world was more homebred, social, and joyous than at present.”
“Of all the old festivals,” he writes, “that of Christmas...
There were some things we did every year when I was a kid, aside from making cookies and fruitcake. Probably the beginning of the Christmas season was when Dad hauled the artificial tree out of the basement. (I don’t know where he stashed it when we lived in the trailer; probably in the shed. I was too young to pay much attention to it back then.) We had the same tree for as long as I could remember, with color-coded branches that fit into the “trunk” one by one, level by level. (Some of...
A Secret Family Harvest by Helen Yeomans (2013). ***. What if money literally grew on trees? And what if very few people knew it? That’s the premise, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a book based on it before. The author and her characters spend about the first three-quarters of the book debating and speculating about what could happen if the secret of the money trees gets out. Then it does. And then the story wraps up pretty quickly and fairly neatly. It’s as if, once the “worst” happens,...
Now I want to share some thoughts on favorite Christmas foods. As promised, there will be fruitcake. There will also be gingerbread, and lefse, and pfeffernusse and sandbakkels. Those of you who didn’t grow up in strongly German or Scandinavian parts of the country likely don’t know what those last three items are. Be patient and all will be revealed.
To get it out of the way: fruitcake.
This past Saturday’s Christmas viewing was Hogfather (2006), a miniseries based on Terry Pratchett’s 1996 Discworld book of the same title. It’s a faithful adaptation, although as with most movies based on books, some things had to be left out. (Just as well, though, considering the movie clocks in at just over 3 hours long.) Suppose a cadre of supernatural beings, in the interest of enforcing their idea of order on the universe, decided to capture the belief system of ordinary people?...
Created, the Destroyer by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir (1971). ***. The first book of the Remo Williams story. I don’t even remember getting this book and it wasn’t until I got into the actual story that I had any idea what it was (the prologue gave no clue). Being a fan of the Remo Williams movie, I jumped into it eagerly. The story is very different from that of the movie; the stakes of the plot seem lower, for one thing. Remo’s recruitment into the clandestine government agency is...
More favorite Christmas music: “A Christmas Song” by Jethro Tull. Not exactly an anti-Christmas song, but a bit cynical. “The Christmas spirit is not what you drink.” A quick meditation on the difference between the original meaning of the season and the over-indulgence of modern holiday celebrations. There’s a good live version of this song on Tull’s A Little Light Music.
“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Andy Williams. Perhaps mostly a nostalgia thing for me, since The Andy Williams Christmas Album (1963) was a staple in our house when I was a kid. It almost isn’t Christmas until I’ve heard this song. It’s kind of a list of all the fun stuff about Christmas: caroling and parties and family gatherings, “jingle belling” and “mistletoeing”. And the sweeping orchestral arrangement, heavy on the brass and bells, is the sound of the season.
*****. A story based in Russian folklore, it’s a fairy tale seasoned with metafiction, literary fiction and historical fiction. Reading this book at the same time as I’m reading the complete Grimms’ fairy tales, I recognized a lot of fairy-tale elements: groups of siblings, a found family of disparate friends, repetitions of phrases and events, and numbers – lots of numbers. (I imagine that the numbers and the repetition in fairy tales helped the original storytellers keep track of events.)....
“White Christmas”, as covered by The Drifters (1954, which as we recall is the same year the movie White Christmas was released). I think I first really became aware of this version in the movie The Santa Clause. The doo-wop version is a little more up-tempo and hence a bit more cheerful than the Bing Crosby “classic” version. I prefer it!
“O Holy Night” (or “Oh Holy Night”) is probably my favorite religious Christmas song. There have, of course, been some poor covers of it. I currently have...
The kids and I have this Christmas tradition that started entirely by accident. It used to be that we would open presents on Christmas morning, and then they would do their thing, whatever that was (mostly fighting over their new stuff), and I would spend the day playing The Sims. But on Christmas Day 2012, I came downstairs to find a functionally dead computer on my desk. No playtime for me that day (or for nearly a month afterward, as I recall).
Instead we spent part of the day watching...
I just finished reading Hotel Magnifique by Emily J. Taylor (2022). *****. So many of the books I’ve read lately have disappointed me in one way or another, so this one was a real breath of fresh air. I guess technically it’s a YA fantasy – the narrator/protagonist is 17 years old – but it could be enjoyed by any fantasy fan as long as they don’t expect something epic. It’s a very confined setting, but one with an expansive variety within. You never know what or who to expect next in this...
Somebody asked me the other day how a person could find time to read more. I told her she should figure out what she likes to read, and go from there.
But I'm not sure that's what she needed to hear. I think I missed part of what she was asking (hey, it was early in the morning and I hadn't eaten for about 10 hours; my brain wasn't what it should be). I was thinking more in terms of not finding enough reading material, rather than not finding enough time. So if I could go back and talk to her...