I’ve decided to start a regular feature here with music. I’ll warn you, my taste in music is… eclectic. (I feel this is being kind. My iPod is cruel enough to pop from Beethoven to Green Day with nothing in between.) Your mileage may vary, but everything’s worth a shot.
All Hallows Read
Happy Halloween!
Hope it’s a lot of fun.
I have a Halloween tradition I started to follow a few years ago — I give out books. The All Hallow’s Read campaign from Neil Gaiman’s camp, suggests that these should be scary books.
I disagree. I think any book you might get someone to read is an appropriate Halloween book.
Obviously, for my horror and sci-fi friends I find scary books. For my romance friends – paranormals. For the rest of my list though? I pick up books that look interesting. Books that are hiding in the corners of the used book store or the dollar store or anywhere else where I can find inexpensive books. (I would love to buy brand-new books, but I have a lot of people on my list. It would break me.) I get adventure books or shopping books or even how-to books. It all depends on the person. Sometimes, I manage to find those books that started me on a series. I give those to people I hope will be intrigued and start reading the rest of the books. For my “one book a year” friends — hurts my little heart, but they exist — I give lighter book. Shopping books, slim mysteries, cozies — anything I can think of that they might find interesting, or pleasant.
I try to avoid controversial books. For me, this is a holiday where I can define my own gift-giving tendencies.
And hey, books. There’s nothing I love better.
They always get a smile of surprise. Adults aren’t used to getting random presents on Halloween. I think that’s a shame.
(Candy’s cool too though. *winks*)
On a larger note, Halloween is when the veil between the worlds is thinnest. We can reach out to ghosts and ancestors. Books are still a part of this. They are part of the fabric of our society; what makes us human. We tell stories. We create our history. We use our language to inspire, to create, and to connect.
So, go, give someone a book you love and want to share. Old, new, whatever.
Filed under Life in Random
Sunday Night Music: The Skeleton Dance
I’ve decided to start a regular feature here with music. I’ll warn you, my taste in music is… eclectic. (I feel this is being kind. My iPod is cruel enough to pop from Beethoven to Green Day with nothing in between.) Your mileage may vary, but everything’s worth a shot.
October 26, 2014 · 6:43 pm
Sunday Night Music: Witch’s Rune
I’ve decided to start a regular feature here with music. I’ll warn you, my taste in music is… eclectic. (I feel this is being kind. My iPod is cruel enough to pop from Beethoven to Green Day with nothing in between.) Your mileage may vary, but everything’s worth a shot.
October 19, 2014 · 6:28 pm
Sunday Night Music: Grim Grinning Ghosts
I’ve decided to start a regular feature here with music. I’ll warn you, my taste in music is… eclectic. (I feel this is being kind. My iPod is cruel enough to pop from Beethoven to Green Day with nothing in between.) Your mileage may vary, but everything’s worth a shot.
October 12, 2014 · 6:09 pm
Disturbing Disorders: Cotard’s Delusion (Walking Corpse Syndrome)
This is absolutely fascinating to me.
I have to wonder if it might be connected to some of the zombie situations in the islands as well. A combination of drugs and a delusional belief.
Wow. Now I have something to research. At the very least it would make an intriguing short story.
In 1880, a middle-aged woman paid a visit to the French neurologist, Jules Cotard (pictured below), complaining of an unusual predicament. She believed she had ‘no brain, no nerves, no chest, no stomach, no intestines’. Mademoiselle X, as Cotard dubbed her in his notes, told the physician she was ‘nothing more than a decomposing body’. She believed neither God nor Satan existed, and that she had no soul. As she could not die a natural death, she had ‘no need to eat’.
Mademoiselle X later died of starvation. [1]
Although this peculiar condition eventually became known as ‘Cotard’s Delusion’ the French neurologist was not the first to describe it. In 1788—nearly 100 years earlier—Charles Bonnet reported the case of an elderly woman who was preparing a meal in her kitchen when a draught ‘struck her forcefully on the neck’ paralyzing her one side ‘as if hit by a stroke’. When…
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Filed under Uncategorized
Beth Cato on the realities of writing
Go check out Beth Cato’s essay “ACME Anvils and the Long Unicorn Ride to Publication” on Chuck Wendig’s blog. You’ll be glad you did.
When you’re a writer, it’s all about trading up to a better set of problems. You start out just wanting the time and/or brain power to write. Then you want to be published–validated–in any kind of way. And published again. If you’re a novelist going the traditional route, acquiring an agent is the first big goal. And when you get that agent, it’s like you’ve been handed the reins to a sparkly unicorn who will take you to magical realms where chocolate has no calories and all your publication dreams will come true.
My own journey started at a timid crawl. I trunked several novels and then worked for years on an urban fantasy about a healer. I did several from-scratch rewrites. I LOVED that book. After all that labor, I had two agents offer me representation. I had a sparkling unicorn at last! I was off to the land of book contracts and purring fuzzy kittens.
No one talks about the ugly truth: that even with an agent, a lot of first novels don’t sell.
Filed under Publishing, Writing
Musings: Flight
Flying always reminds me that the US landscape is not the neat, homogenized rows of houses and streets that we imagine in our stories. It’s no an industrial campus either. No, it still resembles a crazy quilt of greens and browns with dashes of white and bindings of grey and blue running through it.
I’ve seen amazing things through airplane windows – fields of spun cotton candy illuminated by the orange of the sunset behind us, lightning crackling on top of a distant cloud as a storm ramps up, barges and transport ships on our wide waterways, the lights of Vegas shining out of the darkness in a rainbow of color, farms in swaths of green and dark soil, a batter hitting a home-run in a little league game.
I’ve been flying all my life. I was an infant on my first flight – a military transport bringing me back to the states. When I was a toddler I could identify plane engines with unerring accuracy. Even today, I am more comfortable on a flight path than not.
The night of September 11th, the absence of planes is what woke me up. The same thing happened when the jets stopped patrolling the DC area.
The posters in my room in elementary school were of rockets and topographical maps. I dreamed of being a pilot and of going to space.
My mom let me go up in a Piper Cub at an air show. it was a small, yellow, fixed-wing plane. The propellers were loud and the door stayed open the whole flight so that I could see out and feel the air as we flew over the Virginia countryside. The pilot and I cheerfully pointed out landmarks to one another. He circled around the baseball diamond and we cheered for a home run. Who cares who was playing. I know now that it was supposed to be no more than a fifteen minute ride, but it was closer to forty-five minutes when I returned with wind-whipped pigtails and a huge smile.
No boring, tethered hot air balloon could compare with that exhilaration.
Even in the huge, modern jets from Boeing and Airbus, I can feel the engines rumble through my seat and the bulkhead. I can recite the safety-spiel for almost all of the variations. (Not the old school Southwest though – those were hilarious. I haven’t gotten a wonderfully sarcastic Southwest spiel in years.) But, no matter how often I board a plane, the flight itself never loses its magic. (Security… let’s not talk about that.)
The strangest thing though – I’m scared of heights. I’ve hung off the side of a mountain in the Alps and cried in relief when I was done.
But I’ve never been scared in a plane. I’ve never been bored staring out of a window thousands of feet up.
Some day I’ll actually be in control as opposed to just along for the ride.
When you see me in a bright red Piper Cub – wave and I’ll waggle my wings.
Filed under Life in Random
Wood-free paper
I am totally all in on this idea. I love my paper books, but I hate the water and environmental costs that go along with the harvesting of wood for paper. Who wants to help change and industry?
This will delight the conservationally-minded. (Conversation/conservation. Shopfitting, Shoplifting. Read carefully. 😉 )
If you remember a while back I posted
In this piece I argue that the paper industry is keeping large stretches of land forested, instead of it being rip-mined or simply going to the dogs.
There is of course a very valid criticism of that stance.
Pine and Eucalypt (Bluegum) forests are not necessarily the way to conserve a country’s natural, indigenous flora. Nothing much grows under pines; the ground is extremely acidified due to the carpet of needles. Eucalypts have a (for South Africa at least) even bigger problem: They suck up the ground water. Eucalypts were used in Windhoek to dry up a small swampy area so that it could be built up (and you ask, why??? oh why?, Namibia is such a dry place!)
So…
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The History of the Violin
Well, a video of it anyway. This has some incredible playing by Charles Yang. It follows the trail of the violin through the years — all the way up to modern use.
This is a video that’s meant to be a video. It is not a documentary that you can listen to and get all the information out of.
Filed under Research
