Category: Food for thought
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The Mysteries of the Magi
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When I was around five years old, my grandfather passed away, and I remember his funeral chiefly for the overwhelming amount of incense – so oppressive and acrid that it made me cry. (I was sensitive to smells at an early age.) One of the typical components of incense used…
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Colour Me…??
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I don’t decorate with red and green for Christmas. Ironic, because red was my favourite colour when I was a child, and it is an attractive combination. I don’t mind it in small doses, but in large amounts it does tend to smack you in the eye. Is that holiday…
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Tea and Topics: Your genre or mine
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“When you are drinking tea, it is basically a private conversation between the tea and your individual soul.” – Lu Ann Pannunzio Introducing a new semi-regular feature for this blog: brief musings about writing over an aromatic mug of hot tea. I subscribe to a number of literary newsletters that…
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Happy Halloween!
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Hope you have a fantastically eerie Halloween this year! If you’re not going out, reading books 1 & 2 of my trilogy would be a great way to spend a quieter evening.
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Dreaming big
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Yesterday was National When Pigs Fly Day. It’s a day to take joy in silliness, but more importantly, it’s a celebration of possibilities. I love this description from one of the many online day calendars: “It reminds us that anything is possible if we are brave enough to take risks…
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On hiatus this week
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I’m on hiatus this week while my laptop is being repaired. There will be a special post next week about the importance of plants in our world and the increasing phenomenon of ‘plant blindness’, where people ignore the ‘green dimension’ (a term I’m adopting from an ecological writer whose work…
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Fascinating alien worlds
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Fantasy and sci-fi writers have so much fun creating worlds for their stories to take place in. We have total power – but, with great power comes great responsibility 😉 For me, at least, the geography, physics and inhabitants have to make a certain amount of sense, although every year…
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Book ‘marks’?
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I came across an amusing article about bookmarks, or shall we say: different ways of marking the spot you’ve been reading in a book. Isn’t that the same thing, you may ask. The article is called Bookmarks: the definitive ranking, and although I had a lot of fun reading it,…
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How do I write thee, let me count the ways
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If I was producing an alphabet book, and in a rather silly, Edward Lear kind of mood, I might put the image above in about the strange letter Q. Where did the alphabet come from, anyway? An alphabet is a set of letters used in a specific order to produce…
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Better travellers, better planet(s)
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I’ve always loved reading books that featured travel to exotic places. It was Agatha Christie’s murder mystery Death on the Nile, or more specifically the magnificently-filmed movie version in 1978, that cemented my desire to actually go to a country I’d been dreaming about since I was a child. Adding…