I Want Out!

  I want a new house. Badly. It’s possible some of this urge is envy of Siri’s new home. It sounds like she has so much space, and I just love old houses, and I might even grow a few herbs if I had a back yard, or even just a little more space on my porch… A lot of it, though, is that my apartment is simply too small. I knew it was small when I moved in five years ago, but since then my kid has grown about a foot (I swear!) and grown more social. Also I’ve acquired a housemate. I thought it was just temporary, but she likes living here and I like having her here. Add to the fact that I am working on getting some balance in my life, which means walking away from my computer, but if I walk into the living room to read or watch TV or exercise, there’s the housemate, in the place she goes to get away from the kid who has no idea how to SHARE A ROOM…

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Pinterest: Late to the Game

Oh, dear friends, I know Pinterest has been around forever in Internet terms, I just thought I didn’t have a use for it. For those of you who, like me, occasionally live under social media rocks, Pinterest is basically a social media site for pictures. You can upload your own pictures, re-pin other people’s, comment, and like various images. You can follow users or boards. So why have I finally decided to take the plunge?

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Art for the Masses: Nuit Blanche

Two years ago in this space I wrote about attending Nuit Blanche, a one-night-only arts festival that runs from dusk until dawn. If you think this sounds magical, it is…or at least it was. Picture an urban downtown transformed, sculptures in alleys, multimedia installations projecting onto buildings, performance art on the street, location-specific works of art making the most of the spaces that, for one night only, they are allowed to take over. Wandering around with friends at night, finding art in the most unlikely places, I felt like I was getting away with something, like I was discovering a secret part of the city, like I was sharing a private experience with the other attendees.

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New Serial Up Today!

Just a quick post today to tell you that we have a new story up. Still Waters Run Deep: Part 3 is the latest installment of a fantasy serial by Siri Paulson (me!). It’s set in a quasi-Thailand and follows a pedlar who’s been wandering the jungle waterways for many years, selling charms from village to village…but something magical has gone very wrong in the city, and he can’t hide from his past any longer. If you missed the beginning of the story, start here. Part 2 is here. We’ll be back with a proper blog post next week. Stay tuned!  

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Get Lost

  For thirteen years I’ve driven a car of advancing age. Last month I upgraded from an ’88 Corolla to an ’07. It’s made a dramatic difference in my life. Suddenly I’m willing to take my daughter to her friend’s house. I’m even willing to pick her up. I’m doing that park-at-the-far-end-of-the-parking-lot-and-walk thing. And I’m getting lost. Not very lost, sadly. I still have those darn responsibilities. So maybe it takes me ten minutes longer than usual to get home from work. And maybe I’ve started mapping out the less-trafficked streets around me so I can do more driving and less stopping. I still don’t wander off for very long. One day soon, though…

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The Change of the Seasons

Ah, autumn. It’s lurking just around the corner, and I can’t wait. I’m done with summer’s heat. I’m an autumn girl all the way around. Maybe it’s because I was born in autumn, but I love how it’s not too cold and not too hot. I love how the trees change. I love curling up with a mug of cocoa and a good book under a blanket. Doesn’t it always seem like it just arrives overnight? One day it’s 95 degrees, and then, the next, it’s 70 and all the trees have gone up in brilliant golds and reds.

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Vegetable Gardening: The Tasty, Tasty Conclusion

I’m nearing the end of my first year of vegetable gardening. After starting from zero and learning a lot while slogging through the middle of summer, I’m finally seeing rewards. My household has had a steady (but not overwhelming) supply of zucchini for the last month. Zucchini grow fast, did you know? We picked the first one a month earlier than we were expecting after last year’s tomato crop. And we could have picked it even earlier, only we didn’t notice it. They’re good at hiding. By the time we realized we had one, it was thicker than a baseball bat. Whoops!

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An Author So Awesome She Needed Three Names

On August 8, we lost Barbara Mertz. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, how about Barbara Michaels? Or Elizabeth Peters? That’s the one that hits me. We’ve lost Elizabeth Peters. We’ll have no more Amelia Peabody forever. The marvelous adventures in Egypt have come to an end. No more beating people with parasols. No more shirts ruined. I want to say something intelligent and insightful about this writer, but I really can’t. Except that she wrote nearly seventy novels. Excuse me–published nearly seventy novels. That makes me feel like such a slacker.

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Don’t Mess With My Neurons

While I was writing a new scene for Grave Touched (the sequel to Fey Touched), one character made an offhand comment to another about “memory therapy.”  I haven’t explored that yet, but since Grave Touched  is science fantasy and set in a near-future Earth, I’m thinking “memory therapy” could mean erasing bad memories or something along those lines.  Since the character being spoken to suffers from PTSD from brainwashing and torture, it would be something to consider…right?

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