The heroine of one of my Works-in-Progress has been stuck in a hayloft, in the middle of the night, for years. The reasons she is stuck there are legion, as I have slowly realized over those same years. A fiction book written today has to have a story arc. I'm betting that books always did, [...]
Reading on many levels
When I was originally struggling with reading The Divine Comedy, I tried some of Dante’s other writings. Dante wrote up a whole system about how to read on more than one level and this, oddly, was a good entry point for me, because my mother had shared this system with a whole bunch of teenage [...]
Analemmas and a personal Stonehenge
Driving on Route 7 in Northern Virginia in late November poses a special challenge. There are a few days when the sun rises directly in line-of-sight down the road. Because it is so early in the morning the sun is low in the sky and blinds drivers. Traffic slows down as you come over certain [...]
Ridiculous comparisons, slightly useful thoughts
Sometime in the past year I read several books from a modern author. The author is an immigrant, the books are award winning, the prose is exceptional, and the books are unrelentingly depressing. This person is supposedly writing about a particular immigrant experience, but the whole canon was utterly alien to me. I spent some [...]
Economics of a skein of yarn, or thinking about the Industrial Revolution. Take your pick.
I’ve been doing research for one of my fiction stories and came across this article in the process. https://www.fashionroundtable.co.uk/news/why-skills-are-more-important-than-ever The author of this article visits a ‘mill’ in Wales. This mill does not grind wheat; it is a place for weaving cloth out of sheep fleece, with all the steps that that implies. The article [...]
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