Carnivals and Comets

Posted by on Feb 24, 2009 in Ferrara, Stargazing | Comments Off

Fat Tuesday! The last day of Carnival!

Ferrara celebrates Il Carnevale

Comet Lulin update: clouds last night. Will try again tonight.

Stargazing Update

Posted by on Feb 23, 2009 in Stargazing | 2 comments

Don’t forget to keep an eye out for Comet Lulin tonight and tomorrow night. It’s kind of cloudy here right now and I’m hoping the clouds blow off by tonight.

The coolest thing about Comet Lulin (besides being backwards and green, both of which are both pretty cool in themselves) is that this is its one trip around the sun. Most comets have orbits and return periodically, even if their periods are hundreds of years. Lulin, however, appears to have enough velocity to escape from the solar system entirely on its way out, and disappear forever into deep space. So we are the only people, in the whole history of mankind and the entire future of mankind, to see it.

Stargazing is just pretty incredible.

Relentlessly Optimistic

Posted by on Feb 22, 2009 in Creativity, Writers | 3 comments

If you do any sort of creative work at all, you have to read this:

Relentlessly Optimistic

It uses actors as a reference, but it’s about writers, too. Do we not throw our tender hearts out in front of the speeding trains of beta readers and agents and editors? Do we not have to learn to take one more chance, even though we swear our hearts can’t take it?

Read this. You must. And then dig around in Communicatrix’s site. Connect with stories? Of course we connect with stories. We’re storytellers, after all.

The Lost Weekend

Posted by on Feb 21, 2009 in Dreams, Libraries, Reading, The Plague | Comments Off

Where did the past week go? Lots of sleeping, aching, drinking water, aching, sleeping, sneezing, taking aspirin, aching, sleeping and sleeping, with the occasional reading of a chapter or so.

I love libraries and librarians (what writer of historical fiction can survive without Inter-Library Loan, even in these days of the Internet?), but I’m afraid it was a librarian who shared the cold with me. I was at the library on Friday the 13th (ack! No wonder! I hadn’t made that connection until just this moment) and the new! updated! better! self-checkout machine wasn’t working properly. So the librarian came over and leaned close to help. That’s when I suspect the germs made the leap. And in the end she had to check out the books manually anyway.

By Sunday night I was miserable. The rest of the week is a write-off.

I did, however, have some vivid dreams. Some of them weren’t too helpful (Emeril Lagasse as the Pope. No, really, zucchetto and vestments and all), but one gave me a fabulous idea for my next book. Exactly the thing I’ve been looking for to spark the story. Thank you, subconscious mind!

Where Have I Been?

Posted by on Feb 18, 2009 in Life, Reading, The Plague | 4 comments

I’d like to say I’ve been happily reading, but the truth is I’ve been struggling to fight off the cold/flu plague that seems to be spreading magically through the Internet. I guess I need to rub some Purell on our router. Or something.

Not fair that I get sick when I’m supposed to be on vacation!

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