Book Review: The Glass Demon, by Helen Grant

I see a lot of books at the library. Some good, some bad, some really bad. Fortunately (or not?) I'm getting pretty good at spotting the really bad ones, regardless of their position on the NY Times Best Seller list. Some, I truly never heard of until a patron requested them from another library and they passed through my hands. 

Sometimes, those "accidental" books are really good. The Glass Demon, by Helen Grant, is one of those for me.

Library Insanity: 2 Vignettes

The library can be busier some days than others. Also more sane than others. These three stories are all from the same day. The picture from the week prior, of one of the library puppets, discarded corpse like on the floor of the children's room.

Blogging block?

You may have noticed, I don't update here very often.

Well, sometimes I do. I've been doing pretty well since, say, Wednesday. Not daily, but I don't know that I want this to be a daily blog. Maybe thrice a week is a good benchmark? Or four times, if Wordless Wednesday is cheating. Which it might be.

Sometimes, I just don't know what I want to postulate on. Is writing important to me? Hell yeah. Is writing about writing important to me? Less so.

God gives you one face, but you paint another on top of it

I'm a different person online than I am in person.

Really, I'm kind of a different person when I talk about writing than I am when I talk about dogs.

I'm a different person when I sit down at a gaming table (and, depending on the day, the variance in the person I set out to be increases as well).

I'm a different person at work from when I'm at home.

I'm a different person with my family than with my friends.

I'm a different person alone at Wal-Mart than walking Elka (my Doberman) at the park.

All of these people are me. Any one of them are me.

So, who are all of these people?

Which one of these is the person the stories come from?

Or is it all of them?

Wordless Wednesday February 15, 2012

(Kelly, I do hope you see this!)

Literary tattoos

I don't have any tattoos. Yet.

I've seen quite a lot of bad tattoos. Quite a lot of good ones. I like looking online at various pages listing them. I don't want a tattoo that somebody else has. I want a tattoo for me, that's mine. I haven't settled on a design yet that I love for long enough to actually go through with it.

Then, I saw a post on Neil Gaiman's blog: literary tattoos. Is there a reason I hadn't thought of this before? I hadn't seen one before, anyway. So, duh. Of course getting a quote would make fantastic sense. Of course, now the problem is what quote? Contrariwise.org is (or rather, was...they haven't updated in a year or more) a blog of literary tattoos. It's cool to see the ink people have gotten, and the quotes people have gotten. It's amazing how many Kurt Vonnegut "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" tattoos you'll see, with web search. How many The Giving Tree tattoos. The Lorax. Shakespeare, of course, and while I dearly love the Bard, none of his words are my words.

In The Order of Things I talked about my poetry preferences, citing Adrienne Rich specifically. A poem of hers, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, has great imagery and a few really good lines in it, notably, "A thinking woman sleeps with monsters".  I'd just heard of a website, StrayTats.com, where you can create a fake tattoo (or multiples), and decided I'd try it out.

In the end, forearm is not the place for that tattoo for me. But, I still really like the quote.

Really, anything from Ginsberg's "Howl" would be lovely; also, too long. Just "Howl" from the cover of the collection wouldn't be bad, but a single word is too easily misconstrued. I don't want it to be looked at as though I'm wearing a wolf t-shirt, after all.

Maybe one day, when I have something published, I'll pick a phrase or word from that, so that it is mine. But for now, I'm still looking. Or, still rowing, if I want to quote Anne Sexton, and frequently I do.

What is it with people and rocks?

Headed to Salvation Army on a break from work, I glanced through a wrought iron fence I'd looked through before, and saw something I hadn't seen before: a few rocks, stacked up. I continued on my way but, amused, I took a picture on my way back. It's either artsy or crappy, I'm not sure which; I took it with my cell phone, forgive me.

Thoughts While Doing Dishes

I need to start washing pans the night I cooked. I'm so lazy.

Of course, if you wash them while they're still warm, you can warp them. This cast iron baking dish is always warm for so long, that's why I wait.

Crap, I just put soap in the cast iron baking dish. No, it's enameled, that doesn't matter. The cast iron is encapsulated, I don't need to worry about seasoning. Man, that mac and cheese was good. I love this peppermint castille soap. I should get the bigger bottle next time.

This thing is heavy and bigger than the sink. That's another reason I put off washing it. Ah well. It's still lighter than the dog. And that mac and cheese was good.

Oh look, the neighbor's boyfriend's labby dog. Off leash. And next to the road. I really hope nobody runs a stop sign right as he decides the road is AWESOME. That would ruin my life. Oh, the dude's right there. Good. And now they're out of the road. I wish they'd stop doing that.

Fun with CAPTCHA

Before I started my dog blog over at The Elka Almanac, I was frequently a CAPTCHA failer. I had to listen to the audio, or try over and over until, by some miracle of the Internet, I got it. A lot of comments require the CAPTCHA completion to know that you're a person, though, and I've gotten much "better" at it, if such a thing could be considered a viable skill. Really, it is a viable skill; leaving comments and suchlike is instrumental in the "social network" (see what I did there?) that brings traffic to blog, shares info about contests and upcoming publications, and gives you cred in the field of your choosing.

(image from Wikipedia)