Category: Randoms & My Life
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Must-Reads at Stories and Stuff in 2014
I started this blog in 2009–wow, that’s a lot of blogging! This year was definitely less active for me in the posting department, as I’ve had a lot going on (see Paris, and my Job and Apartment update). However, I refuse to neglect this blog! I love to debate the joy of stories with you…
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Update! And Quotes!
Whoa, haven’t blogged for a while! What’s been going on? Well, for one thing – I moved. A huge undertaking, as it turns also. Secondly – I got a new job. I now work in, wait for it… a library! How appropriate! (Where did I work before? Well, actually I sold computers for Microsoft. Turns…
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Tell Me About Your Favourite Bookstore
Last Friday The Guardian published a wonderful list of bookstores worldwide – including one from Canada, woohoo! Any book-lover knows there is no shortage of lovable bookstores out there, so which is your favourite? I’d have to say, from The Guardian‘s list, I want to visit the bookstore-in-a-van that sells Portuguese books translated into English.…
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Useful Words English Doesn’t Have
Anyone who’s ever started learning another language has come across words that just don’t translate into English. My favorites are ‘saudades,’ from Portuguese (meaning a feeling of longing, melancholy or nostalgia), and ‘gezellig,’ from Dutch (meaning a nice atmosphere, but also belonging and time spent with loved ones). Today, Slate published an excerpt from Lost…
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I Handwrite My Fiction, But I’m Not Stuck in the Dark Ages – I’ll Prove It
Remember back in November I said I managed to spew out 50,000 words in a month in order to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)? Well, I may not have mentioned those were handwritten words, so really my total of 50,000 was a guesstimate. I have recently been occupied in typing these words up.…
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Paris is Always a Good Idea
“Paris is always a good idea.” – the internet would like to believe this quote is by Audrey Hepburn* It’s been a while since I updated, hasn’t it? And definitely for some of those weeks I didn’t have a good excuse, but I’d like to believe a spontaneous trip to Paris is a good enough excuse…
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How the Sochi Olympics Illustrate the Value of Books
The big news when this set of Olympics started in Sochi was how much the whole thing cost – fifty billion dollars! – and cue predictions of how these fancy Olympics venues would all fall apart in a decade or so from lack of use. Okay, okay, I can definitely get in line with the…
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Observations on Being Single, Revisited
I wrote a post for Valentine’s Day a couple years back, and clearly felt I’d said everything I’d needed to say about it, because I never wrote another one since… and this year, I thought I’d look back on it and see if I still felt the same way. I do. I still feel like…
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Ebooks Have Not Killed the Printed Book (Yet)
Two years ago, I asked the question, will ebooks replace the printed book? Will we turn into a world of readers who stare at the glowing screen, instead of burrowing our noses in the musty pages of a hardcover? And I predicted that the good old printed book will never go extinct. Not completely. If…
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Writing Is Difficult!!!
“A writer—someone once said—is a person for whom writing is difficult.” – peptalk from Lev Grossman, during Nanowrimo A writer with real genius makes writing a book look easy. When you read the book, you don’t feel all the blood and sweat and tears the author poured into the manuscript – you just follow a…
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