January 2023
Today I learned – from an essay about Sherlock Holmes scholarship, of all things – that Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” was about the American occupation of the Philippines, not the British occupation of India. Huh. Doesn’t make it any better, obviously.
📓📝 About a month ago, I started keeping a commonplace book to capture interesting things I come across online. Originally, it was in Scrivener on my desktop, which is my primary machine for work and for my writing. But I also do a lot of my leisure-time online reading on my l...
💬 Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces, ...
📚 Finished reading Ghosts from the Library, an anthology of lost and forgotten supernaturalish tales from well-known Golden Age mystery writers. Uneven, but fun. My review is here.
📚 Related to my previous post, I found this: If Goodreads Users Reviewed Your LIfe the Way they Reviewed Your Book.
📚 The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2022. There’s something about the joy people take in reading vicious book reviews like these that sits wrong with me. Oh, I know that two of the books on this list are probably vile works, written by vile people. And the other authors are f...
📚 ❄️ The last winter tale for this season is a short and somewhat unusual one. In “The Tale of a Gas-Light Ghost,” mysterious Gregory Barnstake comes to live in rural Mapleton. What’s his secret? Read and find out…
December 2022
📓 📝 I’ve started keeping a commonplace book for inspirational things I find online. I’m using Scrivener. Usually, I copy/paste the article or excerpt directly in, and add a link to the source. Sometimes, I’ll use Scrivener’s “import from the web” research feature. Scrivener le...
📚 ❄️ Winter tales continue through the twelve days of Christmas with “A Curious Experience,” by Ellen Wood. There’s something not right about this beautiful boarding house bedroom.
Things I’ve Learned from Reading Ghost Stories: If the rent or sale price seems too good to be true - it is. Don’t blow old whistles. Found an ancient artifact? And it’s got a Latin inscription? Don’t read it out loud! Ditto for old books...
Happy Boxing Day! I’ve changed my blog theme to something slightly less primitive. Little changes can make a big difference.
A Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and a joyous day to all who don’t! 🎄🎄
📚 On Christmas Eve, I always post a lighter winter tale: Squire Humperdinck and the Devil is a delightful fairy tale about a greedy landowner and a mischievous little boy who foils the squire’s evil plans. Happy Holidays, and enjoy!
📚 New winter tale: “Sister Johanna’s Story” (1873) is a love-triangle ghost story by Amelia Edwards, inspired by her travels through the Gröden Valley in the Dolomite Alps. Heartbreaking, but lovely.
I’ve been thinking about the evolution of the word “content” as it relates to creative endeavors. “Content” used to be a quality of a creative work, especially a piece of writing: “this article has no content” means that it’s fluff, a puff piece, filler. Now we talk about an a...
After many years, I’ve finally started using an RSS reader again. As someone who prefers medium-to-long form writing, I’m wondering why I ever stopped! It’s reinvigorated my online reading. RSS is just the perfect way for me to follow other people’s writing. Mailing list noti...
📚 New winter tale! “The Ghost of Charlotte Cray” is a lighter-hearted story by Florence Marryat, author of The Blood of the Vampire. It’s also a warning that playboy-types should be more careful in their relationships. Enjoy!
📚 New winter tale! Number Two, Melrose Square is a haunted house story by Theo Gift, from 1880. If the rent sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
📚 Winter Tales time! My annual tradition of sharing Christmas season ghost stories starts with A Musical Mystery, first published 1875. I’ll be posting about one a week, until Epiphany.
November 2022
🖋️ 📓 Thanks to work avoidance, I’ve rediscovered Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought, a little piece my husband and colleague John Mount wrote some years back. I thought some of the pen and personal productivity nerds here might enjoy it.
Back to the dilemna-verse Earlier today, my husband, who knows he can’t spell, asked me how to spell “dilemma.” I spelled it to him out loud, the way I have always spelled the word: d-i-l-e-m-N-a. And I reflexively added, “Google it, to make sure.” “Here it is,” he replied. ...
Unsocial in a Social Media World Last night, I invented a new dish, a fusion of Mexican arroz amarillo and South Asian kichidi that I dubbed “Mexican Kichidi.” It was delicious, and while cooking it I had excited plans to photograph my culinary creation and post my new brainc...
📚 I once dissected all the flower imagery in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was a fun exercise. It’s a three-part series, still holds up.
🍿 In case you find it useful: some cool non-subscription streaming sites (VOD): Kino Now- an eclectic collection of restored classics, as well as more recent films. Flicker Alley - mostly produces physical format restorations of vintage cinema and lesser-kno...
Observation, not complaint: The 📚 and 🍿 discover categories here are mostly “Currently reading X”, or “Movie: {some number of stars}”. That’s nice and all, but I’m kinda wishing for more discussion, or at least a description. Or a link to the post on your book/film blog…
These Vincent Price Weird Mysteries are great for folding laundry. One story is the perfect length to finish the job.
Something I wrote ten years ago, and is still one of my favorite pieces: I Write, Therefore I Think.
💬 A brief conversation with @annahavron inspired me to look up this wonderful Joan Didion quote: Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I...
🎥 The Bells is a 1926 silent film starring Lionel Barrymore and featuring Boris Karloff in what should have been his breakout role. I watched it because I’m a Karloff fan – it’s pretty good, except the ending. It’s based on an 1867 French play by Erckmann-Chatrian, and I found...
The best thing about getting past election day will be the end of all these stupid campaign texts. For now…
I need seven ghost stories to share for Winter Tales season; I’ve picked six. Two strong candidates for the last one. It should be a fun mix this year. 📚
It’s also a perfect day to curl up and read The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Follies and Grottoes. I love Rosemary Pardoe’s anthologies; I wish they weren’t so pricy. 📚 👻
Sunday plans: Time to start gathering Christmas ghost stories for my annual Winter Tales series. 📚 👻
Why on earth do I have 99 followers on GitHub??? Almost nothing I do on Github is public, except my blogs. So weird.
Wrapping up my series of early never-made occult detective TV shows with A Darkness at Blaisedon (1969). I hate to finish on a downbeat note, but only Dan Curtis fans will be warm about this one. 📺 👻 🕵🏽♀️
📚 Picked up a copy of Creeps by Night, a 1931 anthology of spooky and macabre short stories, edited by Dashiell Hammett. My 1944 edition has 20 stories, plus an intro by Hammett, like the 1931 edition does; later reprints only include ten stories. So it was worth doing the re...
Testing images on my blog This is the Palacio Crystal, in El Retiro (Retiro Park), Madrid. I took it in 2016.
October 2022
The reason I made my own microblogging site is so that I can announce my new long-form posts with an introduction. The stark “title + link” format I get by syndicating my blogs directly on Micro.blog isn’t very friendly, or attractive. For casual chat, a static Jekyll site is...
Happy Halloween! 🎃 👻
Testing the plumbing.