The Girdle of Melian

ew books! Okay, I know my ROW80 goal of late has been to read all the books we own already. And I was doing really well. But how can anyone keep up when so many intriguing new books by already-loved authors are always coming out? I put in a book order yesterday for the first time in many weeks -- there's a new Joanna Bourne , a new Neil Gaiman, a new Claire Legrand , and a new Simon Tolkien coming out! Not to mention I'll soon have to order the new JK Rowling, the new Louise Penny, and even a new Beatrix Potter! 100 years on -- isn't that amazing? That's not the only reason I've been getting books -- I might be travelling to Kenya soon for work! I thought I should read a few Kenyan authors before I did so. And there are two new releases and a cover reveal this week! Discovering You by Brenda Novak "There was a bloody man walking down the middle of the road." What a great first line! "Can she ever trust another 'bad boy'?...

ow has your writing changed over the years? I stumbled across this older blog post, and I'm going to repost part of it here: Deniz, Age 5: A story about a cow, which went something like this: "Where was All? He did not know where All was. Aldo could not find All the cow. He searched and searched. He went up with a jet and All was with the moon." Deniz, Age 10: The Kitchen Mystery Deniz, Age 15: Trying too hard to be an adult, I started a story about two handcuffed convicts and a sheriff travelling through the California desert. Never mind the two long romances I had, featuring scenes like the one where the hero and heroine have a food fight... at the supermarket... Deniz, Age 20: Depressing stories about girls going out at night and failed relationships. I had a lovely one-page story called Eyes of the Sky but can't for the life of me find an electronic copy at the moment. This was the tail end of the thesaurus era, where I'd write a line like "...

ook fair! Not a sale, but a fair and, although they had lots of booths with books for sale, I'm happy to report that I successfully resisted picking up anything new! I was at the Geneva Salon du Livre mainly to watch an interview and attend a signing session with Swiss author Joel Dicker, whose books I highly recommend. His first, Les derniers jours de nos pères (The Last Days of Our Fathers) is about secret service agents in World War II, and the last two are a kind of family saga, murder mystery, and coming of age story all in one, set along the Eastern seaboard of the United States: La vérité sur l'Affaire Harry Quebert (The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair) and Le livre des Baltimore (The Book of the Baltimores). I took a couple of blurry photos (as an aside, we just got our first DSLR camera, and I'm looking forward to some sharper and brighter images from now on!): I didn't quite set it as my ROW80 goal but I'm still plugging away...

irst post-A to Z post! The rush of posting every day is over. I did my Saturday posts in advance, and one day managed to do five posts in advance, which gave me spare room to catch up on all the lovely comments I'd received, and actually visit a few new-to-me bloggers, too. Now's the time to post our Reflections on the 2016 Challenge . For those who haven't done it, I definitely recommend a theme. It helps keep you focused, and it's easy to stray from the theme if you need to; easier than trying to come up with ideas at random in the middle of all that hectic blogging. Something conducive to lots of photos is definitely a plus. Even if you can't write them all in advance (and doing so does take away from the challenge and the thrill a bit), formatting them is helpful. I was able to do this this time around; I set up each post as a draft, and entered my daily drop cap, and added a few lines of what I meant to share that day, and as many of the links and photos...