The Girdle of Melian

dinburgh! An extremely belated travel post. I'm going to try to catch up on these in the next little while. These are some shots from a visit with friends in June 2019... Beers Breakfast at The Haven in Newhaven Bus stop view of Calton Hill  Octopus ! Deep fried mars bar Holyrood 9A pub At the National Museum of Scotland: At the cafeteria... Clarsach, a Highland harp, c. 1500 James Watt Lewis chess pieces The Printed Word Wylan Dilly, 1813; one of two oldest surviving steam locomotives Oor Wullie ! The various Wullies I saw from the Oor Wullie bucket trail : Street scene, kind of a close Street scene, clouds Street scene, sun Tolbooth Tavern View from the plane: Edinburgh View from the plane: Founex View from the plane: Founex Game of Thrones whisky trail! Whisky ad:

ew release! You Can't Catch Me by Catherine McKenzie "Do you want to play a game? Twelve years ago Jessica Williams escaped a cult. Thanks to the private detective who rescued her, she reintegrated into society, endured an uncomfortable notoriety, and tried to put it all behind her. Then, at an airport bar, Jessica meets a woman with an identical name and birth date. It appears to be just an odd coincidence—until a week later, when Jessica finds her bank account drained and her personal information stolen. Following a trail of the grifter’s victims, each with the same name, Jessica gathers players—one by one—for her own game. According to her plan, they’ll set a trap and wait for the impostor to strike again. But plans can go awry, and trust can fray, and as Jessica tries to escape the shadows of her childhood, the risks are greater than she imagined. Now, confronting the casualties of her past, Jessica can’t help but wonder... Who will pay the price?"

I stumbled across this fascinating post of mine called Learning from the Masters from a decade ago. I barely remember listening to these fascinating interviews! For fun, I'm reposting the original post, with some comments and updates added in square brackets. might have mentioned this before, but the BBC have put up archival footage of interviews with authors, including Tolkien , Maugham , Wodehouse , Graves and a host of others. The Tolkien one is full of university kids blabbing but in between there are some lovely snips of Tolkien talking about languages, allegory vs application and kicking the sponge out of his bath when he got an idea, as well as the theory that all stories are about death - here he quotes Simone de Beauvoir and says that these lines are the "keystring" of The Lord of the Rings : "There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must

A while back, I noted that "one of the things I used to use this blog for often was as an info-dump for upcoming writing projects, yearly goals, 30 Things I Want To Do , and so on. If they're written down, my brain feels less frazzled." This is still true, so today I'm going to update two of the lists. I'm not adding to the list of Simmering on the Back Burner Writing Projects (not counting items already started) because there are too many now to count, and collating them is one of the tasks for my magical intern. Task lists! For the blog : Change the template again , so that I can go back to using daily drop cap Update all the photos in old posts Update all the broken links in old posts (e.g. storify links) Compile all posts for the next blogiversary, the way I did during celebrations for my 500th post Related to the above, I'd like to keep track of all my book reviews (see intern list below) Finish visiting everyone that's come by in the l