Yesterday we had a gorgeous day, with a truly perfect weather, and a beautiful sunset. There were birds flying, and families playing. It looked almost like a postcard, and for a moment I could almost allow myself to forget that we are living on borrowed time, that the perfect days won’t stretch endlessly into the future.
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I was watching an oldish YouTube video by kurzgesagt about what it would mean if we were to find alien life forms out there. It was an interesting watch. You can find it below. Go, check it out. It’s not that long, and I’m not going anywhere. (more…)
The news that Yahoo groups is shutting down has hit me, and hit me hard, as you can probably tell by the fact that this is my second rambling post in a matter of hours on that particular subject, even if I usually try to update only twice a week. The thing is that knowing that I would soon lose access to this particular resource has sent me rummaging through my fic collection, and that has caused me to rediscover some stories I had all but forgotten. It has also made me realize just how much the world has changed because stories that were deemed to be way ahead of the curve when it came to gay rights less than twenty years ago would now cause their authors to be burned at the stake by the queer community’s speech police (a point that was driven home by the realization that some classics, s...
Yahoo! groups is shutting down. That is not exactly unexpected, in fact I have feared that this day was inevitable for a number of years now, but that doesn’t mean that this development does not represent a sad day for me. Yes, with a couple of exceptions my groups have fallen completely silent, but there are those exceptions, not to mention that to me the groups are a lot more than that. (more…)
This is not the post I set out to write today, in fact this is about something that is likely to be totally irrelevant for anyone but me, but for once I don’t care. This is my blog, and I’ll break my rules if I want to... and yes, this is another post about pets, about what losing Terri did to me, and about a seemingly small incident that left me absolutely devastated a couple of days later, one that, especially in the aftermath of what happened a few hours ago, made me confront some of my own prejudices. This is the story: (more…)
I like to walk. That, as pretty much anyone who knows me will tell you, is probably an understatement. In fact I suspect I am one of the very few people on this earth who has doctors telling her to please walk a little less whenever they get half a chance (I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this happens on a regular basis because I refuse to set foot in a doctor’s office often enough for that ever to become an option, but still, you get the general idea).
To me walking is not just a means of going from one place to another. In fact most of my walks are back and forth a nearby stretch of beach --very deliberately going nowhere-- with the occasional excursion through a small thicket that is also by my place every now and then, just to mix things up a bit. What can I say, I’d rather spend a...
On March 29, as I was walking past a vacant lot, I heard a faint meow. In fact I heard three of them. The place was a jumble of weeds and tall grasses, with countless nooks and crannies. Not exactly welcoming, especially not considering that I live in an area that is crawling with venomous snakes... or at least that we have enough of those critters to make it seem like they are crawling all over the place. (more…)
A huge jumble of bricks does not a house make.
That, I believe, is a statement we can all agree on. It is also a good explanation of why is it that most attempts at mastering a foreign language tend to fall short.
In a nutshell, we tend to think of words as the building blocks of language, and when trying to master a foreign one our first instinct is to try to gather as many of those blocks as we can. In some instances that is not a bad idea. In others it is a recipe for disaster. The reason is simple enough: different languages are different, but they are not all different in the same way. If the language you are trying to master is close enough to your native one, then that words first approach may work, even if it leaves you with a few unusual linguistic quirks, but the farther afield...
Today is September 30, tomorrow will be October 1... it sounds so simple, and yet it is anything but. You see, July 31 was a day I will never forget. (more…)
No, I’m not dead, though I do realize that, after more than two years of silence, you probably thought I was. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been some rather significant changes in my life --hence the hiatus-- and those changes will almost certainly be reflected here.
To begin with I will be reorganizing what little content I had managed to post here. No, my books are not going anywhere, but other than that... well, let’s just say that it’s time for me to do some spring cleaning, not that there’s much to clean, not considering that this site was barely getting started when things went absolutely crazy on me. Going forward my goal is to try to keep a steady stream of posts coming, probably twice a week, though don’t be surprised if today proves to be a bit of an outlier with two --slightl...
A few days ago I tried to join Quora. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but instead I came across yet another unpleasant reminder of one of the most ridiculous aspects of my life. In a nutshell, the site insists on real names. I fact they are pretty adamant about it (facebook at least allows you to use the name you go by in your everyday life). That doesn't sound so bad, and considering its nature as a Q&A site it sort of makes sense, as it can help keep things honest. The problem is that I am one of those people for whom the very concept of a 'real name' is somewhat problematic. Why? Well, because I had the misfortune of being born in one of those countries with stupid laws that restrict the names parents can give to their children, and the name my parents had chosen ...
Announcing a new addition to the family!
Title: Of Shards and Shadows
Author: Clea Saal
Born: October 15, 2016
Genre: Science Fiction
Format: Paperback
Page count: 206 pages
ISBN:978-1539499770
Price: $12.95
Note: This volume combines a fully revised version of the book originally released under the title of The Shadow Walker and its sequel, The Shard (and that, in case you were wondering, is the reason The Shadow Walker is missing from the list). (more…)
Okay, so maybe I should be saying 'Welcome to my new home on the web!' or something along those lines, and I do welcome you, but I also wanted to take this opportunity to explain why, after so many years, I decided to move to a new site, rather than keep updating booksandtales.com as I had been doing since the dawn of the millennium.
The reason itself is simple enough: in the fourteen years since that site came online the web has changed too much, and booksandtales itself has accrued too much dead wood. The problem is that it's a kind of dead wood I don't really want to get rid of, not entirely. There is the print on demand comparison, which is now ridiculously outdated, but which was once a useful starting point for people looking to self-publish, and also my early attempts at writing ...
