By April 2022 I had almost entirely lost steam with Seeker of the Lost Song. I had already changed the setting once, from a generation-ship in space. For the type of story I was writing, the characters needed movement. They needed a quest. Deciding that the closed environment of a…
Firstly: Happy Filipino Heritage Month! 🇵🇭 There’s an old-school style of Filipino restaurant called “turo-turo1.” The name is an example of classic Filipino word reduplicating, and stems from the word for pointing at something. They're often located in strip malls, and the typical feature is their cafeteria-style presentation, all food…
Seeker of the Lost Song is a historically-inspired fantasy novel merging medieval Finnish & pre-colonial Filipino elements, and I wanted to share two elements of Filipino history I included. Dulang, a low table One of my favourite tidbits from my research is that pre-colonial Filipinos ate at a low table,…
Say hi to the grossest historical recipe I've ever made! A little while ago, I was talking to a friend about the "Vegetarian Cookery" section of my c.1938 copy of Mrs Beeton's Household Management. I told them that I was pleasantly surprised at some of these recipes. Then I saw…
Recently I thought it might be a fun quarantine project to revisit my copy of Mrs Beeton's Household Management, c.1938, and make another historical recipe from the book. I narrowed it down to two that I thought would be fairly easy and interesting, and asked my Instagram followers to choose…
Ruth Goodman is one of my favourite historians. I’ve watched several of her shows and have seen her as a guest on other history programs, and am always impressed by how she tries to live as period-authentic as she can during a project. I don’t have that much commitment to anything!
I’ve recently finished her book How to be a Victorian, which I was very excited about. If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know that my favourite part of history are the smaller, everyday moments of regular people – and that’s kind of Ruth’s whole thing. This quote from the book is a prime example of why I love her – when talking about dry rubbing instead of washing, she writes:
In 2016, I wrote the following blog post for my history blog, The Small Histories. I was thinking about it again recently and wanted to share it here as well – book lovers will appreciate it! Also, I had to actually laugh out loud when I read “I’m not a worldbuilding sort of writer” – Oh if only the me of 2016 knew that worldbuilding would be ALL she’d do just two years later!
Note: This post originally appeared on Wordscience, a now defunct writing-focused blog of mine, on March 15, 2009. I was recently flipping through that blog’s archives and came across this post, which I thought would be neat to share here too. I've recently shared another post from that blog, "Weather, history,…
The early days of home computers and video games has always been a particular interest of mine. In fact, it's my stock answer for the "if you had a time machine" question - while I would love to visit all sorts of historical periods, I'd probably fare a bit better…
Between my recent Instagram post about Gibson girls and revisiting a favourite article detailing how the ideal woman's body has changed over the past hundred years, I've had the 1910s on the brain a little bit. I'd remembered an episode of Edwardian Farm where Ruth and her daughter were demonstrating…
