Recently, I heard Jeanne Dielman described as “three and a half hours of a woman in her apartment going about her daily life. I watched it once in college when I was really depressed.” I decided to watch it based on this description alone. A couple of the IMDB tags for the film are “peeling …
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Read More »
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 which one I should make …
After reading a couple of speculative fiction novels that incorporate non-European mythology (Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson and Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James), and really wonderful conversations with my editor, I’ve renewed my commitment to incorporating Filipino folk tales and mythology in The Quiet is Loud. My dad used to …
Discovering NK Jemisin changed my entire focus as a writer. The Broken Earth Trilogy (not pictured, I know) was like nothing else I’d read in my life. The world she created, and the way she wrote it, encouraged me to write what actually made me happy: stories featuring tweaked reality, magic systems, people who could …
I recently asked people on Instagram to recommend “pretty and fartistic” movies to me, and I got several good suggestions. I picked the first two, The Terrorizers and La Notte, at random, and was pleasantly surprised to find that books and writers featured heavily in them. These movies were also very pretty, and I took …
Writing & books in movies: The Terrorizers and La Notte Read More »
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” – …
I’m half-Finnish, but I didn’t know what a Moomin was until I was an adult. Maybe that’s not entirely true; I do have a dim memory of receiving a Moominpapa piggybank as a child, but I had no idea what what the character was supposed to be. However, as an adult I did finally learn, …
“Freedom is the best thing” – Reading ‘Tove Jansson: Work and Love’ Read More »
Overheard, in a book store: “Must it be rhyming couplets?” “Oh, yes.”
I found an old post from a different blog (called “Wordscience” – not to be confused with another, more talented Samantha!), written in 2010 as I was reading the second volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography. This excerpt has always stuck with me, and I thought it worthy to share here too: Impossible to describe a …
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 in the early ’80s as …