Twist the Branch (formerly 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, sitting […]
Historical inspiration for my fantasy novel: Pre-colonial Philippines Read More »
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 the recipe for “Nut Sandwiches.”
A Mrs Beeton Recipe: Nut! Sandwiches! 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
A Mrs Beeton Recipe: Celery Croquettes Read More »
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
Reading Ruth Goodman’s “How to Be a Victorian” 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” –
The history of fictional worlds Read More »
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, and the origins of words,” which
Secret Lives of Great Authors Read More »
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
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 the calisthenic exercises that became
Exercise for women in the 1910s Read More »
One of the reasons I love reading Victorian/Regency novels is that I get a glimpse of the everyday rituals, strange to us now, that were so important to the people performing them. One of those rituals that always seemed at once charming and terrifying to me was the obligation of the morning call 0r social visit.
Etiquette of morning calls and visits of ceremony Read More »
A few months ago, I visited Ottawa and went on a guided tour of Centre Block (which is one of our Parliament buildings, for those unfamiliar). It was very interesting to see all of it, but my favourite was the Library of Parliament. There were many gasps from my group when we walked in, and I
A library clerk saves the day! Read More »
