Reading

my most influential authors

My 5 most influential authors

| Misc., Reading, Writing

⫸ (AKA If you like one or more of them you’ll probably find something you like in my work):⁠⫷ ⌯ Robin Hobb: Thoughtful examinations of character and a wide range of relationships. Major events happen in the world but her books feel somehow intimate. Her “Fitz” books were a major inspiration for the tone and characters of Seeker of the Lost Song and its sequel.⁠ ⌯ Kazuo Ishiguro: My biggest influence in “write whatever the […]

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Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

| Film Stills, Misc., Reading

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 potatoes” and “existential loneliness,” and I can’t really put into words why the alchemy of of those two things combining

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A Mrs Beeton Recipe: Celery Croquettes

| Food, Myth | Lore | History, Reading

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 – celery croquettes won out! This book is one of my prized possessions. I’ve made a few recipes from Mrs

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Filipino stories

Filipino culture in my writing – a pledge

| Places, Reading, The Quiet is Loud, Writing

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 read to me from the book on the right, as bedtime stories. The sun and the moon as living things

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NK Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy

Sci-fi and fantasy novels by Black authors

| Reading, Writing | 2 Comments

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 do things unimaginable to us today. And I recently embarked on a fairly intense Octavia Butler phase. And Brown Girl

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Writing & books in movies: The Terrorizers and La Notte

| Film Stills, Misc., Reading, Writing

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 a lot of screenshots for the blog. This might surprise you, but my screenshots skewed heavily towards the writing and

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history of fictional worlds

The history of fictional worlds

| Misc., Myth | Lore | History, Places, Reading, Writing | 2 Comments

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!

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Tove Jansson

“Freedom is the best thing” – Reading ‘Tove Jansson: Work and Love’

| People, Reading, Writing | 2 Comments

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, and I began also to learn about the Moomins’ creator, Tove Jansson. And I began to like her quite a

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writing 2010

Doris Lessing and wool-gathering

| People, Reading, Writing

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 writer’s life, for the real part of it cannot be written down. How did my day go in those early

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