What follows is the tale as I tell it to my children, perhaps just a smidgen influenced by my professional hat as a librarian. Once upon a time, there were three pigs who were setting out to make their way into the world. The first thing they needed to do was make homes for themselves….
I present: lighting reviews! One sentence reviews of all the books I’ve read in 2019 so far. Please note that some of these are re-reads, as I definitely believe in reading books over and over again. Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie Gender bending sci-fi with great complexity of plot detail, rewards a close reading. The…
Last September, following a tip from my mom, I started bullet journaling. One aspect of the bullet journal is a high form of internet craze, wherein people post pretty pictures on their instagrams and blogs of how wonderfully analog and totally unplugged their lives have become. If you want to hear about it from the…
If you could trade seven minutes of your time for a calmer and more productive day, would you? Does your answer change if those seven minutes are awful? Have I sold you on trying it? This week’s Brave Wednesday is brought to you by yet another snow day! Unlike my usual Brave Wednesday offerings, it…
Demeter is the goddess of summer and harvest. If is she who coaxes the seed to sprout, and she who, if she smiles upon you, can bring a bountiful harvest. Her power is vast, and power is attractive to many. One such was Zeus. Demeter got pregnant (everyone does, with Zeus) and in time had…
Books written for early readers are built with simple characters. This is good for emerging readers. They can come to appreciate running gags, as a character does the same thing in different scenes. The simple character can be described with few words, and takes does not take long to feel that the character is a…
For this Brave Wednesday, I want to share with you the beginning of what I imagine could become a longish short story, or a perhaps a novella. I first conceived of the idea in 2012, and wrote these words after having it occasionally pop back into my mind for about a year. After writing it down…
Two years ago this week, I wrote out a version of a traditional tale I’d been working on for a long while. This is my first time sharing it in its written form, though I have told it orally before, using different bits and pieces each time. Brave Wednesdays are pushing me to look back…
I appreciate ritual in my life. As my religious tradition is Judaism, the tradition I seek out is generally from Jewish sources. And sometimes, rituals don’t yet exist for the things I’m doing. Sometimes that’s because I’m doing something that didn’t used to be a thing that happened, and sometimes it’s because I’m doing a…