Oh woe! I have just finished my last fiction library book, right before heading out on vacation. Now what do I do? The non-fiction currently in progress is a bit heavy for car reading. ☹️

BTW, when this author was recommended to me I checked out the first book each of two different series because a reviewer on LT said they were different in tone. Wrong. The milieu was different, the tone was the same—as snarky as all get-out. 😈

“Seeing as they‘d come to Miracle Springs in search of healing...Nora‘s customers were usually empathetic people.”

Can someone explain this quote to me—what does being empathetic have to do with searching for healing?
Non-empathetic people don‘t want to be healed?

(As an aside, I did only read one book last week, but I did so without taking a day off. So I really am improving. Woot!)

The good news is that after spending December through April so sick I mostly couldn‘t even read, last week I finally felt recovered enough to restart my daily exercise sessions. The bad news is that adding exercises to my daily routine made me so tired I stopped reading again. 😭

So I declared Sunday a day of rest, and enjoyed a good book. 😁

#bookmark designed and tatted by me.

“They argue that touching one hundred people with a brilliant ad is more effective than reaching twenty-five people four times each. This approach is encouraging but research has shown it to be wrong.”

Personally I like the author‘s ‘permission‘ concept, instead of the usual ‘interrupting‘ people in order to sell to them. Alas, he confesses that although his approach is way better you actually do need to do classic advertising also. Darn!

@callunakeep I got a songbook out of the library—just for you!

... Okay, not really, I‘ve been wanting to learn one of the songs in there for a while. No, not ‘Let it Go‘. I was after ‘Frozen Heart‘ — I‘m just more into husky male choruses than angsty sopranos. So sue me.

And that there beside the book is my tenor English Concertina. 💜

Staring at my wall right now (yep, that‘s really my wall —mural by me and art by my daughters), and thinking I need some book rec‘s.

Can anyone suggest some recent not-grim, not-dark fantasy (YA titles fine) and/or some ‘cozy‘ mysteries?

“Chapter 1 attempts to degrade or destroy the fear of coding.”

I‘m thinking this isn‘t the book for me. I hand-coded all of www.lshelby.com except for the blog (I just integrated wordpress into my existing site for that) including the two card games, the space pirate paper dolls, the mini-dragon breeding game, the jigsaw puzzles...

But maybe its a useful book for people who don‘t do web-development as a hobby?

“Is having narrow eyes that important?”

Of course narrow eyes are an important benchmark of masculinity. Apparently this character somehow failed to notice that 99% of all the guys in his universe have them—one has to worry about his observation skills. The thing that confuses me, is the reference to smooth hair. Sigh! And here I thought I was finally ‘getting‘ the art style.

“The idea that progress is the natural way of things is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that when we are confronted with clear evidence that, for much of human history, things didn‘t get better and often they got worse, we reject these episodes as aberrations...”

I think this author hasn‘t encountered as many post-apocalyptic novels as I have. 😉

#bookmark by me.

“I decided I had to find my answers on my own. Since I was confined at home, and expected to waste my time thinking about ruffles and hair ribbons, I needed a disguise.”

And so Princess Lilah‘s Adventure begins...

Personally, I waste my time thinking about lace: the #bookmark was designed and tatted by me.

Sometimes I am in the mood for cute fluffy teenybopper romances, and this one hit that spot delightfully. 🙂

Just finished this classic noir furry #comic. It‘s actually pretty complimentary that I finished it, because I tend not to much like noir, furries, “message” stories or ‘mature‘ content.

About furries: I want imaginary worlds to feel real, and the whole furry thing is usually a visual metaphor and so the biological and ecological implications are ignored. That irks me. Anyone else have this issue, or am I just strange?

I have gotten far enough along the timeline that all the megafauna are officially extinct. This makes me sad, because I have a thing for megamammals.

But I note that although in the paleoindian period they found a lot of animal bones, and a bazillion flint weapons and tools, they have found “essentially no human remains”. So...

... How do we know that the ones using the tools were actually human?
:: Cue spooky music ::

#ideasgrowontrees

“Since I found this little apartment in Greenwich Village I‘ve grown fond of it.” — Laureline to Valerian

I just finished this fun little #adventure #comic: A futuristic time cop and his lovely assistant travel to a flooded New York.

I wonder if I can find a library source for these in the original language—it would be a great way to practice my french.

“Mike and Noah were just catching up with her when they saw a rocket engine emerge from the rear of Delta‘s go-kart, which blasted her away from them.”

Excerpt From Teslageist: Amber Wasp, by A. W. Black

A scene in the book I‘m reading was set inside an eerily familiar arcade game. I am amused.

In theory I checked out this book as #research for the story my publisher-cum-husband wants me to write next after the EFP Epic is done. But it will be set in the 1800s... mastodons are not going to be relevant. Naturally I refuse to let that limit my reading. To a writer, all knowledge is potentially useful—at least, that‘s my rationalization and I‘m sticking to it.

Discussed with my son yesterday about the difference between John Carter and Tarzan. He considered both to be adventure fantasy, and yet still distinctly different genres. We decided that the true difference was in the scope, John Carter is an important man on Mars — he marries a Princess, he leads armies, and the fate of entire countries is occasionally at stake — Tarzan‘s adventures tend to have a smaller, more personal scale.

#litanalysis