So, I have been mainlining 'Mad Men' lately, as I already mentioned before, originally entirely out of the wish to look at Christina Hendricks more ( Read more... )

You can use the same ingredients for making a nice Mediterranean salad, or for topping a pizza with; with a little ingenuity, you can even make a pasta sauce. You can do that as a writer, too. The author of Urquhart's canon re-used the ingredients of 'Death and the Devil' for a modern day thriller set in Cologne, minus the Patrician clients but ( Read more... )

Since the Great LiveJournal Outage of August, I have been chewing on the lessons from that remarkable Saturday, and the fact that LJ can filter input.

By now, cyxymu's journal as been restored, and we're allowed to say 'Sukhumi' again. But things go much deeper; they reach into the early 1990s, all the way back to Stalin, Jason and the Golden Fleece, ( Read more... )

It really pisses me off that putting up an advertisement like this is still thought a) acceptable and b) funny. The post I link vigorously protests against it, but an ad agency came up with the bullshit, that organisation is paying for it, and thousands of people are probably finding it funny, not only thin people, and people that 'successfully' ( Read more... )

Last night, poor bigfluffball couldn't get onto LJ at all, as she told me via IM; she finally went offline, frustrated, in the hope it would work in the morning.

Now it is morning, I turn on my computer, can't get on LJ either! I asked moons_storm, and she says she can ( Read more... )

"Thank you! But yes, it's necessary to rather tiptoe 'round the edges of Ponder's feelings more often than not."
And that rung a very  large bell with me, and I was off on a total tangent.This is a Special Extended Version of my reply to her.

I realised why it is that I like Ponder so much as a character in the RPG. Argh!! It took me three weeks ( Read more... )

Here are my replies to her questions: just click on them, and LiveJournal will take you there...

( 1. Many of us know that you are writing a novel about Rasputin and you have done a great deal of research on him. Given the chance to communicate with him in the great beyond, what five interview questions would you ask him? )

I'd like to start the new year with a true ghost story that has been passed down in my family for generations, and of which I was reminded this morning for some reason. Thinking about it again, I realised that it was not so much a ghost story, more a story about entity creation ( Read more... )

A long, long time ago when Big Ben was a little watch, I was already writing. The oldest things were pencil on paper, hundreds of pages of it, some of it even in Tengwar - as I wrote during boring class, under the desk, but didn't want my stuff legible in case I was caught, which I never was ( Read more... )