A Single Layer

Thanks to my brilliant sister, I finally have a link to my Pinterest boards up on this blog. Go ahead and click through the button on the left to view all the pretty pictures I've been collecting this year. Here's a sampling. You can find all their sources by clicking through the images on their respective boards:

Michael Blake, author of Dances With Wolves and The Holy Road (currently pictured in my sidebar), will be chatting on blogtalkradio this evening at 7PM, about his books, his ranch, and his life. Click on the link to listen in.

The cereus is blooming twice over tonight. We are huddled round the plant, which is some sort of cactus, watching the buds turn from tightly woven pods to starry trumpets and at last to beautiful white flowers. This plant has a special history. It was my grandmother's, and my mother inherited it upon her death some fifteen years ago. It bloomed for the first time only a year ago, and now has a miraculous six buds gracing its succulent stems. Two of them are opening right now, and we are watching the petals move before our eyes, ever so slowly, from cocoon to flower. It's a lesson from nature in waiting, perseverance, silence, patience, and doubtless a dozen other things the Puritans would better understand than I do.

I really didn't think I'd be writing another blog post on the YASaves issue, now so many weeks outdated, but I started drafting a comment to one of my favorite book bloggers, and it just got waaaay too long. So I am posting it here instead. Favorite Blogger was actually writing in response to a different article - an opinion piece in the Huffington Post - written in support of Gurdon's socially disastrous WSJ article and against the ensuing broo-ha-ha. If you can follow that at all, let me try a little better to summarize the issue. Gurdon says certain books aren't appropriate for teens because of their violence and sexuality and general too-much-like-the-underbelly-of-the-world nature. Teen writers and readers (some of them, mostly the ones with twitter accounts) unite in a social networking frenzy to say that Gurdon's attempt to ban books from their category is small-minded and quack. Huff-Po opinion piece says this isn't banning; it's good parenting. F...

I have waited to blog about this. I considered not mentioning it at all, but there's something about the hashtag YASaves that requires reasonably-minded people to stand up and say "Who made you God?" For those of you who haven't been following it, here's the short version of the most recent young adult literature internet squawk: 1. Meghan Cox Gurdon, a seasoned children's and young adult book reviewer, wrote an article criticizing the increasingly dark subject matter of YA literature. 2. YA authors protested her criticism on Twitter, grouping their comments under the subject heading #YASaves. I know. This sort of thing happens all the time. It's not really news. Except it bothers me. Plenty of people are in uproar about Gurdon's criticism, but few who object to the article have said anything very helpful, at least that I've noticed. Most, in fact, are more defensive about their own work than anything else. Because a large body of those p...

I don't have anything to say, really. Just wanted to give a little hello to you readers, to let you know I am grateful for you and have not forgotten you.