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The Dark is Reading 1: Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond all imagining

Posted on by Jo Walton

I think if I were to read The Dark is Rising for the first time now, it would be a very different book. I was thirteen when I first read it on the beach in Hastings. Hastings is a town in…

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Posted in Among Others, Books, Fandom, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

How to make dinner for three days

Posted on by Jo Walton

You need a chicken, half a pound of lamb mince (or beef if no lamb), raisins, two onions, a leek, a container of mushrooms, a handful of pancetta or lardons (or 3 slices of bacon if no pancetta or lardons),…

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Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Whimsy

I’m home

Posted on by Jo Walton

This has been a truly epic trip. I’m home to Emmet and my rice cooker and my Damascus steel kitchen knife and my bathrobe and drawers full of clothes I’d forgotten I owned, as I’ve been wearing the same nine…

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Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

In Nimes

Posted on by Jo Walton

…The so-called temple of Diana was an Augusteum, the niches in the cella also suggest some library use… I’m in the South of France. Far off, a flute is playing Vivaldi’s measured Summer And all around unmeasured profligate summer Is…

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Posted in Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Poetry

Dance!

Posted on by Jo Walton

With your made-up eyes and your grown up gown And the glitter on your cheek When the pink balloons come tumbling down You’ve been waiting for all week… Dance little girl,  dance with delight Let nobody tell you that it…

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Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Poetry

So full of a number of things

Posted on by Jo Walton

1) Poor Relations has a cover. I have not in fact written an ineluctably masculine seventies SF novel, but it makes me happy to have a cover as if I had. Nothing represents anything specific in the book — there…

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Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Poor Relations

I would have stayed on Livejournal forever

Posted on by Jo Walton

Somebody bought me a permanent account — an anonymous person, in 2005. And I really would have stayed there as people left in droves, through thick and thin, through changes in format and bad service and whatever. I had all…

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Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

10th November 2016: How I feel when people reference Farthing

Posted on by Jo Walton

Generally if something in the world causes somebody to think of something I have written, it’s delightful. It means I’ve succeeded in encapsulating something, in finding a way of describing something that’s useful to somebody. Something I’ve written has helped…

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Posted in Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Small Change, Writing

2nd May 2016: My Goodreads review of Petrarch’s letters

Posted on by Jo Walton

Five hundred and ninety years before I was born, Petrarch died in the middle of writing me a letter. What do you mean it wasn’t to me? It totally was. It was addressed to “Posterity”, and if I’m not his…

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Posted in Books, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

1st December 2015: 51 Today

Posted on by Jo Walton

AM is here and I’m going out for breakfast and later today for dinner with Z as well, and the book is done, and I have such great family and friends, and being fifty-one is lovely so far. I won’t…

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Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, My Books