Happy Thanksgiving!

And in other news, Erotic Exploits is now available for the Nook. If you have a Nook, and are willing to download the free sample, please let me know if the formatting looks all right or is terrible. The preview function does not seem to be working for me.

Laurence Binyon, "The Fallen"

For The Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

--Laurence Binyon

Originally published in The Times, 21 September 1914

City of Independence

Today's a big day here in Philadelphia - it's Independence Day!

There are many other reasons I love living in Philadelphia. Here are a couple of them. This mural, representing local independent radio station WXPN, is one. The mural is located in West Philadelphia.


And here's another reason - this church was built in 1886. It's also in West Philadelphia. Eventually it was struck by lightning. It's no longer in use. I think it's for sale, though. I think it's really striking. Pardon the expression!

Wherefore the Poppy?

Decoration Day, renamed Memorial Day beginning in 1882, was first celebrated in the United States following the Civil War; it commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in the military. One of the most famous parts of Memorial Day, however, arose during World War One.

The practice of red poppies on Memorial Day originated in 1918 with Moina Michael, who was inspired by Canadian John McCrae's famous poem, "In Flanders Fields" (1915). The tradition spread from the United States to France via Anne Guerin, who poineered the selling of poppies, real or facsimile, as a way to raise money for various causes to benefit veterans and the victims of war. Through her advocacy, the sale of poppies for charitable causes spread to The United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

White poppies are sometimes worn in this context, and symbolize looking forward to peace, rather than back at sacrifice.

Geoffrey Dearmer, "The Turkish Trench Dog"

The Turkish Trench Dog

Night held me as I crawled and scrambled near
The Turkish lines. Above, the mocking stars
Silvered the curving parapet, and clear
Cloud-latticed beams o'erflecked the land with bars;
I, crouching, lay between
Tense-listening armies peering through the night,
Twin giants bound by tentacles unseen.
Here in dim-shadowed light
I saw him, as a sudden movement turned
His eyes towards me, glowing eyes that burned
A moment ere his snuffling muzzle found
My trail; and then as serpents mesmerise
He chained me with those unrelenting eyes,
That muscle-sliding rhythm, knit and bound
In spare-limbed symmetry, those perfect jaws
And soft-approaching pitter-patter paws.
Nearer and nearer like a wolf he crept--
That moment had my swift revolver leapt--
But terror seized me, terror born of shame
Brought flooding revelation. For he came
As one who offers comradeship deserved,
An open ally of the human race,
And sniffling at my prostrate form unnerved
He licked my face!

--Geoffrey Dearmer (1893-1996)

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Today is ANZAC Day.

Father Christmas, 1914

Christmas, 1914: Father Christmas putting presents in soldiers' boots.

Happy Book Birthday, Moonlight Mistress!!!

Leave a comment about your favorite werewolf book or movie, and tomorrow morning I'll choose one name randomly to win a free copy.



The Moonlight Mistress

Read some excerpts, and more about the book, in these posts.

Siegfried Sassoon, "Aftermath"

It's Armistice/Remembrance/Veterans' Day today.


Aftermath

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz--
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

March 1919.

--Siegfried Sassoon, Picture-Show, 1920

A jolly Halloween....

And it's especially jolly for me since I received my author copies of The Moonlight Mistress!!!

Happy Birthday, Ursula!

"We turn not older with years but newer every day." --Emily Dickinson


Today is Ursula Kroeber LeGuin's 80th Birthday.


[Photo copyright Eileen Gunn]

"Socrates said, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper."

--"A Few Words to a Young Writer"

"...when women speak truly they speak subversively--they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That's what I want--to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don't know the power in you--I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman's tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don't let us sink back into silence. If we don't tell our truth, who will? Who'll speak for my children, and yours?"

--"The Mother Tongue," Bryn Mawr Commencement Address, 1986

Now go read and admire A Pillow-Book For Cats.

Many Happy Returns, Ursula!!!

Memorial Day, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, "A Lament"

A Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings--
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?


--Wilfred Wilson Gibson, 1918

Today is Star Trek Movie Day!

Mr. Spock (in reruns) was one of my earliest crushes, and the show one of my favorites for many years. Isn't he yummy? You really need to hear his speaking voice to get the full effect.

I might not get quite the same buzz from the new Star Trek movie, but nostalgia moves me to go and see it anyway. If I don't like it, I can take the traditional Trekker approach and complain about it bitterly afterwards.

And who knows, maybe I will like the new movie in a whole new way. It's definitely got some actors I enjoy watching. Sadly, though, I can't see it tonight--my choir has a dress rehearsal for our Saturday performance. But soon. Soon I shall see it! Soon it shall be mine!

It is illogical to think Friday should be happier than any other day of the week.

Happy May Day! And Guest Post Tomorrow.

Stop by tomorrow for my guest, Evangeline Adams of Edwardian Promenade, who posts about writing African-American romance.

Happy May Day!

"Never had the Maypole been so gayly decked as at sunset on midsummer eve. This venerated emblem was a pine-tree, which had preserved the slender grace of youth, while it equalled the loftiest height of the old wood monarchs. From its top streamed a silken banner, colored like the rainbow. Down nearly to the ground the pole was dressed with birchen boughs, and others of the liveliest green, and some with silvery leaves, fastened by ribbons that fluttered in fantastic knots of twenty different colors, but no sad ones. Garden flowers, and blossoms of the wilderness, laughed gladly forth amid the verdure, so fresh and dewy that they must have grown by magic on that happy pine-tree. Where this green and flowery splendor terminated, the shaft of the Maypole was stained with the seven brilliant hues of the banner at its top. "

--Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Maypole of Merry Mount"

but also:

"...and now, disengag'd from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ'd, it must have belong'd to a young giant. "

--from Fanny Hill by John Cleland

ANZAC Cookies

It is ANZAC Day.



These cookies were meant to keep fresh for a long time, to be shipped by boat from Australia and New Zealand to the European front during World War One, but they are also very yummy cookies. I got this recipe from someone in my writers' workshop.

ANZAC Cookie/Biscuits

1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup refined sugar
1 cup rolled oats (preferably not the quick-cook kind)
3/4 cup grated coconut
1/2 cup Butter
1 tablespoon "golden syrup" such as King's or corn syrup such as Karo
2 tablespoons boiling water
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

Mix flour, sugar, oats and coconut. On low heat, melt butter with syrup. Mix boiling water and baking soda, and add to butter and syrup mixture. Add this to dry ingredients and mix well. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet. Bake at 300 degrees for about 12 minutes, or until lightly browned at the edges. Cool slightly, then remove to rack to cool completely.

World Frog Day!

Happy World Frog Day!

Yes, it really is.

You never find World Frog Day-themed romances, though. Despite all those hunky and/or gorgeous herpetologists out there.

the life of St. Patrick

Sometimes, historical research leaves me seeing novels everywhere.

This is what I could find on St. Patrick, who was born in 387 C.E..

Patrick's birth name was Maewyn Succat and he took the name Patricus when he became a priest.

At age 16, he was captured by Irish raiders and made a slave; he served as a shepherd in Ireland for six years, where he learned to speak Irish. He also became a devout Christian while a slave, and had a dream that told him to leave Ireland aboard a ship. He escaped, found a ship, and returned home to Britain, where he became a priest and studied in a French monastery. He was later sent back to Ireland to covert the inhabitants to Christianity. He died on March 17th, though the year is not confirmed (I found several sources that gave different dates).

Doesn't this sound a bit like the plot to a romance novel? Except that there's no heroine. Perhaps a spunky Irish lass who is defending her lands from the interlopers....

it's the 98th annual international women's day

Happy International Women's Day!

http://www.internationalwomensday.com/first.asp

Mark Twain on Mardi Gras

"The largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we arrived too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities. I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety. There is a chief personage--'Rex;' and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence; and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not on account of the police.

"Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached. "

--Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)