Author Archives: lydias

I’ve been on a gratitude binge lately.

Now it’s my readers turn.

Thank you for reading this blog.

Thank you for your comments.

Thank you for supporting my books.

Thank you for leaving reviews of them.

Thank you for your encouragement.

Thank you for your retweets and reposts.

You’re all amazing.

This makes me picture a mermaid culture that developed the idea of underwater animal husbandry in order to maintain a steady supply of fish for their dinner tables.

Sharks were gradually domesticated in this society as a result of them hanging around the merpeople when they were culling their fish stocks.

Now shark teeth are the strongest currency and status symbol of mermaid society. Keeping your pet sharks healthy is as important as keeping yourself healthy, so mermaid culture unravels when the sharks mysteriously begin disappearing. Where did they go? Will the shark shepherds be able to track them down before it’s too late?

Someone hurry up and write this book. I can’t wait to see how it ends!

My RSS feed is filled with dozens of amazing blogs. Some of them belong to friends of mine, but many more are written by people I’ve never met and don’t know at all outside of what they post about themselves on their sites.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what people do and don’t blog about. The sites I follow talk about everything from science news to snapshots of cute animals to the online diaries of foster and adoptive parents. Some of these blogs reveal a ton of information about the person writing them. Others give away virtually no hints about the bloggers and their personal lives at all.

Regardless of what type of site it is, though, there are a few things I wish I could find more often in all of the blogs I follow.

1. Stories about their bad days. I completely understand wanting to keep certain things private, but I really like reading the occasional post about what other people find frustrating or difficult in life. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. If we share the same weaknesses, I can learn new coping skills for the things that I have trouble doing. Reading about the things people struggle with also gives me sympathy for how hard they work to accomplish something that I or you have always pulled off effortlessly.
2. Responses to other blog posts. It is so interesting to see a blog post spawn one or more responses to it. Your interpretation of a discussion could be completely different from mine, but I won’t know why you think the way you do unless you tell everyone about it. In some cases, I also haven’t even heard of the original debate or controversy yet. If a blogger I follow doesn’t mention it and it’s not something that’s covered in the mainstream news, I might not know about it for a long time.
3. Funny stories. While it’s true that not every blog is well-suited for these kinds of posts, I love seeing them show up in my RSS feed. Sometimes the best way to respond to an impossible problem is to find the humour in it. This isn’t something that comes to me naturally, so I really enjoy seeing how other people pull it off.
4. Updates to previous posts. What someone believed six months (or six years) ago might not be what they still believe today. It’s so interesting to me to read about how and why a person’s mind changes over time.
5. Off-topic posts. If your blog advertisers itself to be about underwater basket weaving, I’d prefer to be reading about stuff related to weaving and underwater adventures 90% of the time. Occasional off-topic posts can be a fascinating glimpse into the author’s life, though.

What topics do you wish more blogs talked about?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The White Rabbit. I want a sequel to this!

I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense. This isn’t a feeling I’ve ever had, but I sure loved the way it was expressed.

Why Parents Should Have Child-Free Friends. I agree with this 100%. There are so many important things you can learn about life from befriending people who fall outside of the norm in some way. To give one example, I love listening to my friends who have visible and invisible disabilities/illnesses talk about what it takes for them to get through the day. It’s hard to admit this, but I know that I take my good health for granted. Talking to my friends whose lives look so different from mine in certain ways has made me so much more compassionate and understanding than I might have otherwise been.

Lost in a Fishbowl via KStuckInTraffic. This is the kind of thought experiment that blows my mind.

How Graphic Is Too Graphic? via Kathleen01930. None of my stories have been graphic yet, but this is definitely something I think about when toying with new ideas. Your reason for including violent or disturbing content matters. Some plots can be just as effective without these things, but others truly cannot.

The Great Backyard Bird Count. Every February the Cornell  Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society asks volunteers from around the world to count the birds they see and send in a short report about it. The count started yesterday and will end on the fifteenth. I think I’ll be participating. It only takes 15 minutes, although you can do it for a longer period of time if you prefer.

Valentine’s Day: Like or Dislike via SusanStovall. What surprised me the most about this post was how much I ended up agreeing with the person who wrote it. As someone who has never really celebrated Valentine’s Day, I was expecting to have a totally different reaction to something with this title. I suspect we’d get along well if we lived in the same city and every struck up a friendship.

What have you been reading?

For anyone who hasn’t heard the good news yet, J.K. Rowling is revisiting the Harry Potter series. The play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be performed this summer in London, although all of the tickets for it have already been sold. It will also be released as a script at midnight on July 31.

I am so excited about this release because of how much I loved these books as a kid. I reread the first seven books over and over again. Sometimes I still have moments when I see or hear something in my ordinary life that instantly reminds me of a character or scene from this series.

Waiting five months to read the new instalment feels like an eternity.

How will I be passing the time?

By rereading all of the previous Harry Potter novels, of course!

I’m about 50 pages into Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at the moment. (If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t read it yet, be prepared for mild spoilers from a nearly 20-year-old story. Haha).

As a kid, I didn’t notice – or maybe I simply didn’t remember – that Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were never asked if they were willing to take in their nephew. They didn’t even know that he was coming to live with them after his parents were murdered until Aunt Petunia opened the door one morning and found baby Harry sitting on her doorstep with a letter tucked beside him.

Surprise!

This wasn’t something that struck me as odd back then, but I sure would be discombobulated to discover any of my nieces or nephews on my doorstep as an adult. What if they grew hungry, frightened, or cold between the time they were dropped off and the time I discovered them? Eek. That thought makes me wince.

It will be a lot of fun to see if there’s anything else I understand in a completely different light as I continue on with Harry’s story.

Who else is looking forward to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? If you’re not a Harry Potter fan, what novels have you revisited as an adult only to realize that your opinion of certain scenes has completely changed over the years?

Winter Fox from mechanical apple on Vimeo.

Okay, so technically the title of this short film is Winter Fox, not Winter in Heaven.

I like the contrast between it and the video I shared with you last week, though. Winter in Hell was more visually striking, but I’d much rather visit this setting.

I have a confession to make: the amazing commercials (and the occasional performance from Beyonce) are the only reasons why I’ve ever paid attention to the Super Bowl.

This isn’t a judgement on how other people spend their time. I’m sure my love of stuff like the Harry Potter books is equally tedious for some.

Football is a sport that I find boring even when I’m playing it.  Sitting still and watching other people play football for hours simply isn’t something my brain is capable of doing.

So imagine how confused I was when owls started showing up on my  Twitter stream last night.

Someone – I’m still not entirely sure who – attempted to hijack the Super Bowl hashtag in order to talk about Superb Owls.

This image above was one of many graphics about how owls live and what they look like. I found them endlessly interesting because of all of the owls that were mentioned in the Harry Potter books and because this isn’t a species I know a whole lot about.

At least for me, owls are better than football.

Where do your interests lay?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, jokes, comic strips, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Freedom and Apology via Kim_Batchelor. The author of this post teaches a creative writing class in a jail, and she’s learned a lot from her students. This was such an interesting peek into a part of society I know almost nothing about.

February. I actually found this poem last spring,  but I decided to wait until February rolled around again to share it with all of you. 🙂

Fear and Monsters via CamelaThompson. Isn’t it wonderful to stumble across blog posts that ask questions you’ve never thought of before?

Why Birds Fluff Up. Just the thought of this makes me shiver.

Powers. This is also true for those of us who are bisexual. Haha!

Confidence Trick via Hannah_Chutzpah. Yes, exactly.

From The Jellyfish Method Of Handling Criticism:

But the problem with developing thick skin is that there’s a tendency to start deflecting anything and everything that isn’t overwhelmingly positive.  After awhile, even a well-meaning critique runs the risk of being labeled as “hater talk” and disregarded.

What have you been reading?

I’d find this fascinating even if I didn’t currently have a cold.

Winter in Hell from Enrique Pacheco on Vimeo.

What a title, eh?

This is a video you can watch without listening to the background music if you’d like. It’s a collection of volcanic explosions, frozen meadows, and small icebergs bobbing up and down in the ocean.

Iceland isn’t my idea of hell at all. It’s actually a beautiful, peaceful place. I’m still not interested in visiting it at this time of year, though. Haha.