This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

Rebecca Stead and I both have terrible senses of direction (as I wrote about once in a previous post – one of my favorite posts, actually). And when we get together, our terrible senses of direction collide and explode into an utter inability to get anywhere at all. In a place like London, maps are comical rather than helpful (just look at one and maybe you'll understand why)… Last night we were finding one of our maps particularly incomprehensible and Rebecca told me I should hurl it into the nearest pit. Ha!

Here are a few London scenes in no particular order.

Here are some clues.















Hello from beautiful London, blog readers. :)

Stay tuned for another guessing game on the weekend, when my location changes!

So, I've been reading Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart mysteries (and loving them, especially The Shadow in the North.) However, this passage in The Ruby in the Smoke startled me:

Beyond the Tower of London, between St. Katharine’s Docks and Shadwell New Basin, lies the area known as Wapping: a district of docks and warehouses, of crumbling tenements and rat-haunted alleys, of narrow streets where the only doors are at second-floor level, surmounted by crude projecting beams and ropes and pulleys. The blind brick walls at pavement level and the brutal-looking apparatus above give the place the air of some hideous dungeon from a nightmare, while the light, filtered and dulled by the grime in the air, seems to come from a long way off – as if through a high window set with bars.
Oh, dearie me! I lived in Wapping for four months, and apparently I should be glad that the year was 2004 rather than Sally Lockhart's 1872! When I was there, it was the cutest place ever! I could, …