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

In the category of It's All Relative, it's 41°F (5°C) and raining today, I was just outside, I was wearing a light long-sleeve shirt and jeans but no coat, no hat, no scarf, no longjohns, and it was GLORIOUS. It's not supposed to snow again until tomorrow. :D?It turns out I was wrong about two things about the event last night. First of all, it was totally snowing. Secondly, it was also snowing in New York, which meant that poor Marie spent an hour or so sitting on her plane on the runway before they finally canceled her flight. Marie was not able to make it to last night's event. Waaah! I did my best to read from The Winner's Crime and talk up her beautiful series. Happy book birthday, Marie. Here in Cambridge, we miss you. Thank you, everyone, for coming out on a snowy night!Via Rebecca Rabinowitz, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/CFIDS/ME has a new name: SEID, systemic exertion intolerance disease. It's also the focus of some new attention. This is wonderful news fo…

(Those of you who can't see the video (of Benedict Counterbatch, Murray-arty, and Count von Count), go to my Blog Actual.)

Thanks to the ever reliable codename: Apocalyptica the Flimflammer.

I like the movie of Catching Fire SO much more than I liked the movie of The Hunger Games. (No spoilers here.) I'm happy about the directorial change to Francis Lawrence, who doesn't rely on way too much shaky cam to create tension (which I blogged about when the first movie came out). I have to say, though, that I think I'm going to need a sedative or something for watching Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2. If they stick to the plots and characterizations depicted in the books, parts of it are going to be so hard to watch.

The word of the day today at dictionary.com is "pilcrow", which is the punctuation symbol for "paragraph": ¶. I'm rather fond of this symbol, because I use it frequently in my work, when I've got sentences crammed together and realize there should be a paragraph break between them, or worry that my own formatting is so messy that I'll forget to put in the paragraph break when I transcribe from my handwriting to the typed documen…

One of the things I love about the collaborations between famous musicians and Sesame Street (aside from that it was my first introduction to people like Yo-Yo Ma [click here for the Beethoven Quartet for Two Honkers, Dinger, and Cello] and Itzhak Perlman [click here for a lesson on easy and hard – one of my most vivid Sesame Street memories from childhood] is that the song adaptations are generally extremely silly, but also maintain the correct style for that musician (in a way that makes the whole thing even more silly!).  Like, when Melissa Etheridge sings "Like the Way U Does," she sings with exactly the appropriate level of earnestness and angst :). Today, however, I would particularly like to thank whichever genius at Sesame Street realized that Steven Tyler needed to do a cover of "I Love Trash." Press play below.