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

I really like this map! (Thanks, B.) Super interesting.


From mentalfloss.com. Image credit: Ben Blatt/Slate.

Also, for them that's interested, the other day, to my astonishment, I wrote two and a half pages. Or, as I emailed to a particular group of interested friends, "tuna half pages." There are certain dictation errors that I encounter so frequently that at a certain point I give up correcting them and they enter our lexicon as a kind of code. My correspondents, who are usually not dictating, use them as much as I do. (And now I've remembered one of my favorite (of my own) blog posts, about dictation errors, angst, and Prufrock ^_^.)

I wish you all well on this Wednesday.

This week, my happiness about Elizabeth Warren running for Senate in Massachusetts...


(transcript here)

...combined with this (funny? offensive? certainly clever, certainly reductive) t-shirt for sale at Threadless Tees...
















(click on it to enbiggen; you can buy it here)

...combined with my recent perusal of maps because I'm going on vacation next week to a part of the country I barely know at all...

(no picture for that one, sorry -- though maybe there will be once I get back!)

... all got me searching the internets for something I'd remembered seeing once before. I found it. It was created by Mark Newman in the Department of Physics and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. Here it is:
















What is that purple monstrosity?

Well, many of you will recognize this:















It's the results of a USA presidential election (in this case, 2008). Blue is for Democrat, red is for Republican; each state is colored either red or blue to represent which party the majorit…

Let's start with a new cover that I LOVE. Here's Graceling in Japanese, published by Hayakawa:


Can I have that outfit? At least the boots? Next, here's one of my favorite things.


Let me help you parse that picture: an orchid sits in a leather chair. (No, that's not where I normally keep it. The sunlight was streaming through the window where it normally sits, plus, it was being encroached upon by an aloe plant on one side and a zebra plant on the other, so I moved it to someplace dignified for the sake of the picture.) A stake protrudes from the soil and a small red monster sits atop the stake. A stem with a few buds is growing its way up the stake. BUT! BUT! Guess what? A few weeks ago, that stem didn't exist. It was an orchid with a pot, big green leaves, a stake, a monster, and NO STEM. Then I went to Australia and left my orchids in the sunny window of a hot apartment for two weeks. A friend watered them for me. When I got back, they ALL made it very …

If you're an audiobooker, the maps from the books, both by Jeffery C. Mathison, might be helpful! Click on a map to make it bigger.


The Seven Kingdoms (Graceling)




The Dells and Pikkia (Fire)