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

One of my sisters is currently camping by herself in the Mojave Desert for a month, as part of her doctoral dissertation. Another is evacuating to avoid Hurricane Irma. And I'm about to leave on a book tour...

So my parents and I grabbed a quiet moment and did something close to (my) home: we visited the deCordova Sculpture Park in the rain.








It was lovely to enter other people's ideas for an afternoon. I hope you can find some silliness, imagination, and/or wonder in your day, dear reader :). Here's moonrise over the Mojave Desert to send you on your way:

You can touch the art.


(Outside, that is. I wouldn't suggest trying to touch any of the art in the galleries. ^_^)

Marie took the pic.

The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is an odd little place in Paris, a museum that combines historic weaponry and taxidermied animals with art from various periods, some of it contemporary. It's macabre, creepy, bizarre -- and in some parts, quite beautiful.

The nasturtiums are currently hanging from the balconies in the courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and it's a breathtaking sight, so much so that when I got home from the museum, I wrote hanging nasturtiums into the courtyard of the building in my current WIP. They'll be on display until mid-April or so. (There are some lovely photos at that link.)

As I stood in the courtyard gawking -- thinking about how description often works best in books if you're able to capture the mood something creates with a few words, or maybe briefly say what it's like rather than providing lengthy and specific details about what it actually is or precisely how it looks -- my friend told me that the museum invites artists-in-residence to live in the museum and work. LUCKY DUCKS. What a dream to write in a place like that. Then we went to the tiny red concert hall with the custom-built Steinway and watched and heard pianist Paavali Jumppanen and violinist Corey Cerovsek have a…