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

Bulgarian cover for Fire! Published by Emas, designed by Zlatina Zareva. Click to enbiggen! ------>

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My dear nieces (accidentally and with great affection) gave me a Christmas present of a terrible cold in which my head was like a TARDIS of snot, so I've fallen behind in some things, including blogging. (The TARDIS, for those of you who aren't Doctor Who fans, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, such that it's capable of containing unimaginably huge quantities of stuff you would never think possible if you're standing outside it. And by the way, I'm not as obsessed with Doctor Who as it might seem given recent mentions on my blog (though I do rather love it). It's more that a character I'm writing about is often wearing Doctor Who pajamas, so it's always on my mind.)

As colds go, this one was massive, but also dreamy and contemplative, possibly because it coincided with the New Year. I should have some resolution thoughts to b…

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.

When writing, there's a danger in depending too much on preparation. Yes, preparation is important, but you're not going to figure everything out about a writing project before you start it. Part of the point is that you figure it out while doing it. You're planning a book, and you can't figure out the solution to a certain plot puzzle, or how one of your characters feels about something, or even what someone's name is? Maybe that means it's time to start writing. You're not completely ready? As with most things in life, if you wait until you're completely ready, you'll never start. Get a new definition for "ready." Just as courage often involves being scared to death, readiness often involves accepting that you don't really know what's going to happen. :)

(Or so sings Lou Reed in one of the best songs ever... except that it sounds so sad when he sings it. I don't mean it so sadly!)
Last week was a tough one. You know those times when you're contemplating everything you've done in the past year, and then suddenly you realize you did all that stuff in the past month?

Anyway, Wednesday night, I went to bed completely rattled, burned out, and beat. Thursday morning, I woke to a phone call from a lady at my credit card company, who was calling to verify suspicious activity on my account. She was right: I had NOT purchased a song online for 99 cents the day before. (Though I had three days prior, making it a particularly clever theft for the perpetrator to have perpetrated -- but, um, still a bit underwhelming? 99 cents? Is it really worth going to all the trouble of being nefarious to buy one song on iTunes?). Why, I asked the lady, would anyone steal my credit card info and then spend 99 cents? I dropped my credit card in …