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

What is a moonraker? Also called a moonsail, a moonraker is the small sail, sometimes set in light winds, above the skysail.

What is the skysail? Used in a favorable light wind, it's the light sail above the royal.

What is the royal? Also used in a favorable light wind, it's the small sail above the topgallant sail.

What is the topgallant sail? It's the sail above the topsail. Sometimes divided into upper topgallant sail and lower topgallant sail (depending on the era of the ship).

What is the topsail? It's the sail above the course. Sometimes divided into upper topsail and lower topsail (depending on the era of the ship).

What is the course? The sails that hang from the lower yards of a square-rigged ship, now usually restricted to the foresail (the principal sail set on the foremast and the lowest on that mast) and mainsail (the lowest and largest sail on the mainmast, pronounced mains'l).

So, what is a moonraker? It's that tiny sail six or even eight sails …

Graceling now exists in Norwegian. Yay! ----->

Published by Cappelen Damm and translated by Carina Westberg, whose excellent translation questions spurred my recent post about how Seabane Isn't Real.

This is another randutiae post. Ready?
I really like Rebecca Rabinowitz's short post called Some things to consider when writing fat characters.Some recent words my Scrabble app has rejected: Bearthin. Adjective. The particular degree of thinness of a bear coming out of hibernation. Trocheey. Adjective. Adjectival form of "trochee." Meowlion. Noun. Really, isn't every lion a meowlion? Evebait. Noun. Perhaps a sexist synonym for "apple." Unshovel. Verb. Arguably if a walk is unshoveled, someone or something has unshoveled it. I would go so far as to say I've spent entire mornings unshoveling the walk. I did recently have the satisfaction of changing "otter" to "garotter," but I lament the lack of style points in Scrabble. I feel…

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…

Happy Pan-Universal Be Who You Are Day! Someone who uses voice recognition software and draws should start a VRS comic strip. The objects that appear suddenly in my scenes because my VRS has misunderstood me are visually amusing. I just dictated the line, "'I will,' she said with a sob," and my VRS typed, "'I will,' she said with a saw." I feel like a spontaneous saw could really add something to a conversation.Gentlemen of Cambridge: to the man, when faced with a long, narrow corridor of sidewalk between snowbanks, you have waited at your end and let me pass first. This has literally happened to me twelve times since the storm (which I know because at a certain point I started counting). In this northeast USA city (meaning, a city where strangers tend not to pay much attention to each other and rudeness is not particularly unusual), I am startled and touched by this thoughtfulness, then startled that I am touched. Thank you for your gentlemanly beh…

Boustrophedon[boo-struh-FEED-n], from the Greek βουστροφηδόν, βοῦς (bous) meaning "ox" and στροφή (strophē) meaning "turn": An ancient method of writing in which every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. The way oxen would write, you know, if they were turning back and forth in the fields in order to write, rather than in order to pull the plow. :D?

The derivation of this word brings back memories for me, because I took ancient Greek in high school, and I remember the word βοῦς (bous). Except that I remember it meaning bull, not ox, and I remember combining it with the word κόπρος (kopros), meaning "shit." Bouskopros [BOOS-KOP-ross]: A disguised way to say "bullshit" to the non-Greek-speaking Jesuit priests and brothers without getting sent to Jug. Jug[JUG]: What we had instead of detention at my Jesuit high school. An acronym for "Justice Under God." I am not even kidding.

Wow, is it ever hard to write…

I'm proud to report that Bitterblue is a New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year, along with Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (for fiction), Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (for nonfiction), I, Too, Am America by Langston Hughes and illustrated by Bryan Collier (for picture book), and Wonder by R. J. Palacio (for middle readers). I'll be at the NAIBA Awards Banquet on September 29, as will artist Ian Schoenherr, who did the beautiful maps and illustrations.
With apologies for throwing this in with other things -- I wanted to be sure to blog the link, but am too depressed to say much -- writer David Rakoff died way too young on August 9. I'm going to miss his voice on This American Life so, so much. The show put together a beautiful episode in his honor. It aired last week. Warning: it's really sad.Laurie Halse Anderson is doing Write Five Minutes a Day this month -- with frequent (exc…

Every once in a while, I become overwhelmed by the crush of books I'm supposed to be reading (for research; as a favor for someone; because soon they'll be due back at the library; because everyone's telling me I should), and my soul revolts. I spend a week or so mulishly resisting reading anything at all. Then I skip over all the things I'm supposed to be reading and instead read whatever I damn well please. This is the reason I'm currently reading the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace.

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My sister codename: Apocalyptica the Flimflammer recently instructed me to think about the derivation of the word "cantaloupe." I did and came up with "singing wolf," which delighted me, but I'm finding it hard to research the further derivation of the name. (I mean, in the 8 minutes I've devoted to it just now. ^_^) According to my OED, Cantaluppi was the Italian town where cantaloupes were once famously grown, but why was the town called…

Perhaps (based on emails I received from friends across the pond) I should have clarified that when I said (in my last post) that Shah Rukh Khan stole my pants (in my dream) and wore them in the rain, I meant pants in the American sense, not pants in the British sense (see definition 2b). Allow me to clarify this now, for the sake of Dream Shah Rukh's dignity. :D HE STOLE MY TROUSERS, OKAY?

Relatedly, here's an amusing dictionary of British slang.

I'm not sure what it says about my reasoning capabilities that during the earthquake on Tuesday, as my house swayed back and forth and my mind tried to make sense of what was happening, I got to "a monster-sized backhoe is picking up my house and carrying it away with me in it" before I got to "earthquake." I thought to myself, "Don't the backhoe people understand that I'm still in the house? Why was I not informed of this move?!"

Personally, I think all it means is that I've never expe…

So, I've decided I want to play the triangle in a production of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird. Somewhere on this big, round earth, there must be a symphony orchestra facing the tragic circumstance of having to cancel its upcoming performance of the Firebird for lack of a triangle player, mustn't there? I've looked at the score and I know I can do it! I'll go anywhere! (By the way, that video is of Stravinsky himself conducting in 1965, at the age of 82. Check out the cane. Can you guess how jealous I am of that triangle player?)

Here's a beautiful video of a rocket breaking the sound barrier amidst a layer of ice crystals. Hap-tip, JD, and, for the curious among you, more info can be found here.



JD, incidentally, happens to be one of the smarty-pants experts who answers my endless questions as I research various parts of my novels. JD used to be a physicist, and for Bitterblue, he helped me with light waves. Why? Because one of my characters -- let's ca…

Could there be a rule that actors, directors, and producers being interviewed for DVD special features are never, ever asked to explain to us what the movie we just saw was about; what the characters they played were like; or what the important themes and messages of the TV show were? Because the reason we're in the special features at all is that we just watched the damn thing, isn't it? And we're not stoopid; we can figure that stuff out for ourselves. Special features are for magical goodness, not boredom!

Could there also be a rule that on such special features, no one is allowed to say that "filming this war scene was just like real war, like, SRSLY"? Because, hi there. You airlifted your entire crew onto a glacier and shot for days and it was very cold and you all worked very hard and you had to repeat some of the shots as many as thirty times and it really was damnably cold and hard and makeup is hard to apply at that temperature and lighting is hard to con…