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

I'm not a gamer, and most of the games I could play on my iPhone would hurt my hands and arms. So I'm very happy to have discovered Flutter, which is technically a game but doesn't feel like one. It feels like I have my own butterfly sanctuary where hardly anything ever happens, pretty butterflies flutter around, maybe occasionally I catch a falling flower petal, maybe occasionally I feed a treat to the frog, now and then I hatch a new species of butterfly, then I go away for a few hours and when I come back not a whole lot has changed. FLUTTER IS SO SOOTHING. (It's also free! There are ways to make it fancier and faster if you feel like spending money, but I don't.) (Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 6.1 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.)

For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
I'm listening to and loving Recorded Books' production of Moby-Dick, narrated by Frank Muller. It's over 21 hours long! I tune in and out as I'm listening, perhaps starting back to attention to find that it's been fifteen minutes and Ishmael is STILL listing white things (!!!) (see "Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale"), tuning out again, then sitting straight upright as Melville says something so beautiful I could die. I read this book in college, I wrote a paper about it. What a pleasure to enjoy it for itself and be allowed to space out when I wan…

*intercom dings*

First Officer Douglas Richardson (voiced by Roger Allam): Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We're now about halfway through our flight from Hong Kong to Limerick, and I just thought I'd let you know that I... am... BORED. Bored, bored. Bored. Bored...... BOOOOOORED. We are, unbelievably, still flying over Russia, which continues to be STUPIDLY BIG. Really enormous. Far bigger than necessary. We've been in the air now for about a week and it doesn't look like we'll be landing until the last syllable of recorded time. So, if anyone on board knows any card tricks, ghost stories, or would like to have some sex, please do make your way to the flight deck. Thank you.

*intercom dings*

Captain Martin Crieff (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch): Ahhh, ladies and gentlemen, I do – I do profoundly apologize for my first officer and his badly misjudged attempt at humor. I do hope you weren't distressed by his outburst and – and let me just say in his defense t…

Greetings from the back of beyond, dear readers.

I love Deborah Kaplan's recent post called "Writing Homework for You, My Loyal Readers." Last fall, Deborah and Amy Stern co-taught the fantasy course at Simmons College's Center for the Study of Children's Literature. After they'd started the semester, they realized what the opening assignment should have been. Now that they're no longer teaching the course, they're sharing that assignment with us, and it's a great one. It involves learning to better appreciate the differences between all the many ways we can write about books. From the post:

Current students are so incredibly proficient at writing about reading, because what with blogs etc., they do so much of it. And yet at the same time, they are proficient in some very specific kinds of writing about reading (primarily personal blogs and Goodreads-style reviews, with some amount of professional blogs), and the process of showing people the req…

It's birthday month on the blog, but life this summer has been so jam-packed (in all the best ways) that I haven't given much time to blogging. So. Um. Happy birthday, everyone, including me. :o)

In my limited time today, I want to point out one online resource for learning to talk about abortion, then mention one really interesting book about women and eating problems.

First: a decade ago, my mother brought an article at the Public Conversations Project to my attention. It's about a secret, six-year-long dialogue between leaders on both sides of the abortion debate, a dialogue which took place in the wake of John Salvi's December 30, 1994 shootings at the Brookline Planned Parenthood and Preterm Health Services that killed two people and wounded five. The participants in this dialogue held passionate and opposing views on the abortion issue, but didn't come together hoping to change each other's minds. From the article: "Our talks would not aim for commo…

Recently, I organized some tickets for an upcoming concert. A friend sent a check in the mail to pay for her ticket. Above is her accompanying note. Can you guess what we're going to see/hear?

Now I'll talk about something else for a minute so there's some space between the question and the answer. Um. Hi. I don't have a lot to say right now. Except that today I find myself wondering how the drive is between Ísafjörður and Akureyri (Iceland). Based on this Google maps image, it looks delightfully fjordy.


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Oh! I could also tell you about one other exciting upcoming concert for those in my neck of the woods. Recently I have blogged (more than once) about the Slovenian/Croatian duo of Luka Šulić and Stjepan Hauser known as 2Cellos. These two very talented classically-trained cellists perform classical crossover covers of various pop, rock, and metal songs, and their music is completely infectious. And – they're doing a USA tour in October/November, star…

I have just been watching the most beautiful show of clouds and light in the sky. I was being very selfish and didn't take any pictures, but here are a couple of pictures from the other day.



Recently, at the end of a magic show, the magician asked if anyone in the audience had any questions about magic. My niece, codename: Phoenix, nearly four, raised her hand, stood, and asked, "How can there be a rainbow with only water and the sun?"

I try not to make my blog Whinge Central, but this information might actually be helpful for some of you out there. So: I'm sure Dragon Dictate's latest version of dictation software for Mac users (by Nuance) is useful to someone with some job, but I'm sorry to say that if you happen to be a writer who works with manuscripts that are a few hundred pages long, it amounts to highly-priced garbage. The program is designed to be simultaneously conscious of every word in your manuscript, so that you can verbally navigate to any point – a feature I have no need for, but that I'm not given the option of turning off – and it's quite limited, apparently, in the number of words it can manage at once. If I have my Dragon Dictate microphone turned on and I click into my current 280-page manuscript, the software flips out, freezes, then takes several minutes to crash.  Every single time. When I called Nuance's (consistently appalling) customer service, I was told to dictat…

My Bulgarian publisher, Emas Publishing, has released Graceling, and their cover is one of my favorites. I particularly like the grim color scheme, only broken up by the subtle colors of Katsa's eyes. The artist is Zlatina Zareva. Thank you, Emas!

I have many deep and meaningful thoughts to blog, but I've been too busy doing important things like eating a double-decker peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwich while sitting in a kayak in the middle of a lake next to some loons. So this will have to do for now: have you seen/heard the a cappella version of the trailer to the (wonderful) movie Inception? On a recent road trip, my companion played the audio for me. I have never laughed so hard while driving through New Hampshire. Here it is:



(And here's the actual trailer for comparison.)