I am publicly making a new year’s resolution: In 2011 I will write a full draft of In the Red. It may suck, but it’s happening. Hopefully at this time next year I will not be writing a sad blog post about how extravagantly short I fell of that goal.
13-rue-Thérèse-wise, I just got a review on Booklist, a mostly good one. Since it is behind a pay wall, I can’t link to it, so I will quote the best bit here:
This ambitious first novel…At turns truly exciting and overflowing with imagination,…is full of intriguing characters… Puzzle-lovers will be curious to check out the book’s online counterpart, in which they can view 3-D versions of the book’s images.
Yay! I think that is the last of the pre-pub reviews in industry papers. I am glad they mentioned the website because it is shaping up to be ferociously awesome. It will come online January 7.
Meanwhile I just got back from a tiny holiday in Santa Cruz, where I got to visit with an old friend, witness sea lions doing alternately endearing and disgusting things, and experienced radically altered gravity. That last one was at the Mystery Spot. My husband and I were prepared to be underwhelmed (being inveterate skeptics) but it was really, really weird, and thus I recommend it. If you’re into the idea of feeling like you need a barf bag while standing still on solid ground, it will rock your world. The warped pendulum was especially cool.
The property was purchased in 1939 by a dude who wanted to build a summer home, and the guy who sold him the lot insisted that he also buy a big piece of land up the side of the hill even though it was unbuildable. The man who absolutely had to shed the property lacked capitalist vision. The purchaser, however, did not. And thus, an amusing tourist trap was born–because who wouldn’t pay five bucks to watch a billiard ball roll the wrong way up an incline?
Addendum, after being told, “duh, don’t you know mystery spots are just optical illusions:” It doesn’t interest me whether they are “real” or not. All I’m saying is that I got a sense of the uncanny there that was well worth the admission price. I am not angry with the director of House of Wax for not having actually thrown a stake through Paris Hilton’s head. (Wait, come to think of it, maybe I kind of am…)
According to many sources, the pastoral ballad Miorita encapsulates something essential about the Romanian soul. In the story, three shepherds tend their sheep on the same plain: a Vrancean, a Transylvanian, and a Moldavian. Since the Moldavian is the wealthiest, the other two decide that they are going to kill him and steal his flock. The Moldavian’s favorite lamb, Miorita, overhears them, and goes to warn her master. The Moldavian only wishes to be buried on the heath with his flute, and tells Miorita to tell all the other sheep and his poor old mother that he went away to marry a princess “at Heaven’s doorsill,” that the sun and the moon came down to hold his bridal crown, that the mountain was his priest, the stars his torches, and the birds his fiddlers.
Elena Mauli Shapiro 