
Here's to the end of a month that's felt like a year. Good riddance. But in other news, here are five new sparklies to put in the Curio Cabinet:
Fave current quote about the weirdness of time: "There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen." -- Lenin
Fave new writing tool: jotting down striking opening lines in my commonplace book. The first line in an article/essay/story and the last line -- those gotta be golden. For some reason, the Feb. 8, 2024 issue of the London Review of Books (OK, OK, I was catching up in my backlog of magazines last month, you caught me) was on fire with great opening lines. Here are a few:
"The earliest known author was married to the moon." - pg 23, Anna Della Subin
"There were more than a million women in early 16th century England, yet we remain obsessively interested in the life and death of just one." - pg 27, Lucy Wooding
"An eldest sister was born in the North, daughter of a judge who never lied and a scholar who always did." - pg 35, Patricia Lockwood
Any of these could be jumping off points for a fiction piece, too. So, a tool in craft and creative inspo? What a deal.
Fave winter reads: BFBs (Big. Fat. Books). Currently I'm tackling the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel. While the constant use of the pronoun "he" is tripping me up (wait, which he is he talking about? Him? Or him? And just how many men were named "Thomas" in Tudor England? All of them???), the slow steady burn of years and years of intrigue is heating up.
Fave poetic line: " . . . Imbroglio is a beautiful word for trap." -- from "Poem Never to be Read Aloud" by Dobby Gibson
Fave truth about our pets: "Dogs gossip; cats know where the bodies are buried." from "The Tail End" by Sloane Crosley

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