Books. Well, I like books. I like talking about bookstores and used bookstores and libraries and museums. 

Star Trek, but I have to remember not everyone wants to talk about it. I can also talk about Blake’s 7 or Babylon 5 for variety. 

I just finished reading all the A Song of Ice and Fire books, so now I am dying to talk about it with someone.

History. I love museums. I read and collect books on African American history. My grandmother was a part of a historical archive project and I found a three hour interview with her online! It was a real treasure to hear her voice again.

Science. I don’t know as much about science as I like but I enjoy learning about it.

Food. I enjoyed reading everyone’s post about food because I love to try new cuisine.

The truth is, I’m fairly open about what I will talk about. I am a shy person, but when I get a chance to meet someone new, I try to listen and get to know about them. The only things I don’t talk about with people I don’t know well are sensitive topics like politics or religion. I also hate office gossip. As soon as the office gossip starts in the break room, I leave. I really don’t want to be pulled into it.

I don’t much like talking about sports but I’m trying to more open about that. I had so much fun watching World Cup Rugby last year, I think I’m actually beginning to like it. 

 

One thing I’ve learned is that what is strange to me, may not be strange to anyone else. I used to think Vegemite was strange. So, I thought I’d mention some of the more unusual foods I’ve tried.

Japanese food is very different from western food. I took me a while to get used to rice, tofu, seaweed, miso as basic to a daily diet. Nowadays, lots of people around the world eat Japanese food so I don’t think it’s so odd for younger people. Cuisine had gone global rapidly in the past few decades.

One of the unusual foods I enjoyed were dandelions. On this site, there is a recipe for sesame spinach and dandelions. (AndreasRecipes.com) I had no idea they could be eaten, but one of my  Japanese friends made it for dinner. I’ve never tried to make it on my own.

I have fallen in love with bamboo for cooking. One of my absolute favorites now is bamboo rice. My husband and his friends too me to pick fresh bamboo. The smell of it cooking is absolutely wonderful and I look forward to it in season. There is a wonderful recipe on (Just One CookBook.com.)

On the odder end, I did try snake soup in Hong Kong. Eels took some getting used to, but now I don’t mind it so much. I actually like grilled eels.

Locusts, however, were not something I could really get used to. I did try fried locusts. It was…crunchy. Bugs are a food source in many parts of the world and many eco-friendly activists are advocating eating bugs as better for the earth.There are online recipes for honey and miso locusts, grub granola, and grasshopper tacos.  It is also believed to be a way to solve the growing resource problem. One SF series I like by Becky Chambers, had her crew members eating bugs and this is a real possibility for colonies and space travel.

Well. Well. Well.

i always knew that I wanted to travel, so I figured whatever I did I’d live in a foreign country, which I do. At the time I wanted to love in Mexico or England. I’m not sure why, but it’s probably because  I only knew anything about a handful of countries. 😀

I knew I wanted to write a book someday.  I used to make little books and handmade covers; most with bizarre plots. I wanted to be on the radio too. I used to make up radio plays with with my tape recorder and have my sister help with sound effects. I also wanted to work in a museum, ie. The Smithsonian or the British Museum.

About college time I was under pressure to be a lawyer, teacher, or minister. I did get a teaching certificate, but never liked teaching high school.  I took the law school exam, but didn’t pursue it when I discovered I had no interest. I had no desire to go into ministry, and that caused a big rift with my family for years.

At the moment, I’m happy with my job. I work as a university lecturer. It’s not the first job I thought of as a child, but it suits me, and it gives me flexibility to go to all my daughters school events. And I get to spend a lot of time in the library.

And I get to write!!

 

I have a confession… I can’t stand not being able to pronounce a character name in a book, so I immediately look it up. Yay social media! 

As a learn more about writing on my own, I have discovered how difficult it can be to name characters. Even if I have a name in your head, often I will change it by the time I draft chapter three or so because I have too many characters with similar names (Amy, Amanda, Amelia) or it is too cumbersome or too common. Or I already used a similar one in another story. And I think some names get overused. I remember long, long ago when I worked for a review blog there was a spate of books with heroes named Liam. There have got to be other choices for an Irish character.  As an aside, there are too many Hollywood Chris’. The limit has been reached.

 If you’re doing SFR, it’s tough to come up with alien names that sound ‘alien’ but aren’t too distracting. I used to get annoyed with too many alien character with names like Zar, but then I tried to  write an SFR and realized how incredibly difficult that is. Writers have a tough job. 

I remember reading a book, again awhile ago, and it was about hero names in romance. This was before indie publishing took off so the ‘rules’ are rather restrictive on what traditional publishers wanted. One rule was that you couldn’t have a hero with a Russian name because those didn’t sell. (There are tons of Russian heroes now, but apparently that was a thing.) And if the character was Latina it was almost always Maria.  Asian characters in romances were rare, mostly supporting characters stuck to a handful of  (Chang, Patel, Sato ) here or there. Southeast Asian names were non-existent.  

You also weren’t supposed to have names that were too ethnic. If you were writing African American romances you had to make sure the names were more ‘neutral’, but not too ethnic like ‘Tameka’ or Keisha’. I had a problem with that. I still do. As a young woman, I read Harlequin’s now defunct line geared to African American romances (there was a teen one also) and I liked having characters that looked like me and people I knew. So it grated that certain names were considered ‘bad’ by publishers as if a person’s name automatically makes them less worthy to be a hero or heroine in a romance. 

This post went off the rails. Oh well. 

Wow. This is a challenging one, because usually I seek books about my hobbies. And I’m interested in just about anything. I’ll go through phases of reading. Once year, it was all books about Mathematics and Mathematicians. It did not encourage to me to do more math, but it was interesting to read about. Books don’t necessarily inspire hobbies, but they do inspire obsessions.

When I was young, I loved the Harriet the Spy books, so I did try to copy her. I stayed with my grandmother every summer for about a week in a very small slow paced town in NC. I was bored. Sitting around in the summer heat in NC, with no air-conditioner just rickety fans blowing hot air around. Not much in the way of TV. No cable, three stations with reception, and we had to be sit there and be quiet in the afternoons while my grandmother watched The Guiding Light and The Young and the Restless.  For some reason, I got it in my head that I could spy on people like Harriet so I made journals  of the neighbors coming and goings, and came up with elaborate plots about who they ‘really’ were and what they were involved in. I didn’t discover any great secrets.

There was a whole series of books called Ghosts of North Carolina, if I remember correctly. They probably aren’t around anymore. Anyway, each book had a list of locations in NC that were said to be haunted complete with ‘real’ photos of ghosts. So, on another slow summer with my grandmother I decided I’d be a paranormal investigator. Nothing much happened except scaring the crap out of my younger sister. 

I do love Bill Bryson’s books. He’s a travel writer, and it does influence my love of travel. His books are funny but really packed with information. A Walk in the Woods about walking the Appalachian Trail is wonderful. And he has another book, Notes from a Small Island, that really makes me want to go to Australia one of these days.

I’m also blogging at Coffee Time Romance today, celebrating my series and upcoming release. So if you have a moment, come by and drop a comment about your favorite alien species.

Like most people, my travel has been limited. I haven’t been out of my prefecture (province or state) since January. The good things is, I’ve been able to visit some of the local spots and now that there are restricted openings, I decided to enjoy a few places. One of the best was Sunpu Castle, which was the seat of power of Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of the most powerful shogun in Japan’s history. The castle was first built in 1585 and he resided there with his favorite consort and his sons until he died in 1616. (From records kept by his attendants its theorized he died from cancer) The castle is a reconstruction, only a parts of the moat and gates were left, but it has a museum and a beautifully designed tea garden based on ideas of the period. 

More locally, I visit a park which has a restored tea garden and tea house. The tea house is not open for guests now, because of Covid, but the ponds are open. There are volunteers who come to keep things clean and someone to take care of the fish. Koi are expensive fish and require lots of care.

Everyone needs a pick-me-up. Sometimes, I want something complicated and other times I just want escapist fun. My favorite pick me up movies are Galaxy Quest, Star Trek: First Contact, Ed Wood, and Dodgeball. I also like watching Singing in the Rain because it’s so upbeat it’s hard not to smile. 

My daughter really likes the movie SING. We watch that a lot.

I am currently doing a re-read of Game of Thrones. I started at one point, and lately, have been reading it again. I’m doing a lot more reading since I’ve had to start to work online. By the end of the day, I no longer want to look at a screen. I’ve also go back to my TBR and picked up a few of the urban fantasy series I haven’t caught up on in a while. And I have my growing list of audiobooks. I think I’ll try the X-files next. 

I know this is a short post. I hope you’re all well out there. I’d love to hear any suggestions for fun pick me up movies.

Hello out there. 

I haven’t done the blog hop in a while. Like everyone else in the world, there was a lot of upheaval. And somehow other things I do for fun, like blogging, got pushed to the side.

But I saw this topic Favorite poems, short stories, or novellas.

I am an avid reader, so I always have an ever evolving list of favorites. For this post, I thought of doing short stories. And I want to focus on radio dramas. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I recently listened to the audiobook version of the new Battlestar Galactica, which I like better than the show. (I didn’t hate the show, I just never got into it). There aren’t many shows on TV or even Netflix I follow much, so classic radio dramas and audiobooks have become my latests interest. I’ve always liked X-Minus One, Dimension X or the CBS Radio Mystery Hour. 

Mindwebs began as a Wisconsin radio program in the 70’s co-hosted by Michael Hanson, who passed away last fall. He did a remarkable job narrating wonderful classic SF stories. I got hooked on MINDWEBS (https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410) via some of its stories being broadcast on Relic Radio Sci-Fi.(https://www.relicradio.com/otr/show/scifi/) There is also a collection of open source at the Internet Archive. My personal favorite MINDWEBS stories are: Treasure Hunt/ Joseph Green and The Hall of Machines/ Langdon Jones.  

There are other radio drama stories I really like too:

Cold Equations/ Tom Goodwin

Imposter/ Philip K. Dick

The Ballad of Lost C’Mell/ Cordwainer Smith

These stories are all worth reading too. Since I live overseas, it’s not always that easy to find them affordably. But I know that Philip K. Dick collections are available in e-book form and I did get the e-book collection of Cordwainer Smith.

Does anyone else listen to audiobooks or radio dramas? Any recommendations?

 

 

Hello out there. I hope you are healthy and well, and importantly, keeping yourself mentally well too. I have a routine for me and the daughter to organize our lockdown days. I watch a mystery in the mornings (currently on Rosemary and Thyme) and an SF movie in the evenings. . I’ve already made it through Escape from L.A., Dune, Event Horizon, The Core, and Battle: Los Angeles this past week. 

So, what could I give a speech on….

1. Classic SF movies and the development of my personal canon. I will cover black and white movies such as the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the original  War of the Worlds. Then I will discuss Forbidden Planet and its influence on Star Trek and space exploration genre shows. Then I will talk about Planet of the Apes and Logan’s Run and how they affected my childhood. I could go on and on and on….
2. Great Pies. Instead of focusing on how to make a great pie, because I can’t, I will discuss where to get great pies and which you should try and why. I will cover Apple, Blueberry, Cherry, Key Lime, Pumpkin, and even Lemon Meringue. 
3. Star Wars vs. Star Trek. 
4. Star Trek vs. Blake’s 7
5. Japanese Castles. I have visiting quite a few of them, and now take more interest in how they were designed and built. I am a history buff so I’ve tried to learn as much as I can.