Want a recap of the Dubh Linn series? Wondering if it’s for you? Here’s a spoiler free review of A Crack in Everything, A Hollow in the Hills and A Darkness at the End from Aoife at Fred Weasley Died Laughing on YouTube.
Also just a reminder that I will be at TitanCon next weekend, 30th September – 2nd October, in the Wellington Park Hotel in Belfast.
Like everyone else I woke up this morning to the news that David Bowie passed away. The shock makes it feel not quite real. I was pretty certain that if anyone was immortal, or had some sort of extended fae life, it was him.
Everyone has their favourites, their face of David Bowie.
I grew up with Bowie as a soundtrack. With older sisters, his music was very much part of our household. Hunky Dory, still my favorite album, is the same age as me. Life on Mars resonates across years, more meaningful each time I listen.
Bowie made magical music, about life, death and everything in between. Love songs, and tragedies, comical, meaningful… words that make you think, that continue to inspire. The imagery he could create in just a few words, the emotions he could convey, the breadth of his work and the art he made in sound and vision… these are the things that continue. He showed us that the weird, the different, the magical is all part of life and that we can embrace it, within ourselves and without.
Somewhere still Major Tom, the Starman, Ziggy Stardust or the Goblin King is waiting.
In case anyone ever doubted it, the ball scene in The Treachery of Beautiful Things is based on this scene from the wonderful Labyrinth and the song As The World Falls Down.
As some of you know when I was in Rome for a library conference in January, we were lucky enough to visit the Vatican library. It’s an incredible place. Of course, photos and videos were right out for us, lowly librarians that we were. So too was seeing the treasures!
But one of the group sent me a link this morning to a video report done for 60 minutes on the Vatican Library so I thought I’d share. It really captures something of the place, its history, its (often bizare) accessions – Henry VIII’s love letters to Anne Boelyn for example, and the breathtakingly beautiful Salon Sistino (pic above). It also shows us the behind the scenes work of the conservators, and the amazing things they do to preserve the most fragile of documents for the future. I can never praise this sort of work highly enough.
There’s an additional video where Morley Safer gets the same tour of the Salon Sistino as we did, but I will never forget seeing an elderly librarian of my group standing there, with his mouth wide open and head tilted right back as he stared in wonder at the ceiling like a small boy.
The extras are well worth looking at as well – the treasures oh, the shiny treasures… – and an explanation of why the library is closed to the public. And of course, if the library was burning down, what would the experts save??? 😉
At Pcon I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Cheryl Morgan for Salon Futura, and that interview went live today.
It’s very funny to listen to myself, let alone watch myself talk. I use my hands. Let me rephrase that… I use my hands A LOT.
We covered a wide range of subjects in my 20 minutes – my library day job, old books, paranormal romance, erotica (err… yes… *blush* I think you can actually see the blushing in the video), Soul Fire, The Scroll Thief, my Holtlands stories, Young Adult fiction and May Queen. Wiiiiiiiiiiiide range of subjects.
So a huge thank you to Cheryl. May we meet again very soon.
*BLUSH*