Time again for Long and Short Reviews Wednesday blogging challenge. Last week’s was a challenge for me. This week’s is easy: I’d love a dragon. Well, I live in a small condo, so perhaps a fire lizard. I’ve always loved dragons. I consumed McCaffery’s Pern Books when I was a kid. I love Novik’s Temaire Series. I see my cat Circe in Toothless. Plus flying. Who wouldn’t want to go flying on the back of a dragon?
Hmm…This is a tough one. Last week, I mentioned crocheting. That was new as of January. But beyond that, I’m a teacher and thus deeply in the swing of the year. Not a lot of new comes up. Classes are all just past the half way point. Not even my free reading (I’m reading Furious Heaven, which is a sequel, so not really a new thing – but excellent). I’m writing my sequel to my novel I’m querying, so that’s not really new (and I’m about 91K in, so definitely not new). I’m back to querying agents again after a bit of a break, so that’s kind of new. And it is the (Lunar) New Year. So Happy Year of the Dragon! That’s new.
Time for Long and Short’s Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. The topic is, well, things I like to do on stormy days. Writing is the obvious choice. And drinking tea – big fan of the Murchie’s Storm Watcher in loose and bags (and so many of their other teas too; they make great green-black blends like the No 10). A new activity, however, is crocheting. I picked it up during January intercession, when I taught a course on flow activities. What are flow activities? From Wikipedia, the characteristics of flow are:
Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
Merging of action and awareness
A loss of reflective self-consciousness
A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
A distortion of temporal experience, as one’s subjective experience of time is altered
Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding experience
Here’s a Ted Talk on Flow from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term.
Writing is certainly a flow activity for me and I’ve lost more than one day to writing. I hadn’t expected crocheting would become one for me, but thought it might be a good contender for some of the students. My mother came as a guest teacher and a few of them (and my co-teacher) got into it, but it also hooked me (pun intended).
My first project was the hat that was the class project. Mom had started us off with a little circle. Mine, however, turned into more a beret than than the beanie intended 🤣. Now I’m working on this scarf project. I found the pattern just googling and loved that it came with a YouTube video, that helped me with the new stitches. I’ve been working on it on rainy days (ah for more snowy days!) while listening to Kate Elliot’s Furious Heaven.
In a way, I think series which stop leaving you wanting more have made the right choice. In part, they’ve left the wild places, the “here be dragons” places for your own imagination to wander. It’s also better to be left wanting more than to just feel over and done with them as they just go on and on (I won’t name names). One series that held up through the entire run and that, although where it ended felt right, also made me mourn that there would be no more, is the Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik. I must have put off reading The League of Dragons for a year and a half, knowing that it would be the last new book of the series I would get to read and not wanting to be done with it myself. Finally, I sat down a reread them all through and read the final one. Such joy and sadness in one. Patrick O’Brian with dragons is my usual description, but Naomi Novik does so much more with it. While I miss Temeraire, Will Laurence, and the rest, I am always delighted to reach something else new by Novik.
For me, when it comes to languages, the deader the better. I know Ancient Greek and Latin very well. I tried to do Egyptian hieroglyphs on my own and came to appreciate my students’ struggles more. I did ancient Hebrew as an intensive course (even read the Book of Jonah in the original), but would need to start from scratch if I picked it up again (which would be great to do). I have Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite on my language bucket list. But my current one is Sanskrit.
I had done an intro the Sanskrit alphabet and culture as an intersession class. I was just barely ahead of the students. Then I did a more serious self-study of it during a couple of summers. But each fall, as school started up, it would drop by the wayside. This year, however, I have a student who’s doing an independent study of it with me, so I am thus externally motivated not to let it be pushed aside.
While my knowledge of Greek and Latin really help, I do highly recommend The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, which has some great video resources to accompany it (which I really should use more, to help my pronunciation). My goal is to read the Ramayana in the original. One year when I was teaching “Heroic Epics” in the Classics Department and a colleague was teaching South Asian Epics in the Religion Department, we did some cross lectures and I read up on the Ramayana as part of that and was hooked.
Another tough one for me. My vocabulary is pretty expansive. I once played FreeRice (the original vocabulary version) until I reached the top level and could stay there. Fortunately, there are always neologisms. And the OED brought me “rizz” as their word of the year. From a news article on “rizz”:
Rizz, a widely used word online, is defined as style, charm or attractiveness, or one’s ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner.
The word is believed to be a shortened form of the word charisma, taken from the middle part of the word. Rizz can also be used as a verb: to “rizz up” means to attract, seduce or chat up a person.
…
OUP said the word reached its peak popularity in June of this year after actor Tom Holland was asked in a Buzzfeed interview about his rizz, to which he said he had “no rizz whatsoever.”
I’ve never had occasion to use rizz, perhaps because like Tom Holland (or perhaps unlike Tom Holland) I have no rizz whatsoever 🤣
Time again for the Long and Short Review‘s weekly blogging challenge. This is a tough one. It’s not so much whose hand I’d like to shake, but who I’d like to have a conversation with, which leads to with whom I’d really have something to talk about. I think my answer would be Rick Riordan. I’ve shown myself to be a clear fan in past postings. A writer of mythic fantasy is of course right up my alley and would give us a basis for conversation. I’d love his insights on the writing craft as well. I also admire how he has used his platform, both to represent diverse characters within his own stories but also to promote POC authors writing on their own mythic traditions. Maybe someday…
My Dad pointed me to Long and Short Reviews‘ Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge for 2024. As the blog says:
Blogging is a fun way to meet people and get to know them. We’re offering a weekly “prompt” for authors, non-authors, bookish folks and others to share something weekly and gain new friends and visitors to the blog.
As a fairly young blog, I loved the idea of the virtual mix and mingle. Thus, Moment of Joy is moving to Thursday (as much as I enjoyed it on the hump day). The opening topic is “Hobbies I used to enjoy.”
One hobby I truly miss is hiking. A couple of years ago, I frayed my achilles tendon. Ouch. Steroids, PT, and a walking boot got it on the road to recovery, but damn! it’s a long process. It’s come a long way and I don’t have to ice it so much after biking or walking. I hope this spring, I can take to the woods again. There’s nothing like a nice stroll in the wilderness. I do often put on an audiobook, podcast, or music on my headphones, but not so loud that I lose awareness of what’s around me. (Good thing too – hearing a rattle ahead of me was how I discovered PA still has rattlesnakes. I was out by French Creek. The snake was sunning in the path ahead of me with deep grass on either side. Knowing it was more scared of me that I was of it, I backed off so it could slither off the path. Nope. It was happy in the sun and had no plans on moving anytime soon. Fortunately my All Trails app helped me find a detour around it, only adding about a mile and a half to my walk). As I’ve noted, All Trails has also been useful in figuring out travel times for some of my characters taking fictional hikes but I miss the real thing.
Ramblings 
