Out of Ambit
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The Starship and the Upstairs Flat
There is a moment in Sherlock‘s second-season episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” in which the world’s first and only consulting detective is attempting to get to grips with the fact that his senses, the tools of his trade, utterly reliable for all his past life, have apparently turned on him and are no longer to [...]
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We’ve just added complete single-download sets of the nine Young Wizards International Editions to the Ebooks Direct store. Each of these download packages contains all the Young Wizards novels in their international editions, from So You Want to Be a Wizard through A Wizard of Mars. You can download the package as .ePub / Nook [...]
I’ve loved comics all my life. I don’t even remember when the first one fell into my world, or what it was: comics simply seem to have been around me from the beginning. I do remember that the first ones I really loved were the Superman and Superboy comics, especially when that strand of the [...]
ETA, 23 November 2011: I’m Tweeting about this post for the last time(s) this year, as I’m about to judge the results at year’s end and decide what to do. Want to take action (assuming you haven’t already) to help me decide? If the Ebooks Direct store is part of your plans, you may want [...]
ETA: Now with a better image of Mogo!! … I originally posted this piece of writing some years back when there was a Green Lantern-drawing meme going around. But this weekend I had reason to think of it again, what with all the GL-oriented stuff going on. Many, many moons ago I did some writing [...]
I had an email from my NY agent about this late yesterday, and all the principals are agreed on the main details, so I don’t see any particular point in waiting for the paperwork before telling the world. Apparently the good folks at Audible have been seeking out books to adapt to the audiobook format [...]
Once upon a time, the King of the Greek gods, Zeus, was getting ready to cheat on his wife one more time. His latest target was a beautiful mortal girl named Io, whose resistance he’d been wearing down by sending her a series of racy dreams of which he was the star. Having finally arrived on her doorstep [...]
Almost all writers I know have work superstitions, though it’s not something we usually discuss except amongst ourselves. They’re like the superstitions some sportsmen have — the way, for example, that baseball players cross themselves when they’re coming up to bat. (Often provoking the response, Oh, come on now, you didn’t have to cross yourself [...]
Just another day in the great Long Room of Trinity’s famous library. Except for once it wasn’t being “borrowed” without credit by George Lucas. Having earlier stopped in at Áras an Uachtaráin to be greeted by the President of Ireland, and having then laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, Queen Elizabeth [...]
Peter has been doing some genealogical research over the last couple of weeks, and has found out some unusual things about his family that none of us expected. For one thing, he’s looking for a McGuffin. Specifically, Iris McGuffin, one of many, many cousins on his mother’s side. For a writer… how appropriate that there [...]
We saw this while in the excellent Martinsbräu in Freiburg im Breisgau, that jewel among German cities — possibly the most Mediterranean of the cities of the German south. The whole place is downstairs one level, under the busy city food market above. There are booths and tables set near the big copper brew kettles [...]
About twenty years ago we were living in a different house in Ireland, and we had analog satellite rather than the digital that’s pretty much all there is here now. That analog system meant we had access to a lot of the satellite stations that broadcast “in the clear” from Germany. I was just starting to [...]
Which would be (originally) Independent Pizza Co. in Drumcondra, but (even more so) its younger sister-facility, Gotham Café in South Anne Street. The excellent Adam Kuban of Slice, the pizza lovers’ website par excellence, has just kindly posted a note I dropped him about the place. Gotham Café is one of our favorite places to [...]
Noted in passing...
- On being a geek girl: Being a geek girl means building every computer in the house (except the laptops). It means always knowing when (for Android!) "there's an app for that". Being a geek girl means teasing the husband when his electronics start to yank his chain for their amusement -- and never having them dare try a stunt like that with me. Being a geek girl means knowing the speed of light to six significant digits instead of three. (It also means knowing what significant digits are and why they matter.) It meant rolling my eyes at the Parsec Joke in the original Star Wars the very first time I saw the movie. It means being able to do on-the-fly conversions between Imperial and metric volume and weight (all right, mass) measurements in the middle of making a cake without touching a calculator. It means being a first-generation Trekkie and not caring who knows it (and also being above the whole manufactured Trekkie/Trekker conflict). It means owning every single Andre Norton novel, including the fantasy ones. It means living on CNN and the Cartoon Network more or less simultaneously, and not seeing any problem with that. It means knowing the Green Lantern Oath in my sleep and being able to quote Homer in the original Greek, and not seeing any problem with that, either. It means ignoring the cultural and cognitive "dissonances" people try to force on you as a way to shove you up or down the spectrum of being human into their preferred frequency. -- But most of all: being a Geek Girl means never having to say, "I don't know how to find that out." #
- You say Gaddafi and I say Qadhafi, You say Gadhafi and I say Qaddafi: Khadafy! Kadafi! Gadafi! Kadhafi! Let's call the whole thing off... (An explanation of the problems with his name from Time, plus a hundred and three other variants dug up by ABC News. ) #
- Note the European dates for Janis Ian's fall tour... (Sooner see her in AMS than in Milton Keynes, I think.) #
- Via PM: "Esteban Fragances: Still in existence. The English-language version is a bit spartan (maybe new?) but they have the ceramic fragrances as pot-pourri and 'good-luck charm' pendants (en française, "gri-gris porte-bonheur".) #
- That homemade ricotta recipe... #
- Re the Games Wizards Play cameo role contest: ...So Lee has consulted the magic number-generating website, and having used some obscure formula involving matching random numbers to tweeting times (or something...) has chosen our five winners. In no particular order, they are: Moggie (@zz9pzza) The Sharklord (@thesharklord) Tony Kyle (@TonyK50) Octopus Gallery (@OctopusGallery) N. Kolyfoides (@placebetween) I'll be contacting everybody individually over the next day or so and we can start sorting out the details. Congratulations, all! #
- From SeriousEats: How to grill skirt steak. #
- For some future trip to London, don't lost sight of this place: Quince. Really yummy-sounding Eastern Mediterranean stuff. Via Thrillist: "After two high-profile decades in the eating industry, with newspaper columns, TV appearances, and half a dozen cookbooks under her belt, Silvena Rowe's debut is a sharply modern Damascus-style space, colourfully filled with tiles and glass, vintage mirrors, and an open kitchen-peeping counter topped by flat onyx and fronted with beaten copper. Matching that's a similarly modern Eastern Mediterranean menu starting out with sharers including chilli caramel & harissa-glazed chicken wings, veal & prawn surf 'n turf w/ sweet red pepper, and filo parcels stuffed w/ pistachio, spiced foie & duck, magically de-livered even before it arrives. From the custom vertical grill comes heftier fare like pork belly glazed w/ blueberry & coriander molasses, and 45-day côte de boeuf coated in oregano, black sesame za’atar, and quince marmalade; meanwhile, the stone oven yields 12hr-cooked Ottoman-style pulled lamb shoulder for two... " SOUNDS YUM. #
- Yay! Bonomo Turkish Taffy returns! #
- A recipe for English Peas. (snort) Take all the time you need to deal with the recipe... then throw it out, because the meat's in the comments. (Courtesy of Joey deVilla at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century) #
Welcome to Out of Ambit
A blog more or less evenly split between writing, cooking, tales of travel, and random musings on life events and whatnot.
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About the blogger
30+ years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV and movie work, the NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Also: the Young Wizards series, 1983-2010 and beyond.
That said, sometimes I want to talk about anything but writing. This is one place where that happens.
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