My Christmas read was kind of a dud
Snow by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a beautifully written but dull book. I didn’t care about any of the characters, and the snowy landscape wasn’t particularly evocative of any specific place (and I did so want it to feel really Irish), and did nothing to heighten tension. It’s really only about two and a half stars worth of the same old story of priests abusing children.
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I have often thought that putting together a group exercise class is like telling a story: first, there’s a beginning. There are peaks and valleys and a conclusion you hope feels satisfying. A class literally moves people. It makes them feel things and teaches them something about themselves. Ideally, an exercise class uses its physical…
Remembering Marty Cesana My friend Marty died as a result of a stupid training accident at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, in 1996. Military training itself is not stupid. We train as we fight, which can happen day or night, in the dust and heat of the desert or in the brutal…
First, the unboxing video! Videos of writers opening boxes of their books are A Thing. By now you’ve all seen the cover of Playing Army, but this is where I hold the physical book in my hand for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuKDmHRCgfQ Yay! And thank you to Colette for making the video, but I wish…
Here are the choices: stay in my job that used to be mindless but I could leave it all on my desk and go blithely into the other sixteen hours of my day. I could switch it off so fast and so completely that I honestly forgot I worked there when I was on my…
Just a quick note to say that I’m delighted to have been chosen Author of the Month by blogger Gina Rae Mitchell! Here’s the post where she features Playing Army. It includes an excerpt and a bonus piece called 10 Things Most People Don’t Know About Me: https://ginaraemitchell.com/playing-army/ Did you know all of it already?…
I like a good, quantifiable goal. I’m sure you’ve seen S.M.A.R.T. goals on a briefing slide somewhere, but if you haven’t tripped over that acronym before, you can read about it here. It’s hokey but I like them, and keep my goals and New Years resolutions achievable and quantifiable – write 300 words a day,…