When we were at our son's this week, he showed us a series of you tube videos of Irish people reacting to various things. Here's their reaction to Hollywood Irish accents:

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And here's watching Honey Boo Boo:

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(Comments, Dot?)

I can't always tell what makes a good or bad book cover. Here's an interesting post by Rachel Neumeier with pictures and advice from a panel.

http://www.rachelneumeier.com/category/blog/

Neumeier's The Floating Islands is one of my favorite books.

I'm reading All the Light We Cannot See. I am, of course, way behind everyone else on this book which has been a smash seller for months and won the Pulitzer. I'm so impressed by the subtle characterization. I'm also deeply horrified at the cruelty people can work on defenseless other people. One of the values of a novel like this is that it take ( Read more... )

Project Middle Grade Mayhem has an interview with me up today ( Read more... )

One of my former grad students is living in a tiny French village for a year. Her husband is French and they're both on academic sabbaticals. She's been blogging about the experience. Among other things, they live over a chocolate shop. But today she blogged about what school is like for her 6 and 8 year old sons. I thought it was really ( Read more... )

My publisher, Zharmae, has been posting spooky short stories all month and today was my turn. My story, "Ghost Cakes," uses the characters from Finders Keepers, and is set before the book's opening, a few months after the boys' father died.

I have an interview up today on Word Spelunking. One of the questions was what kind of cupcake would be appropriate for Finders Keepers!

http://wordspelunking.blogspot.com/2015/10/interview-and-giveaway-dorothy-winsor.html

Reading: I finished reading two good books: Louise Penny's THE NATURE OF THE BEAST and Brian Staveley's THE PROVIDENCE OF FIRE. They're very different but both great. Penny writes cozy mysteries whose setting in a small Quebec town is a major factor. Staveley's book is the second in an epic fantasy trilogy. Both writers engage you with the ( Read more... )

I wrote a guest blog post for Unleashing Readers today. It tries to explain what a great genre fantasy is, something that seems to puzzle a lot of people I run into who want to know why I don't read something "real."

http://www.unleashingreaders.com/?p=8080

Here are a couple of articles from The Guardian about Amazon reviews. Obviously both customers and sellers value good reviews. In addition to helping a customer evaluate a product, Amazon uses the number and rating in reviews to decide whether to include a product in places where it says things like "if you like this, you might like that" or in the ( Read more... )