Leading up to the publication of Lockdown, in June, I’ve been thinking about the nature of my other writing, that not set in the rather whimsical world of Russell & Holmes. Such as Touchstone, which began the Stuyvesant & Grey series. This week’s proposed women’s strike wasn’t quite as much of a Thing as England’s…
Read MoreThere’s an entire series of videos on YouTube (thanks, BoingBoing) about the Bush Mechanics of the Australian outback, Aboriginal gents who work miracles on heaps of junk and rust and turn them into… well, I’m not sure I’d agree that they’re cars, but they are mobile. More or less. America is now a nation of political and…
Read MoreAs I’ve said before here, under the current regime we’re having to outsource many of those basic services that until recently we could trust our government to perform for us. Things like protecting the weak, and welcoming the assaulted, and healing the sick. One of the friends of the “Resistance” is a group called Emily’s…
Read MoreLately, I’ve been thinking about the kinds of stories that I can’t tell inside the world of Mary Russell. So I decided to write a few blogs about those stories, and what I could do with them, and them alone. I’ve been thinking about the non-Russells partly because I’ve been writing a standalone novel—but also because the act of…
Read MoreI spent my childhood in libraries. Their stacks, their people, were my sanctuaries, the safe and nurturing places where my real community lived (rather than these changing cities where my family seemed to continually be moving). So it makes sense to me that libraries are now declaring themselves as sanctuary spaces—although with political overtones that…
Read MoreLaurie’s internet service is down due to storm damage, so she will post today’s regularly scheduled Takeback Tuesday blog when she is reconnected with the outside world. Thank you for your patience.
Read MoreCareer Day at Guadalupe Middle School: a day given to innocent hopes and youthful dreams. A day no one in attendance will ever forget. A year ago, Principal Linda McDonald arrived at Guadalupe determined to overturn the school’s reputation for truancy, gang violence, and neglect. One of her initiatives is Career Day—bringing together children, teachers,…
Read MoreAmong the more interesting people I have met in this lifetime of odd people were John and Wink Allen. On the books, John was the Swahili scholar, but in fact much of what he did was based on Wink’s ability to wander into the women’s huts and chat. Before John and Wink, anthropologists generally assumed…
Read MoreMy life at the moment is a barrage of emails from what seems like fourteen different Yahoo forums (forae?) that confuse me no end, since a reply will come in and I think it applies to discussion A and so I research and write out my comment only to realize that no, the subject line has…
Read MoreTakeback Tuesday is Team LRK’s weekly vote of confidence in the future, when I talk about steps our community of readers can make in asserting the good. My husband Noel was born in what is now Pakistan. He grew up among Muslims, lived in Africa for many years, and had friends of all religious persuasions…
Read More