Five Things for the Fall

1. Ugh, the weather is horrible. I can already feel my winter gloom coming on. On the bright side, however, there are still bits and pieces that remind me of how pretty autumn can really be.

2. Revisions and more revisions! It's busy editing season for me. I'm smack bang in the middle of a round right now - which I realise is a mysterious thing to say when you don't actually know what I'm working on - but I will share details soon, I promise!

3. Downton Abbey. I am so late to the party, but I finally started watching it during a gap between revision rounds and then had to keep watching. Literally caught up to the current series in three days and now I watch them week by week. I think that equates to about eight episodes or so per day during the frenzy. Yep. When I get obsessed, I get obsessed. Anyone else develop obsessions like this?

4. Steampunk. I've always loved it, but I've recently started making stuff (like the necklace below). It started out as something of a whim, but I really like it and it's one of those brilliant things that helps me think about bookish conundrums while I'm doing it.

5. Books! I don't think I could list every book I've read and loved recently, but here are a couple of new releases that I completely recommend: 

Perfect Ruin by Lauren DeStefano
Frost Hollow Hall by Emma Carroll
Red Rock by Kate Kelly

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Five Random Things for March and Aprll

(YES! I'm back!)

1. WE HAVE INTERNET! We cancelled the old service and got a new one wired in and now it's up. I can't begin to tell you how happy this makes me. Now I work properly, I can stream stuff again, I can connect my iPad to the network and sync the notes I make there, I can use Skype or FaceTime on a decent-sized screen, I can play songs on repeat on Youtube, basically THE WORLD IS MY OYSTER.

2. The IPL is back. I hate it. Unfortunately my husband, brother and baby love it. Which is means it's on TV all. The. Bloody. Time.

3. Snow. Snow in April. Wtf?

4. BOOKS! Without the internet, I've had more time to read and have read some pretty awesome stuff in the last couple months. I'll post a proper list of the best ones next week, but for now my favourite new reads include the tenth Princess Diaries book (by Meg Cabot. I used the love the others when I was much younger, but somehow never got round to finishing the series), Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (clever and heartbreaking) and Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan (I love that it's set in England and it's so, so funny).

5. My book. I've been writing my New Thing for something like four months now and I am still so very much in love with it. Whether my agent will love it too, however, is another question... but we'll see. Word count: 81k. I probably have another 25-30k to go.

Hope everyone is having a lovely week! What have you been up to lately? Read anything good?

Five Things for February

It's time for that... irregular?... feature again! I think I did it in November, and then kind of neglected it in December and January, and now here it is again and it kind of covers December, January and the little we've seen of February too.


1. I watched the 2009 BBC miniseries adaptation of Emma a week ago and I LOVED it. I always thought the version with Kate Beckinsale was the best adaptation, but this one beats it by a mile. For one thing there's more of it. Four hours of it. For another I really, really like Romola Garai. For yet another, Jonny Lee Miller is eye candy. There's no two ways about it. It's funny, it's touching, it's really great. If you're an Austen fan and haven't yet seen this one, go watch it!

2. We're moving house. Again. Three moves in about three years. It's a big fat pain in my rear end. (On the bright side, if we get the house we want - and there's no telling whether or not we will - it's a lovely house.)

3. I love Grey's Anatomy. And especially Chandra Wilson, Sandra Oh and Kevin McKidd in it. I have been a huge fan for a long time but I don't think I've ever said so on here. Or maybe I have. Either way, I love it. In fact, I love it so much I sometimes dream about it. You know something's got its claws into you when that happens.

4. Massive website redesign! My old one was driving me crazy. I didn't really like the way it looked anymore, but it was also a huge, huge trial to update. Literally took me twenty minutes to get in there and change or add, like, a sentence. Which meant, of course, that it put me off updating the darn thing and what's the point of a website if you're not going to share new and current stuff?

5. And this. Because it's cute.

What have you been up to recently? Are you a fan of Emma or Grey's Anatomy or babies? Moving sometime soon? (If the latter is a yes, I feel your pain.)

Five Random Things for November

1. Is anyone else watching The Mentalist this season? And is anyone else growing extremely weary of the fact that in four and something seasons they still haven't got hold of Red flippin' John? Just get rid of the loony, please. There's only so many melodramatic twists and dead daughters and we-killed-him-whoops-it-wasn't-him-oh-noes moments I can put myself through.

And I'm still angry about the fact that the show does not do red herrings well. A good red herring tricks you and when you realize you were wrong, you're like oh, I see. On The Mentalist, a red herring is sly, and slips in, and makes you think aha and when you find out what's really going, it leaves you with no explanation whatsoever. (Yeah. I still want to know why, two seasons ago, Bertram was quoting the same William Blake poem Red John did - and why that potentially OMG moment turned into nothing.)

(If you know nothing about The Mentalist, none of the above will make any sense to you. It's okay. A lot of it makes no sense to me, either, and I've watched pretty much every episode.)

2. On the bus the other day, I overheard this

BOY: You know how girls wear knickers, right?
GIRL: What, you don't wear underwear?
BOY: Yeah, but yours are tight-fitting. You know? So do you think they're supposed to be, like, a bra for your bum?

3. I saw Skyfall at the cinema last night. So, so good. (And just as good was getting a babysitter and getting out of the house, just my husband and me, without the baby for a while! We really don't do that often enough...)

4. The weather is ***t. Really. And much as I get the dismals on a dreary day, in some ways it sometimes feels worse when there's a bright day. It's like you look out of the window and it's all sunny and bright and shiny, and you think hooray, the sun's out and it looks so gloriously warm and I can almost feel it on my skin, and then you go out in a T-shirt, and you practically die on the spot. Because it's effing freezing.

Yeah. The sun lies.

5. And speaking of good red herrings, I really do love Agatha Christie.

Anyone else seen Skyfall recently? Are there other frustrated used-to-be-Mentalist fans out there?

And most importantly of all, do you think underwear is just a bra for your bum?