Happy New Year!

Well, only a day late... Lots of things happening the last couple of weeks, not many of which were connected with either writing or gardening. I got back to work somewhat today. Spent most of the morning working on illustrations for a talk I'm giving in three weeks for a SCA group on Early Medieval religion in the British Isles (500-900 CE). The later half of that range is really outside my usual area of interest, but appropriate to the audience. It's partly designed to answer the question "I want to have a pagan English / Scottish / Welsh / Irish persona, when would that have been appropriate?" The answer is more nuanced than you might think. Although Britain was officially Christian under the late Roman Empire, Saint David (for example) was still said to be converting pagans in south Wales in the mid-sixth century, which implies there was still some number of them around.

The afternoon was mostly devoted to bookselling adminstrivia: inventory, preparing bins for our SCA twelfth night event, updating spreadsheets and reconciling balances prior to tax time. The self-published writer's work is never done...

Nice and sunny today, but the temperature barely got up to freezing, so no new pictures.

-GRG

Friday...

Already? What happened to the week? Well, a lot of gardening and garden carpentry (pictures soon), plus yesterday indoor rearrangements and paper shredding (do I really need personnel records from twenty years ago?) to make more storage room for copies of my books, which were infringing on a bookcase (valuable space!). Anyway... Back to the subject of writing.

As an example of the sort of research I do for my books, here's my reference list so far for The Druid's Son. The link is to one of my "collections" on LibraryThing.com, a dangerous place which can induce book buying. Take a look at your peril - you have been warned.

Also new at Aldertree Books today - a Special Promotions page. Check it out for April's offering...

More pictures later today - in the meantime, back to work...

-GRG

web reviews and other book news

Googling this morning on my books as I do from time to time, I came across a new review of Storyteller. Take a look!

Leo Stableford also has some kind words about Flight of the Hawk here (about half way down the post).

Finally, looking ahead, I will be doing an on-line author chat on LibraryThing between January 26 and February 9. You have to have a LibraryThing account to post to the chat, but this is quick, easy and free, and I think you can read posts without one. I'll put up more information when it gets closer. (Warning: spending time on this site can lead to serious book-buying!)

-GRG

New Feature

I tried LibraryThing a couple of years ago, found it clunky to use, and left it. Recently, though, I've been noticing people using it on their blogs to show random books from their libraries, which seemed interesting. So I went back, found it much improved, and have been busy cataloging my books this last week. I'm nowhere near through, but I've found (as one does) lots of interesting things lurking in bookshelf corners which I'd lost, or even forgot I had. This makes the exercise worthwhile in itself! Also I'm surprised to find just how many Welsh language books I own - a lot of them I bought when I was at the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol in 2000. Time I got to reading some of them...

Anyway, the random selections gadget is partway down the right sidebar - it also seems to have a link to the rest of my catalog on LibraryThing. Try it out and let me know if it works.

-GRG