Helen Lowe's Blog, page 72
January 2, 2019
On The Supernatural Underground Now: Getting Chillax For The New Year
‘There is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as…’ putting one’s feet up with a book… 
December 30, 2018
The Most-Read “…On Anything Really” Posts of 2018
It’s New Year’s Eve, the day when we not only wave the old year farewell but reflect on all that happened within it. From a blog point of view, there can be no better day to look at the ten posts that really grabbed your attention—as “…On Anything Really” friends and readers, regular followers and visitors—during the course of 2018.
As with past years, I shall order the most-read ten posts chronologically from the year’s beginning to its end. So without further ado, listward ho!
via Wikipedia...
December 26, 2018
A Poem for the Holiday: “We Children” by Janine Sowerby
we children
when the days stretched
over the horizon, sprang
from our sleeping bags, threw
on our summer uniform, left
mum and dad dreaming, ran
barefoot through the bush, the river,
to the beach
we children
popped washed up blue
bottles, chased cantankerous
crabs, rescued stubborn sea
creatures from rock pools, buried
each other below sand castles, built
forts manned by katipos, cooked ourselves
in the sun
we children
got seaweed in our hair, sand
in our bum cracks, stranded
by t...
December 23, 2018
Festival Of Light
“There were lights everywhere, marigold windows in the shadowy walls of houses, and golden lanterns hung before the doors, and every light reflected in the river so that it made two. For in those days people still called Christmas Eve the Feast of Lights and set candles in every window and lanterns before their doors…”
~ Rosemary Sutcliff, The Armourer’s House
So here we are on Christmas Eve — Rosemary Sutcliff’s “Feast of Lights” from her novel The Armourer’s House, which is set in Tudor Eng...
December 19, 2018
To The Wilderness I Wander
The hut on the edge of forever
In 2013, when I was completing Daughter of Blood, a friend gave me the use of her fishing hut, a very generous gift since it gave me writing time away from the everyday interruptions of “life, the universe, and everything”. (Including the interwebs, which provide the Great Distraction of our age, from email and search engines to every version of social media imaginable — spot the Luddite!
December 16, 2018
Christmas Is Coming
…in fact, it’s upon us even as I type, in a manner reminiscent of a bullet-train bearing down at high speed upon the unwary—which would be me when it comes to the Christmas season and being prepared this year.
AKA, yours truly is not prepared at all, at all! Too busy writing (and that’s the good news.
December 12, 2018
Wild South
I love living in the South Island of NZ with its “wild south” vibe, shared most recently in my post on Inside Middle Earth: Driving To Edoras (yep, it’s also The Lord of the Rings country!
December 9, 2018
On the Supernatural Underground This Month: The Colour Blue & All of You – Plus An Account of Mrs Crewe
As is my wont on the first of every month, I posted on the Supernatural Underground on December 1 – a post titled The Colour Blue & All of You, in which I reflected on the recent festival of Thanksgiving and the Skiffy and Fanty blog’s forthcoming Month of Joy.
The theme of “The Colour Blue” harks back to the Month of Joy post I contributed to Skiffy and Fanty’s celebration earlier this year, which I quote in part in my SU post.
The colour blue writ large…
The “all of you” part – well you mig...
December 5, 2018
A Geography of Haarth: Sailcloth Street
The Wall of Night Series map; design by Peter Fitzpatrick
A Geography of Haarth is a post series traversing the full range of gazetted locales and places from The Wall Of Night world of Haarth.
From January 25, 2013 to November 25, 2014, the series explored locations encountered in The Heir Of Night and The Gathering Of The Lost.
Now it’s back to traverse the geography of Daughter Of Blood (The Wall Of Night Book Three.) The new series comprises updates of previous entries as well as new lis...
December 2, 2018
Meetings With Remarkable Trees: Peel Forest
The fact I’m a bit of a tree person has probably slipped out over the past few years… Perhaps not quite in the same league as Dame Judi Dench’s A Passion for Trees but I’ll still go out of my way to meet remarkable trees. (Btw, I’ve borrowed this phrase from Thomas Pakenham’s book of the same name.)
Recently, I went down to Peel Forest, just to the south of Canterbury’s Rangitata river to check out some of the remnant forest giants, specifically totara, kahikatea, and matai—and they were well...
