Rachel Hartman's Blog, page 23

Io Saturnalia!

We celebrated Saturnalia on Sunday, ourselves, because the weekend was the most convenient time to open presents and prepare our Roman feast. This year it was leg of lamb, lentils, cucumber salad, barley, and our old favourite olive relish. Mmmmm. Olive relish. I could just scoop that stuff into my mouth with a shovel, and I don’t even like olives particularly. That’s the wonder of Saturnalia.

I’m sure you’ve got celebrations of your own up and coming, or already celebrated. Best wishes for a...

Dear friends

A number of you have asked me very specific questions in the comments recently. I just wanted to pop in and apologize for being slow to answer. I was in bed all weekend with what appears to be the Actual Flu, hoping for my first fever-free day today. I’ll get to you soon. I just need a few more naps.

Thanks for your patience! Here, enjoy a little “pocket bassoon” music while you wait:

All hail the glorious rackett, prince of wind instruments!

Like the noble whack-a-mole

…she pops up again! Fetch the hammer! Seraphina is back on the NYT bestseller listat number… er… hang on, I need to use my toes.

#12! Brava!

So ok, it helps that they’ve newly separated out MG from YA, to say nothing of adding an extension at the end there. But we’ll take it!

Morris Award Finalist!

Seraphina is a Morris Award Finalist, as you probably gleaned from the title of this post! You’re super clever that way, I realize. Here’s the official announcement from YALSA. I am so very honoured and excited, I can’t even tell you.

To celebrate, let’s join Metsatöll in Finland! That’s a great idea!

Play it Lauri! And the little conductor dude is adorable. Ah, I’d have loved to have been there.

This is just to remind myself

Last week a friend told me an interesting idea about art, and I think I need to write it down. She’d told me before and it fell right out of my head. Clearly, there’s too much in my head if stuff this interesting is falling out, but the blog is just going to have to be my auxiliary brain for the moment.

The idea, most simply put, is that art is medicine.

It doesn’t sound so earth-shattering put that way, though. And what does that even mean? Art therapy? That’s not a new idea.

Art therapy tends...

Fan art Monday!

Hm. I guess if I wanted to be alliterative, I’d have waited til Friday. I know from experience, though, that waiting begets procrastinating, which begets forgetting, which begets embarrassment, which begets more procrastinating, etc. It never ends. The time for fan art is NOW! I have proclaimed it thus, and thus mote it be!

Two lovely pictures after the fold. The second image is possibly spoilery. You have been warned.

The first of our pictures is a bit of scratch-art, a rendition of the dragon...

One more

School Library Journal has also included Seraphinaon their Best Books 2012 list!

In other news: November is almost over, which is a relief. It is always my most challenging month, for some reason. The waning of daylight? The ceaseless rain? Maybe it’s the fact that the year is ending, and I’m not ready for it to. We can’t have 2013 yet; I haven’t done everything I wanted to do. It’s like, the midlife crisis of months. By December, I’m old and resigned to it and actually kind of looking forward...

Another year-end list

Seraphina is one of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year for Young People! That’s super nice news for a drizzly Thursday.

For some reason the first sentence of that article really tickles me: “Where did you come from, Rachel Hartman?”

I’m more mysterious than I ever knew!

No cure for November but time

Oh, November. You always do this to me. We get toward the end, and I’m like, “Oh good, only a week left!” and then that week lasts two or three weeks. Time dilates in November, I’m convinced of it. There’s way more than there needs to be.

This year’s Quest for the Cure (for November) brings us back, as is so often the case, to the sublime Iarla Ó Lionáird. Here he is when he was young, already the prince of singers:

I find sean nos – Irish “old style” a capella singing – particularly suited to...

Blessed by the god of oboes

A while ago, someone expressed astonishment at my musical tastes, surprise that I didn’t listen exclusively to classical music while writing, since Seraphina is so evocative of classical music. This got me thinking: I was raised on classical music, almost exclusively, but I don’t really listen to it much anymore. I’m not sure why that is, if I just got tired of it, or if it’s simply that I’m drawn toward the new (to me) and that new (to me) classical music is a) harder to find, and b) require...