Running with toilet paper!
It’s a real crowd-pleaser!
My puppy, Jake, has discovered that if all else fails, he can sneak into a bathroom, grab a roll of toilet paper and prance through the house. That’s a sure way to get yourself a major game of chase! He’s such a little devil! My cat, Yoshi, does the same thing, only he grabs it, rolls onto his back, and rips the toilet paper to shreds with his claws. Toilet paper…who knew such a simple thing could provide your pets with hours of entertainment?
The contest is still happening! You have another whole day to enter. Oh, I so love Captured, my first SFR - science fiction romance. This is one book I re-read every so often. It’s arrival in my brain was like a gift and the story makes me joyous.
What else is new? Hmmmm. I’m reading a wonderful non-fiction book, because I do read non-fiction when I’m writing fiction. The book is The History of a Temptation, Spice, by Jack Turner. And here I thought good old Columbus headed off to prove that the world is round. Wrong! He went to find the legendary Spice Islands. It was believed that spices came our way from Eden, paradise…in Hebrew - pardes.
Here’s a quote: “In a Castilian version of The Romance of Alexander written around the middle of the thirteenth century, galangal, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and zedoary (related to tumeric) waft through the air of the dreamscape…the anonymous author of Man and the Sothsegger left behind the gray and grinding poverty of the fourteenth century English countryside for a vision of a blissful, better land, where the Golden Age endured in all its spicy lushness and abundance. The fantasy land of The Romance of the Rose, among the most widely read and emulated poem of the age, is similarly rose-tinted and spice-scented. In evoking the fairer climes spices were as much a poetic convention as pearly teeth and snowy breasts, chivalrous knights and damsels in distress.”
When we write stories of romance even now, or at least when I write romance, I frequently compare the scents of my hero and especially my heroine to the deep, dark, exotic fragrance of spices. Interesting how little we’ve changed over the centuries.
