Saturday Realisations

Today I found out that a pantomime is not a harlequinade, and that an extravaganza is something else entirely. And not a burlesque either.

I still have no clue how a pantomime is supposed to work (in the middle of it all characters change into characters inspired by the commedia dell' arte???). It doesn't help that all authors who've written on this subject seem to assume that all of their readers have seen Christmas pantomimes and know what they are.

Fortunately, it seems I don't have to write about pantomimes in the dratted d, as the Planchè play I want to discuss is allegedly an extravaganza. Now I just need to solve the riddle of the toy-theatre play ... Among other dramatis personae, there is a doctor and a clown, but no Harlequin. There's a tableaux at the end, but no proper transformation scene.

Some of My Favourite Things & Places in My Flat

The invitation board in the hallway

The sitting room: my lovely red couch (after I've been working there this afternoon)

The antique Chinese table (red and velvety smooth)



Pssssst: And here's the cupboard with all the china and tablecloths and tea cosies ...



The kitchen: I love this small nook above the sink!

The tea shelf with English storage jars and a Keinohrhase (Noearbunny)

The cookbook corner:

the custard tin and the baking powder tin are from Galway. I brought them back home with me after my year abroad. The right tin on the cupboard used to contain Mozartkugeln. My granny bought the tin because I liked it so much. It now peppermint infusion. :-)

My dining area

(looks uttery gorgeous when the sunlight falls through the windows!)

The chandelier in my library

Cara, the resident cat :-)

The study: the bookshelf with my favourite research books

(Instead of buying all that china, I should have got a new digital camera. The one I have is obviously crap. It's nice enough for outdoor pictures, but indoors it's pretty much useless. Duh.)

More China

You totally must move to the Rhine-Main area: I now need plenty of occasions to host dinner parties. *g*

Wedgwood, River Scene

Royal Tudor Ware, Coaching Taverns

Myott, Tonquin (my favourite among this bunch!)

Broadhurst, Constable Series

I can't wait to get these goodies! (And please consider moving to Frankfurt...)

Soup, anybody?

A few weeks ago I fell in love with red transferware. I blame it all on the series Old Britain Castles - the form of those dishes is just too cute! (The tea pot, the creamer, and the lidded sugar bowl all have tiny, itty-bitty feet.) The red (which is acutally more of a reddish-pink colour) goes well with the overall colour scheme of my dining area, so I thought it would be nice to collect dining plates etc. for festive dinners. Thanks to ebay I'm now the proud (future) owner of 12 soup plates of Myott's Country Life. So, would anybody like to stop by for soup? :-)

Look here and here for some lovely decorations with transferware. (Now you know why I like the Little Red House blog so much! *g*)

Sandy's Tuesday Midnight Post

Sitting-Room Decoration Dilemma Solved

I've got beautiful, elegant reddish-orange cushions for my red couch, but because the kitty-cat has invaded the sitting room, I can't really leave the cushions on the couch for everyday use. But without cushions the couch looks rather bare and dreary. So, what to do?

I rummaged among my old stuff that's all packed up, and got out our old caravan cushions from the 1970s. These are my all-time favourite cushions anyway: they're round, they've got frills of sorts, and they're covered with brown, orange and yellow little flowers. Very pretty. They're my think-happy-thoughts cushions. :-) At first I wasn't quite sure, whether they would actually fit into the overall decoration scheme of the sitting room, but in fact, they look lovely and lend the room a nice, casual atmosphere.


New Favourite Blog

While searching the web for red transferware today, I stumbled across a truly wonderful blog: Little Red House. For somebody who loves home decoration magazines as much as I do, Mary's blog is a veritable treasure trove: she has decorated her house with antiques, family heirlooms, and thrift shop finds -- and it's sooooo pretty. No doubt I will visit her blog quite often in the future. :-)

Speaking of red transferware: I've fallen in love with the Bristol series from Crown Ducal. Isn't it pretty?

Tickling the Muse

Today I did some work on BETRAYAL (yay!) and elaborated some more on Georgina's memories of Ash. Since the two of them meet face to face relatively late into the story, I have to balance this by emphasising their memories of each other. (I hope this actually works!)

The scene I was working on today is one of my favourites: Georgina is sitting at the window of the coachman's house in the evening, when her son enters the room and sits down at her feet and leans his head against her knee. The scene is so poignant because it's not the son she has raised, but the other twin, who has grown up in the stifling atmosphere of Ashburnham Place and hungers for love. It's definitely an awwww-scene for me -- and I hope that it will also be an awww-scene for my readers . :-)

More Wondrous Stuff from Ebay

Still lost in Gaskell today, but I wanted to share another great ebay find with you: an attachment for a laterna magica or probably another, similar optical toy.

When turn it, the people inside change their ... uhm ... position. *g* As I've just bought this little toy, be prepared to find it described in loving detail in one of my future novels!

Friday Late Night Blogging

What Sandy did today:

• Subscribe to Homes & Antiques. I discovered the magazine when I was in London last autumn, and fell instantly in love. :-)
• Find out that Gaskell is a very sly, very subtle author (as if I hadn't known that before!): she shows you one thing, but actually tells you something quite different. Brilliant!
• Acquire a new jumper. It used to be my Dad's, but apparently something terrible happened to the poor thing in the washing machine. It's still much too big for me, but it's supersoft and supercomfy and looks great with jeans. So now it's mine.
• Admire Burleigh ceramics online. (Oh, oh, oh ...)
• Try to type with cat lying on my arm or wrist.

The Wondrous Sights of Ebay: Music Boxes

This definitely falls into the category of "Things Nobody Would Believe If You Put Them into a Novel": a chair with hunting motives and with a built-in musical mechanism.

Another curiosity: wine glasses as music boxes. You wind up the musical mechanism, and each time you lift the glass, you'll hear a little melody. :O)

And here's my absolute favourite: a music box formed like a golden cage with a little bird (and the birdie is made of real feathers) (okay, so that last bit is somewhat icky).

Books, Books, Books

Still glomming Lisa Kleypas: I've now bought more or less the rest of Lisa Kleypas's backlist: Fictionwise has 60% micropay rebates on all books at the moment. Wheee!!! (Those people are terribly eeeeehvil, of course, temping poor, little innocent readers ... *g*)

Yesterday I browsed all volumes of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress anthologies in search of dragons and dragonslayers, and was overcome by a wave of nostalgia. I started reading these anthologies when I was not yet twenty, and I've always been aware that they influenced my writing a great deal. I loved, loved, loved those stories with strong female protagonists (of course, later on, when I started to read more romance novels and novels with romantic elements, I realised that there's a certain imbalance in these anthologies as well: there are very few positive male characters; the men are almost always cast as villains).

What I liked and still like most about the Sword & Sorceress books are the introductions to the stories. At least some of them offer you tantalising glimpses of the circle of writers around Bradley, most whom had their first stories published in S&S. It's truly amazing if you think about how many writers Bradley nurtured during her life-time: people like Diana L. Paxson, Jennifer Roberson, Mercedes Lackey.

My favourite intro is not from S&S, but from Return to Avalon: A Celebration of Marion Zimmer Bradley, edited by Jennifer Roberson. The introduction to the collection was written by Diana L. Paxson, and this is how it starts:

A number of years ago, when our children were young and none of us were on diets, we used to have Sunday afternoon tea parties at Greyhaven. Marion would come up the hill from Greenwalls (her house about ten minutes away), accompanied by her daughter Moira or some of the young women who at various times lived there. My sister-in-law Tracy Blackstone would cook up some goodies, and I would make endless cups of English tea.

*sigh* Doesn't that make you wish you could have taken part in those tea parties, too?

More info about Greyhaven can be found here.

Tea Sets in Action: Wiesengrund & Bergeshöh'n

Last Friday I used my other new tea set for the first time -- it looked soooo pretty!!! I used a dark green table cloth with a burgundy floral pattern, and the dark colours made the china SHINE! The big tea pot got wrapt in my brand-new tea cozy, which lent the whole set-up an old-fashioned appeal. The tea cups are simply wonderful: wide and shallow, they lie perfectly in your hand. Add a truly yummy cake from my favourite bakery, and a dear friend, and the afternoon was just perfect! :-)

Betthupferl -- lots of them :-)

Trailer for THE COLOUR OF MAGIC




Trailer for HOGFATHER




HOGFATHER Intro




Good night! :-)

Where's Sandy?

No doubt you'll be happy to hear that Sandy has not fallen off the Disc in order to find out the truth about A'Tuin's sex. (After all, she wouldn't even know what turtle bits and pieces to look for!) Instead, she was working on a Very Important Article (well, sort of important) on "History and Nostalgia in W. M. Thackeray's THE NEWCOMES." Since the novel is set in the 1830s and 40s and there are references to even earlier decades, I was able to show off and make use of all my research about the Regency era. Which was fun! (But took a bit longer than I had anticipated ...)

In addition, I continued glomming Lisa Kleypas (why doesn't Fictionwise have the first of the Hathaway books???) and read some of Anne Perry's Christmas novellas. I bought my first Anne Perry novel in Oxford eleven years ago after I had seen THE CATER STREET HANGMAN on TV. (Hmm. Wonder whether the film is available on DVD by now ...) (I've just checked, and the answer is no. Duh.)

One of the DVDs I gave my parents for Christmas was MAMMA MIA! Loved, loved, loved it!!! It's such a fun, feel-good movie. The German dubbing, though, is a horror. It made me squirm when I watched the film with my parents. Whoever did the synchro managed to butcher the poor movie. It's so sad, especially when you consider how much time, effort and money went into the making of the film. Argh!

I also watched the second Pratchett TV adaptation, THE COLOUR OF MAGIC. Even though we don't learn anything about A'Tuin's sex, the mini-series is still highly entertaining. It's perhaps not as good as HOGFATHER, but the ending is just awwwwww. You can't help loving that big turtle! :-)

More of Bair Hall

Return with me to Bair Hall in the second part of the Holiday Epilogue to THE LILY BRAND. Enjoy! :-)

This is an old photograph of Compton Wynyates, an early Tudor mansion, on which I based Troy's country estate Bair Hall. The picture was taken in 1928. I found it here.

The First of 2009

Happy New Year, everybody! I hope you had a great start into 2009! :-)