It's official: I'm a published author! I don't know if it really has sunk in yet. The day of the book launch, I had mentioned to my coworker how I had a big event that evening. When she asked what, I didn't cower and mutter some half-baked lie. No, I told her the truth. Of course, like most creatives who constantly compare their level of success to the heavily-publicized, multi-billionaire artists who seem to be famous overnight (never happens that way except in the movies)---I did tell ...
Musings
A Small Beginning
Tonight is the night! It's book launch day! I still can't believe something I wrote is actually going to be in a literal, physical book, and people are actually going to read it! I can't even believe I told people and they bought it! Sure, it's not a major book deal with one of the major five publishing houses, nor is it a full-length novel or series. It is after all only a short story within an anthology. Even though this may be a small beginning---one small step for Lynn---it's my step, ...
WOMS: A Tapestry of Spells
Continuing with Lynn Kurland's Nine Kingdoms series, this week we're reviewing book four in the series, the start of a new trilogy: A Tapestry of Spells. Unfortunately, I wasn't as absorbed by this book as its predecessors, but this is not at all a comment on Kurland's writing. Rather I just had too much on my plate, so I didn't get to sit down and just let myself fall back into the world of the Nine Kingdoms and forget about life for a while as I would have preferred. Instead, I had to read ...
WOMS: Princess of the Sword
Well I can finally sit down and write out my review of Lynn Kurland's final installment of the first trilogy in her Nine Kingdoms series, Princess of the Sword. (So much for batch-writing and consistency. Maybe in an upcoming post I'll share the utter insanity that has been my life the past eight weeks, but anyway...onwards!) This series has been a delight, and this finale was no exception. I tend to be a second book person. It's the middle installments where the juicy backstories and ...
Coexisting in Harmony
The sages teach us that beauty is found within the balance of mercy and judgement; when gevurah is balanced with chesed, there is tiferet. Beauty exists in their harmony. This is a Kabbalistic understanding of how three of the ten sefirot---or emanations of the Divine essence, of the Infinite [Ein Sof]---are manifested within the world. To define what this beauty, what tiferet, is would take me much longer than this blog post will allow. (Good thing I wrote a fantasy novel to explore it ...
