A taste, if you’re so inclined:

The riders raced up the road madly. The gleaming, sporty [...]]]>  It is blizzardy and deliciously wintery here today, so I thought you might like reading Lucien’s Fall, available now at Amazon Kindle.  Lucien is one of my all time favorite heroes, reckless and beautiful and very nearly unredeemable.

A taste, if you’re so inclined:

The riders raced up the road madly. The gleaming, sporty phaeton rocked dangerously in the rain-rutted course. The other man rode on a beautiful, lean black horse; beast and man were illuminated with the bars of hazy light falling through thick tree branches. They were young men, London rakes, a breed of man beneath Madeline’s contempt. She found their arrogance and idleness a bore.

And yet, as they laughed and shouted, each goading the other to a faster pace, Madeline felt her blood rise in a strange excitement. It was in particular the man on the horse who caught her eye. He wore no powder or wig, and his thick dark hair was drawn back into a queue with a black ribbon. His body was long and sinuously made, and he rode as if he and the horse were one being. From where she stood, his face gave the impression of exotic tilts and powerful bones.

But it was the hedonism Madeline ordinarily found so distasteful in such men that drew her now, made her take up her skirts and run toward the opening of the maze so she would not lose sight of him behind the hedge.

She broke through to the open stretch of lawn between the maze and the Elizabethan house of Whitethorn just as the man urged his horse into a full run. Light dappled faster and faster over his dark hair, his dark horse, his long legs. Next to him, only a little behind, the phaeton rocked noisily.

As they neared the end of the drive, Madeline burst into a run. The man on the horse left the road and bolted across the same lawn. His speed was almost dizzying, and he headed with purpose for a shoulder-high hedge that edged the house garden.

Madeline froze. They would both be killed.

But even as she clamped a hand over her mouth, watching in horror, the black beast leaped with stunning grace over the squared hedge. Horse and man hung—haloed and gilded by the afternoon light—for an endless time against the sky.

As he hung there, suspended in midair, looking like Pan, like some untamed beast come in from the wild, the man laughed. The sound rang with robust defiance into the day, and Madeline felt her heart catch with a sharp pang.

To be so free!

Order this book now.

I have an old stove—a dull cream model with ancient electric rings and a black front.  It’s serviceable, but little more than that.  I hate it when the sun comes streaming through my kitchen window and [...]]]> This morning’s post to The Lipstick Chronicles.  What household jobs or areas are repugnant to you?

I have an old stove—a dull cream model with ancient electric rings and a black front.  It’s serviceable, but little more than that.  I hate it when the sun comes streaming through my kitchen window and illuminates the splatters of grease across the control panel and the aged dust stuck to the inner hood.  I’m sure I must have wiped it all down when I cleaned the kitchen last night, but it looks like something out of a hoarder’s episode.   Dust from the wings of cat-murdered miller-moths mixed with flutters of dog fur mixed with kosher salt mixed with that creeping cooking sludge I can never quite identify.

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Christopher Robin is in England this week, visiting his mother for Mothering Sunday. He sent me a little audio [...]]]> “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938

Christopher Robin is in England this week, visiting his mother for Mothering Sunday. He sent me a little audio clip of walking up the road in an English village, with birds warbling and his feet crunching and I desperately wanted to be back in Hawkhurst, walking the public footpaths.  I want to be walking anywhere, truth be told, the yen is on me for a long, long, long walk, days and days of getting up and walking a long way and coming back to sleep and eat, then getting up to to it again the next morning.

Oh, I’m walking, of course. Jack and I walk every day, twice, usually for more than hour altogether, and I do love starting my writing day that way, getting my lungs filled up with clean, fresh air, getting my body moving, and my brain. It’s while I’m walking that I unravel plot tangles and come up with ideas for essays and figure out why that character has been carrying around that thing all through the book.

But since walking all over England and down the Camino de Santiago (Best.Walk.Ever.) last summer, I haven’t been on a single very long walk (more than five or six miles) anywhere. There was the little matter of a torn meniscus that had to be repaired and then the recovery, which was actually very fast–I was walking to the mailbox the second day, and to the park by a week later. It helped the knee to heal very quickly.  As walking does.  It’s my cure-all. My daily constitutional and my way of meeting the world.

The long walks are my way of meeting myself. Having long conversations with Spirit and the vastness of everything.

This summer is devoted to my garden, which is also important to me, and I have a lot of writing to do, so I planned to stay home.  I still choose not to travel far this year, but Colorado is pretty stunning.  I’m sure I can find a multi-day walk or two around these parts.  :)

Now I leave you with the quiet of an English village evening. (You can really begin to hear the birds at about .30.  Turn up your volume.  Birds and Hawkhurst

1. Take a chance on something that seems impossible. Write a novel, maybe, or throw your heart into a crumbling old house and try to save it from the wrecking ball. When my [...]]]> Join me over at Chick Lit is Not Dead for a special blog and a chance to win a free book.

1. Take a chance on something that seems impossible. Write a novel, maybe, or throw your heart into a crumbling old house and try to save it from the wrecking ball. When my boys were small and we were poor, I fell in love with an old house down the street. It was empty, maybe abandoned, and I could see into the light falling across the stairway, and upstairs was a big room with a bay window beneath the high pointed eaves. Every morning, I walked by and it whispered to me. Somehow, with no money whatsoever, we ended up buying it and spending years and years renovating one thing and then another. There was a ghost in the garden, who befriended my cats, and it was her ancient globe lilies and giant roses that grew out of the rock hard dirt in the backyard. (I am convinced she is the one who called me to save her house.) My children grew up with torn up floors and ancient bathrooms and sheetrock tape, the two of them crammed together in one bedroom so I could have the tiny office downstairs for work. It was a house of great love, and although it never became This Old House, all gleaming and perfectly restored, we saved it from the wrecking ball. READ THE REST….

Welsh Rabbit, which I thought for years [...]]]> The Brits get a bad name over food, but I’m here to say there is a lot that’s lovely about British cooking. Saveur Magazine has a feature
today on their website about British Pub Food.  I receive their emails and clicked right through to find this lovely menu:

Welsh Rabbit, which I thought for years was Rarebit, no idea why, and is only cheese and toast.  How simple and lovely is that?

Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, served bloody rare, which I loathe.  Not a fan of roast beef, though I love the gravy, and that gravy is a wonder with Yorkshire puddings.

Beef and Guinness pie . I once made this recipe, or one quite similar and forgot that I had it in the oven (before the crust was on it). It cooked at 300 for a couple of hours and the flavors were as deep and rich as some precious old wine.  Highly recommended.

Banoffee Pie, which I have talked about here before.  It’s an English classic, made with digestive biscuits, bananas, caramel and whipped cream.  CR’s mother served it at a holiday meal and I licked the spoon and practically my plate, so she sent me home with tins of caramel, which are not sold here.  It is unbelievably sweet, but the cream and the bananas and the digestives give it texture and depth, so it’s not as horrifying as you might imagine. (Go on, try it, you know you want to!)

What’s funny is that my traditionalist younger son, also a very picky eater, fell madly in love with Banoffee pie the first time I made it for a Christmas meal and he begs for it at every opportunity since.  Though CR’s mother sends those tins of caramel, I don’t always have a can when I need it.  This recipe has a work around that makes the caramel with condensed milk and brown sugar. (And I recently discovered you can buy cans of dulce de leche in the Mexican food aisle at the grocery store, so I am saved, anyway.)

But my favorite thing about British food: cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese.  Check out these 9 artisan cheeses. But don’t forget Stilton or Wensleydale with cranberries or mangos or some other something.  They’re all great.

What foreign foods do you love? Have you even fallen in love with something in a far away land?