While in Toronto, you might want to do as I did, and go see Ann Powell and David Powell, who are puppetmongers of the highest order.  You can read about them in Eileen Blumenthal’s excellent book, of course, and that’s good too, but if you don’t go there yourself you won’t get to see this stuff, some of which is, actually, Ann and David.  Who could not have been kinder or more helpful to a writer lurching out of a pretty damn humid afternoon, disrupting their workday. . .David even gave me a token for the streetcar! I mean, come on! And Ann can tell you what it actually means to “monger.”

So go there.

Or pre-Edwardians, or however you might chronologically consider them: anyway, they were small. For proof, consider this lovely blouse, and dress, and this other insanely lovely blouse, all of which I would cheerfully have tried on (oh, the rigors of research) but I could not begin to get into them; I mean I couldn’t get my skeleton into those blouses!

Many thanks to the mistress of Gadabout, in Toronto, for allowing me access and letting me take pictures. There are things you can do online, and things you can’t, and getting a feel (literally) for the clothes my characters might wear requires proximity. It’s like finding twigs and shoots and fluff to feather the mental bird’s nest that is becoming the fiction.

…she can jump, too.

Thanks to a friend (hi, Clive! and thank you, Peter, for the pictures), I now present the astonishing La Princesse, on her triumphal progress through Liverpool. Bear in mind, she is a puppet.

And she needs a lot of helpers…

You can see her on the BBC here.

Very thrilled to be able to announce that my first novel, The Cipher, has just been optioned for film by Carroll Brown (writer/producer) and Jonathan Levit (producer), who are men of magic in more than one way. May I say I am tres geeked? Oh yes.

Geoffrey Goodwin’s interview with me is up now on Bookslut – we talk about Under the Poppy, and my YA novels, and why a hand puppet is better than a lie detector (not to mention more fun), and an imaginary dinner with John Malkovich and, yes, even that corset, and writing, writing, writing . . . It’s amazing to me, to feel so understood by someone you’ve not yet “met.” Thanks, Geoffrey. And a kiss on both cheeks to Bookslut, for hooking us up.

Poppies for drama, roses for remembrance . . . The iconography of flowers comes and goes throughout this Poppy project. Just finished reading a biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, wherein his photographs of flowers (among others) were discussed and dissected. Flowers don’t have to be “pretty” to be beautiful. There is something especially arresting about a fantastic rose, say, like this one, just about to turn the corner into decay, its petals ever so lightly tinged with brown. . . Like a gorgeous girl who’s slightly sick, a perfect statue with rot at its base. Beauty is where you find it, as Mapplethorpe knew so well.