I’m finally recovering from last weekend’s Context panel blowout. Sitting still and talking are what I do best, so you’d think I’d be all trained up to it, but no.

This week, I recommend these websites:

I met Fiona Young-Brown on the Savvy Authors email list and then in person at FandomFest. I love her foodie website, Crazy Englishwoman Cooks. She not only cooks, she makes comments on the recipes. She digresses. I like it.

I found Daisy Fairbanks when I was looking for pictures of “Pinky and Blue Boy” for a random post here the other day. The site hasn’t been updated since May so it may be moribund, but there’s still a world of stuff to read there, and links to other sites.

Speaking of Mystery is more about mystery, but is also by Edith Maxwell, a woman who is a Quaker and who writes a Quaker sleuth. It’s living proof that a life of faith isn’t necessarily a life of harsh judgement, penance, self-denial and holier-than-thouishness. (Y’all know I’m churchy, right? Stop laughing! I am!)

I’m currently reading Sarah Orne Jewett‘s The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories. Technically, I’ve finished The Country of the Pointed Firs and am now reading the Other Stories. You can get it for free at Project Gutenberg or Bartleby, but be sure to get the other stories set in the same place and time: “A Dunnet Shepherdess”, “The Foreigner”, “The Queen’s Twin”, and “William’s Wedding”. They’re wonderful, lustrous works, but don’t even think about reading them if you want swashbuckling action. These are literary stories in the very best sense of the term: clear, transparent prose that embeds you in another setting and makes you part of it and it a part of you.

Do you have any web sites you particularly love that you think I’d enjoy? Drop a link in the comments.

WRITING PROMPT: Look around you and try to see your setting with new eyes. How would you write it if you were imagining it instead of living in it?

MA