Jane Haddam

I wasn’t going to write a blog post today.  I’m really very aware of the fact that I tend to be crabby and unreasonable during exam weeks, and that there really isn’t a whole lot of point to it. But it’s very early in the morning, and I woke up to find an e-mail from…

Actually, it’s The Well Wrought Urn, and it’s the title of a book by Cleanth Brooks All I can say is that it fit something deep inside my head today, which is as good an explanation as you’re ever going to get from me.  I have it–the book, that is–along with F.R. Leavis’s The Great…

I know this because what I have on the player behind me is Handel, not Bach, and there are no harpsichords.  And it’s the Christmas season and not the holiday season because it seems silly to me to call the season of listening to Handel’s Messiah the–well, you get what I mean. But then, that’s…

Reading over the comments this morning, I find Michael suggesting that from certain clues in the excerpts I posted yesterday, my students seem to be speaking…Ebonics. And since Ebonics is a subdialect with its own language rules, an Ebonics speaker who is trying to learn to speak and write standard English is actually learning an…

I am sitting at this computer much earlier in the day than I usually would be to write a blog post–fiction gets written this early in the morning, but rarely blog posts–and it is cold in this office. This is partially my fault.  My office is a sun room, and when the temperatures dip below…

Good morning.  I’m running a little late, but that’s not a surprise.  It’s “reading week” and exam week at my place, and that means I’m inundated by e-mails and text messages from students desperate for me to assure them that they can, indeed, pass the course, even though they haven’t been in class since midterms…

So, sometimes last week, operating on less than 4 hours of sleep, I posted a little snit that then got everybody to land on me, at which point I posted a longer thing that seems to have convinced some of you that I am denigrating what you like in reading material and declaring all science…

Well, operating on more than four hours of sleep this morning, I should be able to do a little better. But it surprises me that we’ve circled around to this again, and on two counts. The first is–STORY. Lymaree asks why I’d give up good STORIES because they contain “future technology.” But I’ve said before…

The title of this post was a catch phrase about ten or fifteen years ago.  I never quite nailed down exactly what it meant, but I know the reason for using it.  Sometimes, things get entirely too serious. And that is, I think, where I am this morning.  This is the beginning of what looks…

It is Thanksgiving week-end, and as on all Thanksgiving week-ends, I have become majorly disoriented.  Yesterday felt like Saturday, today feels like Sunday, and I’m going into panic mode because I have a lot to do on Monday.  I also have a lot of papers to correct, the super-duper, extra-long, have-to-be-MLA-documented papers that I do…