Jane Haddam

Too early is what it is at the moment.  It’s election day in the US, and I got up very early in order to get started very early in order to get to my polling place before seven, because I usually leave for school at seven, and… Well, and. I got to the polls before…

So, it’s Sunday morning, and on Sunday morning I usually write a bit here and then go off and listen to harpsichords. But this Sunday morning I have a lot to do, which means leaving the house by seven thirty.  That’s later than I leave the house in the middle of the week, but not…

So, it’s Saturday.  And, I know, I know.  I’ve been saying for days that I was going to get around to writing about Sam Harris’s new book, The Moral Landscape, and why it’s a train wreck. And I am, sort of, because the book is a train wreck, on a number of levels. At the…

Okay, I have to explain something here, because it will tell you how I ended up in this particular place on this particular morning. I have an alarm clock, bright yellow travel model, from L.L. Bean.  It runs on two batteries, a watch battery and a regular little cylindrical one.  I probably just spelled that…

Okay, maybe not that bad. It’s just that it’s suddenly hit me that we have an election in the US this coming Tuesday, and the only way in which you can say I’m prepared for it is that I am, in fact, registered to vote. But then, I’ve been registered to vote in the same…

Way back in the mists of time, somewhere, my idea for this blog was to write about the things I was reading.  I do a lot of reading, and I don’t have many people to talk to about it around here.  I have been on some Internet discussion forums that were supposed to be about…

Okay, before I start this, you have to understand something.  It’s nearly nine o’clock in the morning–in fact, when I look at the computer clock, it’s 8:59–and I just got up. I never get up this late unless I’ve been out very late the night before.  That’s unusual, but it didn’t happen this time.  I…

In case you read fewer thirties novels than I do–a continuity girl was a person on a film set who kept notes on what every character was wearing, how their hair and make-up was done, from scene to scene.  This helped stopped big problems from happening when you filmed scenes out of sequence.  If Martha…

So, yesterday, I actually wasn’t using a random title for a post.  I was thinking about writing about personification, which was a staple technique in writing in the late antiquity and the Middle Ages, but that sort of disappeared over time. Personification was the use of dialogue for things like philosophical treatises, in which various…

Some days, you just get up and everything seems to be calculated to annoy me. It’s actually fall now, something I’ve been avoiding for a really long time.  But yesterday we had to turn our heat on for the first time, and this morning my office–which is in a sunroom, overlooking the back yard–is cold.…