HI AGAIN

TL;DR, I've been busy! Finally taking a break this month!!!

Anyway, people moaning about their busy-ness are boring, so here are some other things I did in the last couple months.

Helped my children paint 5 random pieces of their furniture (eldest picked the coral, youngest picked the sage green). It looked very 70's in the backyard for a bit.

Continued climbing, mostly with the 12yo (we make up stories about the routes and then have to climb them, A++ fitness technique, do recommend)

Accepted the fact that I was never going to be a person who wears suitjackets and donated all these thrifted ones

Tried to solve a murder

Tried to get my 15yo to write a grocery list. (Someday we'll find the olycrar and Brussel rarerg.)

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I want to tell you briefly about Antony Johnston's Can You Solve the Murder, above - it's interactive fiction and I'm envious I didn't think of the idea! It was a fun, light read and I enjoyed trying to work out the game engine and figure out how he plotted it in the first place. You play the detective, and can choose whom to interview and where to search. But because a book can't store and remember variables about what paths you may have chosen in the past, part of the author's method involves you writing codes down (A3, P4, etc.) That way, at certain points, the book can direct you forward based on what you've already read about. (IE, if you have A3 written down, go to page 45, but if you don't then go to page 92.)

My brother Andy lent it to me, and he had taken a different path, so it was fun to compare what we each learned about while trying to discover enough clues to make a valid solve to the mystery. Here's an interview with the author about how he plotted it.

I also read Leonie Swann's sheep POV mystery Three Bags Full in March (and then discovered it was about to be the movie The Sheep Detectives! Both were good, but the book is darker.) And in May, I read Helene Tursten's An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good collection (amusing short stories about an 88yo lady with a habit of bumping people off.) Three Bags Full was translated from German by Anthea Bell and Elderly Lady was translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.

Anyway, I believe you are now caught up! After both reading and writing a bunch of interactive fiction and other unusual mysteries (baaaa), I am in a phase of wanting to read more clever mysteries, metafictional curiosities, and just plain unusual ways to write a book. If you have any suggestions, send them my way!

xo tina