The word of the year is Hashtag

The American Dialect Society is at it again. Click here for their roundup of best new words on Mental Floos.

Vulcan's Fire Salt

Do you know the kind of damage you can do with a $50 gift certificate to The Spice House?  A lot.
I've been trolling through their catalogue and already have a list of six things I'd like to get, including green mango powder, which I've never tried and have been wanting to.
This hot salt (Vulcan Fire Salt) caught my eye though.  It pretty much has everything a spice blend should have.

A site that will give you the inside scoop on Paris

Heather Stimmler-Hall's blog, Secrets of Paris, has been online since 1999. Her publishing company, Fleur de Lire, publishes (among other books), the Naughty Guide to Paris.

Download Paris Pastry App

New for the new year: our favorite foodie expatriate, David Lebovitz (Living the Sweet Life in Paris) has a Paris Pastry app you can download (through iTunes) of his Paris Pastry App.

Sign up to get 52 stories by 7 of France's top authors!

From Le French Book site:  sign up to receive (free) a daily or weekly email featuring 52 short stories written (in collaboration) by seven French authors.The stories are in English, so even if one of your New Year's Resolutions was that 2013 would be the year you learned French, you can ease yourself into it gradually.

Book Review Maps of the Edge by Ian Creasey

One of the writers I discovered during the 365 Day Challenge was Ian Creasey. Maps of the Edge is a collection of spec fic stories by Creasey published in 2011. (His novella, The Strawberry Thief, was published last October. I can't wait to read it.) Creasey identifies as a science fiction writer, but pigeonholing him into one genre really doesn't seem fair, especially after reading through this collection, which is a small sample of the more than 50-odd stories he's sold to magazines and anthologies.

The stories range over a wide spectrum of emotions. "Reality 2.0" is a hilarious riff on a new product from Microsoft, a re-imagination of math called "WonderNumbers" that takes all the hard work out of math, much to the dismay of mathematicians. "Now you can divide by zero" is the product's sales pitch for the software, which does away with a lot of inconvenient math concepts and formulae. "This is How it Feels" is a haunting story about loss and grief that describes the feeling as "a compost heap where rats endlessly gnaw over the scraps of your heart." 

"Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone" is a story about a mother and a daughter that also touches on one of the core concepts and conceits of the collection, the persistence of personality in an electronic afterlife. Many of the stories are surrounded and shaped by conspiracy theories and there are references throughout to a Conspiracy Channel--the people who work there and some of the shows that appear. And who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory?

Creasey is not just a storyteller, he's an actual wordsmith--a term that's thrown around much too easily. (In the opening story, "Erosion," he describes clouds as looking like "celestial loft insulation" and the phrase is just perfect.)

You don't have to like science fiction to like Creasey's stories but if you do, you will love them.

After Christmas Sale!

12 Nights of Christmas, my collection of dark takes on the traditional holiday song, is now available FREE on Smashwords. And coming soon--free on Amazon as well. Now that the holidays are over and it's a new year, why not pick up some free reading?