Whitney > Recent Status Updates

I’m beginning to move my reading tracker over to the Storygraph. My profile name there is wslockard

The entire continent has a network of insane asylums (two) and the same doctor manages all of them. Both.

Dang. The Great War.

Lol
“I was wondering if you could help us make a fire,” she says, “in the Lodge.”
He stares at her. He cannot imagine how nine people might not have the skills between them to set a fire.

The who-dunnit is laughingly complex. Yes we have a dead body, but we don’t know who it is yet, among the dozen characters! Many of them are pampered and wealthy. But suddenly my heart is won because the character named Emma is disappointed by a “rather limp raspberry pavlova” for dessert and now I’m sincerely hoping she’s not the dead one

I am at the age where my preferred books have maps on the front pages???

"You are on the wrong side of history."

"I have the data right here." C.L. patted their chest.
"You memorized it?"
"No, of course not. That's insane. I uploaded it to my shirt."

"I learned Atomic Age English from historical romances. Nobody asks questions when a woman watches ancient love stories about heterosexuality."

"This guy is a shitstain of epic proportions."

"Let's get a paper and see who's playing."

And now I was here, feeling almost as shitty as I used to when I was murdering people with my friends.

"Cone of silence, okay?"

"You change a man's mind by showing him a good time."

She'd found a seat next to an elderly man with hamster-sized muttonchops, who kept glancing at her as if she were a radish come inexplicably and irritatingly to life.

The morning after I came out to Aseel and Soph as a traveler, I navigated between a headache, yet another carriage full of ostriches, and monumental chunks of Ferris wheel to reach the Algerian Theater.

No shack, no tappers, nothing. With training, a person could use stones to pound the Machine interface and return to their present. ... To go further, I took the Machines at Raqmu and Attirampakkam, discovered thousands of years ago. (= useful for people unskilled at rhythmic rock pounding, if needing to travel BCE...)

"Miners had stumbled on the Flin Flon Time Machine only fifteen years before, making it the most recently discovered of the five known Machines. That meant travelers who used Flin Flon to go back further than 1878 found themselves alone on a rocky outcropping next to a beautiful lake.

Nancy smiled and said in a coaxing manner, "It's no use, Luke. There's too much evidence against you---your knowledge of the mechanism that opens the trap door, your leaving the trunk open after you took the sheet out of it, the bronze peacock's foot strapped to your own shoes---and lost in the mud--------"
"Don't say any more!" Luke begged. "I don't know how you found out all those things."

"Maybe Alonzo and Luke are in cahoots!"

By this time the peacock had recovered from the hypnotism caused by the light shining directly in his eyes. Folding his tail, he began to run across the lawn.
"Let's follow him, George!" Nancy whispered, keeping her flashlight trained on him.
The bird ran faster than the girls had any idea he could. They had a hard time keeping up...

"It means," said Nancy, "that a human being and not a bird made these marks."
Annette paled. "You---you mean a human being with bird feet?" she questioned.
Nancy said that she believed the human being had strapped artificial peacock claws to the bottom of his shoes to avoid making footprints that might be recognizable.

"Well, count me out," Bess spoke up. "I'll help with something that's not so weird."

"I don't like this peacock business."

"Well, count me out," Bess spoke up. "I'll help with something that's not so weird."

(1939, Zelda had been living in a hospital, mentally ill. She and Scott still communicated frequently by letter. He would die in 1940. She would die in 1948)
(During one poignant letter, she wrote) Nothing could have survived our life.

After a weekend in "regions unmentionable because unknown," Zelda phoned the Kalmans at the Ritz. She "had some faint difficulty with the clerk," because she was so drunk: "I'm not sure that I told him my right name, but if I did, did you get word?"..."Scott informs me that I rode out of your room in a laundry wagon..." The letter concludes with twenty-two year old Zelda's remark: "O well! I was young once."

...about the loneliness of keeping Faiths....

(Scott and Zelda) Their life together was like a joint bank account, upon which only one of them could afford to draw.