- Broaden Your Horizons, in which I share six of my favorite fantasy novels set in non-European locales (they are all awesome books and you should read them!).
- Building Fantasy Worlds One Name at a Time, in which I talk about how I chose names for characters and places in The Whitefire Crossing and The Tainted City. This is part of a whole series on names in fantasy that Abhinav Jain is running at his blog - make sure and check out the other posts in the series, as some really great authors have weighed in over the past weeks.
And then I'll leave you with a few pictures from my favorite winter activity: skiing. Every year when that first storm kisses the high peaks with white, I start to dream of deep powder. (Powder skiing is practically a religion in the west, and for good reason. Skis float in deep snow, letting you turn and bank like an airplane. Between the speed of descent and the sheer freedom of movement, it's the closest most people ever get to flying. The rush is incredible.) Right now as I drive to work, I eye the newly white peaks and salivate...soon, soon my husband and I will spend more days like this:
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| Me enjoying a powder day at Alta, Utah. (They really do have the greatest snow on Earth. Every skier should make a pilgrimage to Alta at least once in their lifetime.) |
Or if we're really lucky, like this...
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| Our friend Jim needs a snorkel |
If it's been a few days since a storm, we can still amuse ourselves by cornice jumping:
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| Robert jumps a cornice at Aspen |
Or if we're really brave, couloir skiing:
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| Who's got enough guts to take the leap? Our friends Jeanne, Khurrum, and Gary scope out the infamous Corbet's Couloir at Jackson Hole. |
No matter what, I'll have a grin this big on my face:
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| Skiing rules. |
I have not skiied often, and always with comically disastrous results! I envy you. And thanks for the pictures. I like the cornice one. Beautiful looking day!
ReplyDeletePerhaps you just haven't yet tried it in the right place. Skiing in the west (in nice soft forgiving snow!) is way easier than the east, where I'm told the slopes often feature bulletproof ice: great for comedic disasters, not so great for learning. :P In any case, glad you liked the pics!
DeleteSkied a bit in high school, but always on bulletproof ice.
ReplyDeleteFlying down a mountain sure sounds great.
There is an upside to bulletproof ice: learn on that stuff, and you can ski anything. (My husband is proof of this: he learned in Australia, where the skiing is even more of an ice-fest, and it only took him a few hours to figure out how to bomb down powder runs. Whereas if you put me on ice slopes, I think it'd take months or more before I got comfortable skiing them (despite my figure skating expertise!).
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