Spring! Spring! Spring!

Okay, technically not until September 1st. But actually, even though it's currently raining, it feels as if this part of the world has finally turned its face towards the sun and is willing to concede that warm air and bloom might be nice. In these cases, I am more inclined to listen to the earth than the calendar. Spring has sprang.

Ōtautahi, nicknamed the garden city, is always a pleasure, but it's particularly gorgeous at this time of year, when the long avenues of cherry trees blossom and the daffodils planted on the grassy verges lift their yellow chins. And I lift my chin too, and spend more time looking at sunsets and less hunching against the chill. Last night I slept under a single duvet! I'm going to start making summer dresses on my brand new sewing machine upgrade!

Look, I know spring is sentimental, and the words to describe it so worn out that even the sharpest observation verges on cliche. But there's a reason every poet writes at least one poem about spring, even if they're ashamed of it. If you need an antidote to poetical pastoralism, here is one of my favourites. (But that final line? That's still spring.)

I drove to work this morning, and the plum trees are unfolding their boldest hues, and the radio played a choral arrangement of Dolly Parton's "Light of a Clear Blue Morning" in tribute to a wonderful woman who lived life well. I defy the most cynical poet not to be moved by that.

Speaking of music, I went to a Tiger Moth performance last week, as part of the weekly Jazz Club that so enlivens our city during the winter months.

I like music the same way I like art, which is to say that I will smile at pleasant sensation, thrill to what moves me, appreciate very few of the technical subtleties, and pounce on any contextual or historical import because narrative makes sense to me. I listen to classical music in the car, nodding happily, and know almost nothing about it. I like the bit when the solo violin soars achingly high, all alone, and then the rest of the orchestra crashes in to applaud it! I do not know what that is called!

It is genuinely relaxing for me to like something without feeling that I need to understand it.

But I do understand lyric, at least so far as it functions as poetry, and jazz lyric is frequently very funny or clever or both, and occasionally punches you right in the heart. I have met purists who claim real jazz doesn't have lyric and belongs purely to the note and the beat, and okay, buddy. You do you, but I like words.

Truth be told, my favorite song of the evening wasn't actually a jazz number, but this Tom Waits song¹, modelled after this Rachael Price performance, and sung by Tiger Moth's stunning vocalist, Kate Taylor. Why, yes, I would like to listen to a beautiful woman in tuxedo pants sing about love and loss and consolation, while the piano and saxophone tug at the tear ducts! Thank you, great night.

Book news!

The Love Labyrinth is out for sale and on Kindle Unlimited with its lovely new cover, and, for the first time, you can buy it in paperback! I've also dropped it to $0.99, this week only.

The Love Labyrinth is a novella, so it's a skinny paperback, but I was surprised to find that it still comes to over a hundred pages. I shouldn't be surprised. I know what I'm like. And yet.

This Ariadne and the Minotaur retelling features some of my favourite tropes; tall/smol; small town romance; hometown girl makes good; crafty gal 4 crafty guy; ethical employee/employer relationships. (The last two aren't really tropes, BUT SHOULD BE.) The crafty part features two hobbies I really like - sewing (natch) and escape rooms (surprise?). They both come from the same place, I think - given that I want this final outcome, how do I maneuver these various elements? Finishing a sleeve ready to set gives me the same kind of pleasure as putting tiles painted with flowers in alphabetical order on a weight sensor.

But the story also comes with a heavy dose of slightly damaged people finding love, with a little light revenge thrown in for flavour. Ariadne is a little sharper than most of my heroines, and not quite as prone to good decisions. Stirling's background, as befits a Minotaur, is not a wholesome tale.

And yet! I love them and I love them together. Sometimes messy is fine.

What's Kate Been Reading:

• Apprentice of the Dead, Laura Greenwood. A short first-in-series novel with some fun shenanigans and an intriguing premise; what if the Egypt resisted, defeated, and then took over the Roman Empire? And continued its eons-long traditions into the present day, in what we would consider modern England?
• Kings of This World, by Elizabeth Knox. A dark academic thriller at a school where most of the students have extra sensory powers that can Push or Persuade people into doing what they want - possibly even death. I am not sure about the plot's final revelations, but Knox's vivid prose, turning dreamy or sharp, as required, is always worth the read. Ronnie and Taye 4eva pls.
• Trade of Blood, Robert Jackson Bennett. Bennett's brilliant detective thrillers in a grotesque world of biological marvels go agricultural this time, with the Empire's meat production industry going under the scalpel. I am so pleased that one of Din's family members makes an appearance--and that he is utterly useless about it. Can't wait for the next one!
• Daggerbound, T. Kingfisher. Yesssssssss, come to me, I have waited so long! This book came out yesterday. I finished it twenty minutes ago. I love the World of the White Rat and I will not spoil, except to say that this is a worthy addition to the canon and the on-going story arcs, and also that I love Francis.
• Fossil Men, Kermit Pattison. I like my natural history to come with drama and personality and SO MUCH GOSSIP and my goodness, does this story of the discovery and subsequent revelation of Ardipithecus ramidus deliver, with some incredible bitching between paleoanthropologists. There's also a sobering dose of real tragedy. These squabbling scientists and their bones are fighting against the background of armed conflict, as the Eritrean-Ethiopian War begins.

Lovely readers, I hope you are well, and that you have a day as wonderful as Dolly would have wished for you.

Love, Kate.

¹ In my opinion, Tom Waits, like Leonard Cohen or Nick Cave, is one of those men who get to be celebrated singer/songwriters, even though they are not good vocalists. Yes, all right, "good" is subjective, but there are very few female performance vocalists² who get away with voices that crack or strain, or vaguely approximate the note, or can just kind of chant their way through a song. Those women mostly get to be songwriters, no slashing. Again, subjective, but I listen to a lot of Leonard Cohen covers, and not a lot of Leonard Cohen. The man was brilliant! He should have got the Nobel Prize above Bob Dylan! His voice was sexy as hell! He couldn't sing.

² I know someone's going to say "Taylor Swift!" and it's true she doesn't have a powerful voice, but a) she works hard with what she does have and b) she's not actually bad, she's just not spectacularly good.