Sara Ryan

I decided it was about time I tried out black nail polish, as I have gone this far in my life without the experience.

Yes, I am going to Boston for the American Library Association Midwinter meeting. Very early in the morning tomorrow. I’ll be in YALSA meetings most of the time while I’m there, but [...]

I finally got around to uploading more photos to Flickr.  Popular subjects include architectural detail, street art, window displays, public transportation, the really cool hotel we stayed at in Rouen, the beach at Saint-Malo. Also: occasional evidence that Steve and I were present.

Prominent on my list of storytelling pet peeves is the Reasonless Revelation: wherein characters, unbidden or with only the slightest hint of prompting, share highly intimate details about their lives. It’s not credible! No one does that! I have been known to rant.
So today we’re in the airport waiting for our flight home, and a [...]

About to return to the Usual Undisclosed Location, which has less Internet than it once did. Gonna try to take advantage of this rather than simply decry the lack.
On a semi-related note, I read another one of those “You Can Get So Much Done If You Don’t Get Online After Five P.M., Srsly” articles today. [...]

Our first meal in Paris. You see the café au lait, the croque monsieur have not yet arrived.
There are many more France pictures, and I will no doubt post more as I get them organized, but I thought I would also put up a few lists that I made as advice to myself for future [...]

…and then my voice went hoarse and my head went strange, and I thought about all the coughing people to whom I was in close proximity during the recent travels. And then I coughed. A lot.
So instead: a picture, then Nyquil.

More beach glass than I’ve ever found before. Are people in St. Malo less obsessive [...]

No time for a long post yet, but:

Here I am on the street near our hotel in Paris.

View from our hotel room.

Detail from one of the pillars at the Musee Cluny.

Sundial designed by Salvador Dali.

Stickers Soup.

We saw several of these seriously tagged white vans.

These next few days aren’t the calm before the storm so much as the calm between the storms. (Storms of amazing opportunities, I hasten to add.)
This past weekend was the first time that I’ve had a being-an-author gig so close to a hosting-an-author gig, and the experience was exhausting but excellent. Thanks again to the [...]

Did you notice that it is already October?

(Not actually a gravestone. Part of a fountain.)
It is an exciting month, is October, so this post will have a lot of exclamation points. It’s a good thing I am fond of Portland International Airport (PDX), as I will be there more often than usual.
As I have previously [...]

As I mentioned, while I was in Los Angeles, I went to the Getty. Twice, actually. The second time, I saw Irving Penn: Small Trades. It’s an amazing exhibit: over 200 photographs, all portraits of people with the tools of their particular trades: chef with knife; seamstress with tape-measure, needle & thread; cobbler with [...]