Me
I am an engineer working in an industrial research laboratory in Cambridge, Massachussets. Besides science and engineering, I like to play tennis, take pictures, and look at birds and stars. I read primarily out of a love of language, often out of curiosity and sometimes out of the desire for an unusual experience. On this blog, I write about books, articles and other reading paraphernalia. Lately, I have taken to writing about my birdwatching experiences as well. I maintain a chronicle of bird sightings.
Mirkwood
Mirkwood (literally “Murky Wood”) is the name of a large forest in the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. It is the home of the Elves of Middle Earth, and appears in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Blogging platform and theme
This blog is hosted by WordPress.com. I like them, but I wish they didn’t put ads on my blog when I am not looking. I have used the Custom CSS feature to override the default K2-lite theme and to add changes of my own.
Header Drawing
Ever since I read Mafe Maria’s wonderful tutorial on Bezier curves and saw a cool video demonstration by Veerle Pieters, I have been fascinated by vector graphics. The current header is a vector drawing of a white-breasted nuthatch. Before this, my header was Boy and Squirrel, vectorized from a small sketch that I drew in 2006.
Fair Use:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.5 License.
Commenting:
I welcome comments and and love responding to them. It is what makes blogging so interesting. This blog has a very short comments policy:
- All comments are moderated, and those deemed offensive or irrelevant shall not be approved.
- Please do not include your email address or personal contact information in the body of the comment. These will be deleted from the comment to prevent spam and identity theft.
Contact
To get in touch with me, please leave a comment below, or in any of the posts.
Congrats, i saw your site listed on 9rules
Hi
Welcome to 9rules.
Best wishes
John Baker
Hi Ralph and John:
Thanks very much. I hope that this helps me to improve the way I blog and that it connects me to many more litbloggers.
I just love the name of the blog, if you eve go for a new design go woody it would be great.
Thats a charming and generous “About” page, Polaris. I suppose it’s inevitable Litlove will eventually find herself the subject of 299 words. What is this 9rules, anyway? Thank you for reaching out to me at the Reading Room!
Thanks for visiting Mirkwood, David. I found your blog recently via litlove’s comments and am very intrigued by the concept of Very Short Novels.
About 9rules: It is a community of blogs with varying subjects and interests, ranging from tech blogs to personal blogs to literary blogs. 9rules has selection rounds every few months. I was lucky to be selected into their “Writing Community” in the most recent round, and Bloglily and Litlove made it as well! You will find a lot of 9rules info on 9rules.com and on the member blogs, especially the tech blogs.
Well, then, congratulations are in order and clearly well-deserved. You set a very high standard for clear thinking and writing here, Polaris, and could scarcely be in better company than Bloglily-and-Litlove’s!
I look forward to your comments at Very Short Novels.
Hello!
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hello
may i forward a query about a short story collection, Down to a Sunless Sea, which has garnered remarkable reviews of late (google my name)?
Kind Regards,
Matt Freese