Who knew knitting could be so dangerous...

I crocheted more last year than I have ever done before and finished numerous projects and felt fine.

In November I gathered together all my remnants of thick yarn and knitted myself a colourful, long, chunky scarf, using 10 mm knitting needles. The result was a repetitive strain injury on my left arm that will require lots and lots of rest, and no knitting OR crocheting for several weeks.

I‘ve had to put off the weightlifting programme I was planning to join and I‘m in more or less constant pain.

The worst part is that it‘s hard for me to hold a book or eReader comfortably for any length of time.

People, when it starts to hurt, just stop right away and take a break rather than try to finish the project.

Thank goodness for audiobooks.

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Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

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Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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