A Dildo in Nantucket

A story about the wives of seldom-home whalers and their dildos, aka “he’s-at-homes”
Whaling“On Nantucket, 80-year-old Connie Congdon and I sat in her living room looking at the 120-year-old plaster dildo that a mason had found in her chimney,” Ben Shattuck writes at Literary….’No mistaking what it is,’ Connie said, as I turned it in my hand..”
By 1830, the average length of a whaling voyage was more than two years and some longer. Nantucket wives were dubbed “Cape Horn widows,” because their husbands might be gone for eight years. …The dildos, sometimes called “he’s-at-homes”, were meant to be some insurance of fidelity for the absentee husband.
Read the whole story HERE
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OH MY GOURD     
The Best Pumpkin Carving On YouTube    
Pumpkin CarvingHalloween is nearly upon us again. Lets take a moment to appreciate the incredible talent that goes into truly great pumpkin carving.
Watch the video HERE
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30 great opening lines in literature
From Jane Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” (Pride and Prejudice);  to Kurt Vonnegut’s “All this happened, more or less.” (Slaughterhouse Five)
or
It was the day my grandmother exploded.” ~ Iain Banks: The Crow Road
The CrowSee all the others HERE
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To write a story or build a world, you need…
The five W’s and an H
Before reporting became a dying craft, every newbie was taught that a news story had to answer five fundamental questions:
Who, What, Where, When, Why
… and sometimes, How.
In fiction, these questions are just as fundamental, and I’m going to discuss them one at a time in a series of essays at Book View Cafe, using my own series, The Were Chronicles, to illustrate my points.
The first essay is all about Who
And you can read it HERE
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30 great one-liners
Ambrose Bierce
Picture: Rex Features
War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.’ ~ Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary
 
And then there’s:’If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.~ Dorothy Parker
See them all HERE
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Buzzfeed offers
24 Tweets every Book Lover will appreciate
I used to love correcting people’s grammar until I realized what I loved more was having friends.” ~ Mara Wilson @MaraWritesStuff
~
Ever realised how fucking surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly” ~ Katie Oldham @KatieOldham
Read the other Tweets HERE
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O.K. I’ll have to admit that I had never knew that corn mazes even existed until I heard about
Literally Literary Corn Mazes
If y’all don’t know about them either, Wikipedia explains “A corn maze or maize maze is a maze cut out of a corn field…They have become popular tourist attractions and are a way for farms to generate tourist income. Many are based on artistic designs such as characters from literature …some are created to tell stories.”
For example, Book Riot tells us about
Corn MazeKruger’s Monster Mash Maze in Sauvie Island, Oregon, brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula to life.
I think getting lost in a corn maze…a book and bag full of Halloween candy sounds like a perfect day,” Jamie Canaves writes at Book Riot.
See other literary corn mazes HERE
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Quote of the Day
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.” ~ Arthur Miller
 
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Alma Alexander       My books       Email me
 
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