The Round-Up: February 2025
A monthly miscellany of interesting links and tidbits
The Second Sentence reached a milestone this month—over 100 total subscribers! Thank you so much to everyone who has subscribed, followed, and shared.
I had a guest post this month over at the Literary Ladies’ Tearoom: Ten Fictional Female Detectives From Long Before Miss Marple. If you love vintage mystery fiction, you might find your next new favorite sleuth among the fictional lady detectives of all ages and personalities I highlighted in this post, who made their appearance between the 1860s and 1920s.
Last week, I was also guest on LA Talk Radio’s Rendezvous With a Writer podcast, along with Through Western Storms editor Richard Prosch and fellow contributors Scott McCrea and Denise F. McAllister. We got to talk about our own stories in the anthology, writing Westerns, inspiration, and more. You can catch the video of the interview here.
Speaking of podcasts, I hardly ever listen to them myself, but I just had to tune in to this great conversation between Grace Hamman and Susannah Black Roberts on the novels of Anthony Trollope.
In the wake of Amazon’s recent update to their Kindle terms, which now explicitly admit that ebook buyers only purchase a license to the content, I found myself thinking that the more everything becomes digitized, streamed, licensed, and stored-in-the-cloud, the more relevant this prescient passage from Louis L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man becomes. I love my Kindle and I love delving in online archives of books and historical documents, but I firmly agree with L’Amour that they should never replace their physical source material, and it is worrying that that seems to be happening in many cases.
For a counterpoint, an example of online archives being amazing: on Internet Archive, there’s a huge collection of concert programs for the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops orchestras beginning all the way back in the 1880s. Each volume, filled with information on the concerts and dozens of advertisements, is a fascinating time capsule of the year in question (for example, here’s the 1902-1903 season, and 1934-1935).
If you are like me, and think that Sense and Sensibility (1995) is one of the most beautiful and perfect movies ever, you may enjoy celebrating its 30th anniversary by watching this 40-minute making-of documentary from back at the time of its production. (Also, here’s a Twitter thread I did a couple years ago on the wonderful use of small floral nosegays in the set design.)
In 2012, the Saturday Evening Post revisited an article from one of their 1907 issues about a day in the life of a switchboard operator (or “hello girl”) in the early days of telephoning—and what the girls heard while eavesdropping on the wires!
I just rediscovered these: two albums of classic Disney songs arranged in the style of famous classical composers. “When You Wish Upon a Star” in the style of Strauss? Delightful. “Beauty and the Beast” à la Rachmaninoff: gorgeous. “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” as if written by Aaron Copland—what fun!
And in case you missed it, here’s my most recent bit of historical flash fiction:
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