And STAY out.
Good morning, Internets, and a very happy new year to you. I had planned to go to Christchurch and join friends for New Year’s Eve, but the recent quake and heavy aftershocks prompted a schedule change. Instead, I brought in the season playing cards with my mother and youngest brother, who insisted, after a few false starts, that we hold hands and sing Auld Lang Syne. There are many worse ways to greet the New Year than safe, warm, well-fed and singing with one’s family. And there may not really be any bad way to bid goodbye to 2011, a year that sucked most heartily on a number of...
read moreThat’s In A Name
I’m a nerd who lives on the internet and has a reasonably common name and a couple of email accounts, so I am often made aware of the existence of other Karen Healeys. Sometimes I learn about these other people who share my name when I get email intended for them. There’s a Karen Healey in the USA who is a deeply Christian woman with a large circle of friends who haven’t all updated their address books from a mistype a couple of years back. They are all very nice when I notify them of this error, and frequently promise to pray for me, which I’d rather they...
read moreRight.
My fabulous sister currently has a job at a dairy farm, which entails getting up at 4am, bossing cows around, coming home at about noon, and going back to work in the evening until about six or seven. Then she comes home, washes the cow poop out of her hair, and goes for a hearty run. I tend to go to bed at 4am, and wake up at noon (which is convenient for hang-out potential!), the closest I generally come to a cow is deciding which part of it to eat, and… well, I do actually enjoy jogging, but my version of it involves running until I get tired, walking until I feel like running again,...
read moreCreepy Cake N Bake: Dark Chocolate Teacup Puddings
Mmm, bakery. I love baking. I like weird things. I like doing weird things with baking. But after the delicious mess that was Dead Dinosaur Trifle earlier this year, I feared that I wouldn’t be able to top myself for the Creepy Cake N Bake-a-thon, where authors bake things in a TERRIFYING manner. So I went simple, and, in keeping with the theme, I went dark. This recipe is not suitable for vegans, people with coeliac disease, or people with tree-nut allergies (although you can probably substitute the heck out of things at will). All photos illustrate the text without any additional...
read moreAnxiety, Keri, and Me
So my friend John runs this thing where he invites people to talk about the Big Idea that lies behind their novel. Wherein! I talk about my anxiety disorder, and The Shattering, and where Keri came from without me realising it. But of course Keri wasn’t really like me. She was a biracial teenager from a low-income family who wasn’t afraid of physical violence and loved sports. I was a white woman in my late twenties who shied away from physical confrontation and thought that sports were doubtless very nice for those who enjoyed them. I had far more in common with the other two narrators;...
read moreHow To Make A Birthday Cake
Your friend Tessa is turning thirty! She is going to celebrate this in your favourite cocktail bar, 1806, where they make the bitter chocolate martinis just right. Clearly, the classy thing is to bake her a birthday cake in the shape of a dinosaur and bring it to the bar. Here are the step-by-step instructions! 1: Search the internet for dinosaur cake pans. Bemoan the lack of selection. Find a perfect one for super cheap – so cheap that shipping more than doubles the price. Bonus! Click order. 2: Inform your and Tessa’s mutual friends that you are going to bring her a dinosaur...
read moreAbout Karen
Karen Healey is a young adult novelist. She is the author of the urban fantasies GUARDIAN OF THE DEAD and THE SHATTERING, both set in New Zealand, and the forthcoming sci-fi adventure WHEN WE WAKE. GUARDIAN OF THE DEAD won the 2010 Aurealis Award for Best YA Novel and was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award. Karen can tell you a lot about baking, covers of "Hallelujah" and superhero comics.
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