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The sequel to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Miss Peregrine is being adapted for film by Tim Burton.

This is an excerpt from Allan Carreon’s interview with the New York Times bestselling YA authors Ransom Riggs and Tahereh Mafi. The full interview is here.

As young writers yourselves, what advice would you give to aspiring young writers?

Ransom: You can’t device a lecture to teach someone how to write a book. It’s all instinct and feel, and reading a lot just helps your brain get used to the shape of a book and all of the different ways that story can be told and a character can be developed. It’s really important to develop a library of possibilities in your brain so that when you’re writing your own characters…you immediately have a million possibilities.

Joker, a 6-month-old Scottish Fold from Francis Bonnevie’s cattery, participated in All About Cats, a show sanctioned by The International Cat Association, at Resorts World Manila last week.

How do you get a cat to drink more water?

What can you do to dissuade the cat from sharpening his claws on the most expensive piece of furniture in the house? (Because cats, being possessed of impeccable taste, know how to identify the one item in the household whose destruction would cause you the most pain.)

What’s a human to do in the midst of a feline territorial war?

Is your cat really attempting to kill you? Why, why, why, when you are her humble servant?

What is Joker telling The Cat Whisperer?

We spoke to The Cat Whisperer Mieshelle Nagelschneider, who was in town last week for the All About Cats show at Resorts World Manila. She gave us some practical advice that made us smack our foreheads and cry, “Why didn’t we think of that!”

Listen to our podcast with The Cat Whisperer. The podcast is available for streaming, downloading, or subscription on iTunes.

Joker and his 3-month-old cousin, Lambert.

Thanks to the Public Relations team of Resorts World Manila for arranging the interview.

There are only four episodes left in Season 4, then a year-long wait for Season 5. We may have to wait longer than that for George R.R. Martin to publish book six of A Song of Ice and Fire, The Winds of Winter. Experience has shown that nagging GRRM to write faster does not work; worse, he reacts to the whingeing by taking on more side projects.

The history of Westeros, out in October

Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have said that they know how the story ends. It is likely that the TV series will end before the books do. It is not likely that the HBO series will go on hiatus in order to wait for the two remaining books to be written. The child actors are growing fast—good thing Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who plays Bran Stark, is seated all the time because he’s now as tall as the adults.

The current season features events from the second half of A Storm of Swords, and from A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons, which are simultaneous in the Westerovian timeline, having been the same book until GRRM chopped it in two. (Hence the early appearance of Reek, for instance.) We have no problem with the way the TV series diverges from the source material—for instance, the way Vargo Hoat became Locke, who became involved in the lives of two characters linked by crippling. There was a controversy over the apparent rape at the wake, which may or may not have happened in A Storm of Swords, where the scene is told from Jaime’s POV. That is a murderous, incestuous pair—they cannot be expected to behave. Yes, there is plenty of violence against women on the show—that is the world they live in, and that is what Arya, Daenerys, Brienne and the other female characters are up against, making their triumphs especially awesome.

We like the changes to the character of Shae, who in the books is a simple whore. On the show she is smart and fiercely loyal—when she told Varys that she would kill for Sansa, it took us by surprise. It would not bother us at all if the show’s writers change Shae’s storyline, in fact we hope they do. (Also, we hope Syrio Forel is still alive.) The Jaime and Brienne romance is hinted at in the series (mostly through lingering glances), but it is, shall we say, non-canonical. The almost-encounters of the Stark siblings are heart-rending.

With the recent revelation as to who got the whole Game of Thrones started in the first place, plus the seemingly accidental revelation that legendary characters do exist, where do you think the story is headed? How does it end? Does R+L equal J? Who is Azor Ahai and is he the prince who was promised, or are they two different people?

Presumably Daenerys rides Drogon; who are the other two dragon riders? What was the point of recasting Daario Naharis when neither is particularly interesting? Why is Grey Worm so cute? How can he and Missandei get together when he is Unsullied? Where is Rickon? Is Jaquen H’ghar still around, just wearing a different face? When will someone get reanimated? Who wins the Game of Thrones?

It goes without saying that spoilers abound in Comments, but we’ll say it anyway.

P.S. Here’s a Peter Dinklage Game of Thrones theme that is vastly superior to the rotating Tyrion version that everyone sent us two weeks ago.

via deathandtaxes

Tennis in 1600. Image from BibliOdyssey.

Tennis has always been – beneath the flannelled pomp – an outsiders’ sport. For all the glamour of its major stars, the A-list oligarchy of Roger-Rafa-Novak, it remains in a small but vital way a sport liked by people who don’t necessarily like sport. And not just liked, but pored over, cherished, meditated upon and generally engaged with in a way that seems distinct from the more garrulous engagements with other mass spectator sports. It isn’t hard to see why. Tennis is a strangely intimate spectacle. At times it can resemble less a display of athletic excellence than a revelation of personality, glimpsed through the familiar repartee of serve, rally, volley, drop shot, winner. Then there is that touchingly stark on-court isolation. No other sport presents its players so nakedly to the world, alone in all that space, surrounded only by ball-grabbers and towel-handlers, engaged in the most mannered of arm’s-length emotional wrestling matches. Little wonder it is so easy to identify rather too closely with a tennis player, to imagine those distant professional athletes as warriors, victims, heroes, friends and general objects of private obsession.

Read the review of Love Game by Elizabeth Wilson at The Literary Review.

Chef Chris Locher of My Kitchen in Paco, Manila has not only overcome his recent health issue, he’s opened an excellent new restaurant on Jupiter in Makati. Last week Stella organized a dinner for six hard-boiled media practitioners who know that when Stella says, “You have to try this restaurant,” the only acceptable response is, “Sure!” It’s like the part in the first Terminator where the T-800 has laid waste to a club and Kyle Reese tells Sarah Connor, “Come with me if you want to live.” You just go.

Pinoy Original CoBe

The restaurant is called Recess, and Chef Chris describes its menu as “eclectic comfort food”. To us, all food is comfort food, not eating food being a prime source of discomfort.

Chef Chris is probably best known for his invention of the thin pizza that you eat in strips with alfalfa sprouts and arugula rolled up in them—a genius way of making people like us eat our vegetables. He can’t use the name of his creation because it belongs to the restaurant he used to work with. At Recess, this dish is called The Original. This being the Philippines, we prefer D’Original.

The Original comes in a dozen varieties, all named after elements you can see on the ceiling designed as a stylized periodic table. We tried three of the all-day breakfast specials: the CoBe—sauteed corned beef, egg, caramelized onions and potatoes with fresh marjoram; the PoTo—finely-sliced pork tocino, red onions and salted egg; and our favorite, the TiTo—tinapang bangus bits, tomatoes, itlog na pula and fresh red onions.

We were only going to pretend to eat our greens, but it had been a sweltering day and the Recess Salad of mixed greens, grapes, apples, oranges, cherry tomatoes in a grapeseed oil dressing with caramelized almonds was so refreshing.

In fact we even tried another salad: the J50 with romaine hearts in gorgonzola, pears, a 7-minute boiled egg, and bacon. Bacon makes everything better. To think that as we trudged towards Recess on that hot night, we were telling ourselves that it was too hot to eat. We were wrong hahahaha.

At this point we could’ve ended the meal and gone home happy, but there was more. Risotto orbs—crispy fried risotto balls with two cheeses, chorizo and herbs.

A juicy tuna steak with chimichuri sauce.

The very tender Carolina-style barbecued mustard lamb ribs. Good thing there were six of us sharing the dishes, or we might’ve eaten ourselves into a food coma. The portions are good for sharing, and by “sharing” we mean “can feed two people who are not on a diet or some other deprivation plan.”

If we’d been responsible adults, we probably would’ve declined dessert. Luckily, we are not. There was lemon cheesecake,

a decadent chocolate cake that went beyond decadent,

and a light, delectable Pavlova. Next to it you see our glass—we finished most of a bottle of Chardonnay and were useless for the rest of the evening. Useless, but happy.

A meal for two consisting of one mini-size The Original, one salad, one lamb ribs and one dessert comes to about Php550 per person. With a glass of wine, add Php200. For the whole shebang described above, probably Php1,500+ per person.

Recess by Chef Chris is at 50 Jupiter Street, Bel-Air, Makati, between Paseo de Roxas and Makati Avenue. Visit their Facebook page. For reservations, call (02) 899 1818.

Sherwin Nuland, the brilliant surgeon and author of How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, died in March. (Read Remembering A Surgeon Who Healed With Words. The article has links to his articles at the New Republic.)

Dr. Nuland wouldn’t have written his great works if he hadn’t recovered from a crushing depression leading to his confinement in a mental hospital. When all the available treatments and medications had failed to bring him back from the black pit, a resident suggested electroshock therapy. Those of us who watch too many movies (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Frances) think of electroshock therapy as a form of torture that turns its victims into zombies, but as Nuland recounts in his moving TED talk from 2001, it was his resurrection.

Oddly enough, after watching this TED talk, we picked up Andrew Sean Greer’s The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, in which the heroine undergoes shock treatment for her depression…and travels through time. (First impression: The plot is very similar to that of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which came out in the same year.)