Kathryn McConaughy's Feast of Adventures

Hi, all! I’ve been catching up on my friends’ blogs after my adventures in Israel and found a really fun post over on Dreams and Dragons, the blog of one of my fellow fairy-tale retellers, Sarah Pennington.   She used the Talk to Transformer interface to see how her stories would begin if she fed the first few lines to the Transformer, then let the AI generate the next few sentences.   I tried this with some of my own stories, and the AI gave me such wacky results that I just had to share! “Guardian of our Beauty” (published in Rooglewood’s Five Magic Spindles anthology) is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty set in ancient Syria.   Below, the sentences in bold are mine and the rest comes from the Transformer. 1. And it happened in the days of the great heroes, in the years of the warrior-shepherds, that the king of Gubla had no son. (He even begged a wife from the King of the Four Quarters, the master of the Black-Headed People; but the Great King did not ...

Camel rides at the Dead Sea   I spent the month of June digging at an archaeological site in Israel, which was great fun.   I was digging in the Judean desert in sight of Jericho, so we were in the West Bank.  The West Bank is pretty economically depressed... the modern town of Jericho is full of half-built businesses, including a theme park that never seems to have opened.  The area where we were digging is inhabited only by Bedouin, who herd goats all over those mountains.  (We had to chase goats out of the road every day!)  It is definitely not an agricultural area.  Even the weeds on the mountain we climbed every morning hug the ground and look dry and unhappy by this time of year.  The little boys who herd goats around our site thought we were very interesting.  They would come and share our food and grin at us.  The littlest boy had a donkey that he would ride around as he followed the goats.   Up the l...