(This is the second installment of Dice Tales, an ongoing series of posts about RPGs as storytelling.) *** The participants in an RPG often get divided into two camps. On the one hand you have the players; on the other … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: January 2016
by Brenda W. Clough My latest theory is that crumpets and pancakes are long-lost cousins. Consider how similar they are. A pourable batter, made of milk, eggs and flour, lightened with a riser and enriched with sugar and butter or … Continue reading
From Part 1, Sept. 19, 2015: A visceral sense of place is very important to me when writing my novels, and after setting them in far-flung locales, I’m bringing this new novel-in-progress home to my back yard. Growing up … Continue reading
I suspect that most people have a blimpcoat.
Oh, not exactly a *blimpcoat*–they have an article of clothing that they can’t bear to part with because there are times it is indispensable. More than once you toss it in the box for charity, or even into the rag bag.
Later, you retrieve it. Because.
Continue readingPacifica by Jill Zeller Leaving is the same as arriving. In pursuit of her art, fleeing an unhappy affair, Nola Lynch sails from New York, through the Panama Canal, to California. Alone. The year is 1914. Nola anticipates romance, excitement, … Continue reading
David Graeber has a different – and delightful – explanation for why we don’t have flying cars, not to mention Moon colonies and the other futuristic advances we were promised in the 1950s and 60s. In a word: bureaucracy. Not … Continue reading
Netflix’s streaming show Jessica Jones wants to be cutting edge. We have a hard-bitten female protagonist who is smart, mouthy, drinks too much, sleeps with men while deliberately avoiding emotional contact, lives in a squalor she ignores, and has super-strength. … Continue reading
The January issue of the Book View Cafe newsletter is now out. It provides links to our latest releases, plus a bunch of specials, one of them free. Newsletter readers will also meet BVC newest member, Kristine Smith, whose Code … Continue reading
King Dave Flaherty has everything a guy could wish for: all the overtime gigs, all the waitresses, and, if not the universal friendship of his peers, at least none of them dares try anything on the son of the president of the Chicago stagehands local. King Dave wants more than that, though, and it’ll save him in two ways. One, it’ll save him from having to be an old-fashioned stagehand in a modern world, where a collitch degree and skills with fancy equipment are called for. And two, it’ll save him from the fate worse than death threatened by Nadine Fisher, a nineteen-year-old small town preacher’s daughter who’s run away from Texas to wait tables in the diner next door to the Auditorium Theatre. Nadine wants to make a better man of King Dave. But that’s not the fate worse than death.
Continue readingOh, forever ago when I was young and foolish and had just moved back to New York City from Boston, I took a job at an investment bank. I had lived in dorms, or with room-mates, since I left home … Continue reading