(This is the thirtieth installment of Dice Tales, an ongoing series of posts about RPGs as storytelling.) *** When you introduce a new character to an ongoing campaign, narrative integration is only one of the problems you face. The longer … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: July 2016
In this blog, I’ve had to focus on books written in English, because blogs are short, and English is the language I know best. I intend no slight to speakers and readers of other languages by doing so. I often … Continue reading
Ghosts in history first rose to my notice with Jaime Lee Moyer’s atmospheric, tense series beginning with Delia’s Shadow , set in San Francisco toward the end of World War I. This period coincides with the height of the Spiritualism … Continue reading
Boy, is it hot, huh? While I’m not dealing with temperatures quite as high as in the rest of the country, it’s still been an abnormally warm summer for us up here in Maine. The human is melting, and the … Continue reading
by Brenda W. Clough I nearly forgot to note here that today is the 150th birthday of Beatrix Potter. I didn’t read any of her works until the birth of my children, but they instantly became family favorites. I have … Continue reading
A recent study by the Pew Research Center showed that a substantial majority of the U.S. public is “wary” about enhancing human abilities by biomedical means. The survey – which used this methodology – asked people about gene editing in … Continue reading
Sometimes authors slip the names of real people and even their descriptions into their fiction. This is called “tuckerizing” after a fan named Bob Tucker, who made it a hobby to persuade as many writers as possible to name characters … Continue reading
Most people know what a ’meme’ is. The dictionary definition ’meme’ is: “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.” The dictionary … Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about the state of our garden. We have about 1/3 acre, much of which is under cultivation. Our orchard consists of 2 pear trees, 2 apple trees (one with 5 different varieties grafted … Continue reading
Scorned by suitors for her statuesque size, Harriet Stansbury bolts when her abusive stepfather begins negotiating with impecunious aristocrats to sell her for her dowry. When opportunity offers, she daringly takes a position in an eccentric household until she can claim her fortune.
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