Musings as the wheel of the year turns toward winter, and the veil thins between the living and the dead. NOTE: I’ll return to my Thailand virtual-vacation blog series next Saturday. Tonight is Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve, Samhain, on the … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Fantasy and science fiction have a very thorny relationship with the concept of essentialism. I’m not going to claim this problem is unique to the speculative genres; you also see … Continue reading
ROBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRY MEN: Sheriff of Nottingham What is any good story without a villain to drive the plot? The Robin Hood mythology provides the template for all great villain roles. In the movies, the truly great actors, … Continue reading
…or Mercury is in retrograde again and this time so is Mars or something and oy vey. This year. Let me put it this way. We lose power REGULARLY out here – we live in TREES and trees FALL OVER … Continue reading
Chicory Up Pixie Chronicles 2 by Irene Radford Being a Pixie King isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Chicory has always been a carefree ditch-weed of a Pixie. But now there’s a war brewing between Pixie tribes, and … Continue reading
(Picture from here.) Okay. It’s the pandemic. It’s been a godawful long time. I just saw one of my best friends, in person, for the first time in seven months. If you can call it that. We were both masked. We … Continue reading
Deities like to send plagues to, well, plague us. God, the one with the capital “G”, has done a lot of things, but one act is clear, it’s this popular deity who sent 10 plagues to Egypt as payback for … Continue reading
Your virtual Thailand vacation continues as Thor and I catch the ferry from Koh Samui to the mainland and Khao Sok National Park. NOTE: “And now for something completely different.” Thor and I made our first trip to Asia — … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Odds are extremely high that every single person reading this has given or received a gift at some point in their life. It can be a lot of fun, on … Continue reading
As we have already seen, the nineteenth century had some pretty memorable bad boys. Appropriately enough, the king of them all was, in fact, a king—Albert Edward (called Bertie by his family), who reigned in the United Kingdom from 1901 … Continue reading
