Tales From the Delta Quadrant
In a recent post at Vox Popoli, Vox Day dropped a heckuva a bon motte regarding Mary Sue characters: Authors have a tendency to reveal more about themselves than they realize… That sentence fragment got my noggin joggin’ about the novels that I’ve written to date, and my current work in progress...
The Pre-Tolkien Challenge, Algernon Blackwood
This past weekend, The Barbarian Book Club challenged his fellow bloggers to read three Fantasy stories written before Lord of the Rings was published, review all three on your blog, focusing on pre-Tolkien differences of similarities, and making sure you let us know where we can find them for...
No Escape, No Surrender
We’ve heard this song before. That’s the refrain they always use. The last verse always, always wraps things up with a theme and variation on, “There’s no room in this hobby for those of you who have been here for decades.” Let’s make a few predictions based on past...
Infowars Fallout
The unpersoning of InfoWars by tech giants finally happened. For months they and their enablers in the corporate media have been rumbling that “something must be done” about those uppity flyover rubes forgetting their place. Having already chased numerous other unpersons out of the new public square, they grow...
The Pre-Tolkein Challenge
Alexandru Constantine, the barbarian book clubber, has an intriguing idea that should appeal to all fans of fantastic literature. In his words… Identify 3 Fantasy stories written before Lord of the Rings was published. 3 stories written before 1954. Review all three on your blog, focusing on pre-Tolkien differences...
Living in Omelas
Spoilers ahoy! You’ve been warned. I was holding out for today, but Emperor Ponders ain’t got no time for people who wait too long to read the good stuff. His summary of “Law of the Wolves” is note perfect. He compares it to Dunsany, and he ain’t wrong. His...
It’s Not Too Late
Among the recent crop of short fiction startup magazines, Cirsova holds a special place in my heart. The editor’s determination to produce old school short fiction – the sort of thing that had become as rare as hen’s teeth in today’s market – inspired me to pick up the...
Life in the Hot Zone
Wildfires broke out all around the Mollison homestead this past weekend. While working on the last few passages of my latest novel – part of a much larger project you’ll get the full dirt on this August 21st – we could smell the smoke, but didn’t worry. These things...
Mortu and Kyrus
Walk, don’t run, to your local Amazon store and download Schuyler Hernstrom’s latest work. Mortu and Kyrus rocks. It’s as good as anything he’s written, and contains some major twists that make discussions of the book difficult without ruining the surprise. Which is a shame, because this is a...
This is Not a Game
Yeah, so this came across my transom recently, and it’s not…good. Not even by D5D standards. There’s a lot to dissect here, a lot of threads to tug on to unravel the knotted misery of this title, but let’s start with the title as a gaming supplement. Does it...