I’ve just returned from DC after a week away–back to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. Seeing my family again drove home just how much I missed them, but also how much I enjoy living on my own. It’s a balance between different sources of comfort and stress, I suppose, especially after as rough a year as this…
Category: Blog Posts
It’s Been a Grand Weekend
Especially for Whovians. Also those still mourning the passing of John Fitzgerald Kennedy–now that’s a morbid cosmic coincidence. And somewhere between joy and tragedy lie the Hobbit fans, with the Battle of Five Armies also falling on November 23rd (warning: may be spoilers through the wikia link). For me, it’s also been the culmination of…
Review: “Collegium Sorcerorum: Thaddeus of Beewicke” by Louis Sauvain
Another prize from the LibraryThing giveaways program, this one even came with a courteous letter from the author himself. I’m always one to be impressed by presentation, and the presentation of this book was fine indeed: I was especially impressed by the dozen or so illustrations by Sean Bodley scattered throughout the text. The back…
Review: Serving Time by Nadine Ducca
For this review, another thank you is in order to the LibraryThing giveaways program, and of course Nadine Ducca herself for offering the first volume of her Timekeepers trilogy. I’m a winner once again! Although I was often confused over what was going on, the original mythological background of Serving Time was strong from the…
Happy National Novel Writing Month!
For several hundred thousand writers, the great challenge of the year has just launched: for the next 30 days, they will be scrambling to maintain a semi-functional life while also producing 1,667 words per day, to end with a 50,000 word story on December 1st. I wish them luck. While I can’t deny the glories…
Review: Heaven’s Needle by Liane Merciel
You know how I said The White-Luck Warrior became horror a few pages in? The White-Luck Warrior would take one look at one page of Heaven’s Needle and run away crying. Which is why, despite it being marketed as high fantasy, Heaven’s Needle is my review of choice for Hallow’s Eve this year. (That’s a…
Return from the 18th Century
It may say something about how much I’ve traveled this year that I have not purchased a single bottle of conditioner, instead relying on the cute little bottles they give you in hotel bathrooms. I’d have the same record for soap but this weekend at Colonial Williamsburg their scented and fun-shaped “soap balls” were too…
Review: The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott Bakker
The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott BakkerFifty pages in, I realized I had come to approach this as a horror story rather than epic fantasy, as if I was reading Stephen King or the Lovecraft Unbound anthology. I read horror in a much more defensive mode, trying not to get invested in any character’s survival,…
Useful Things of the Week
I don’t know if I’m actually going to make this a weekly post, but I suppose it depends on how much cool and useful stuff I find over the course of the week. An excellent quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Airman’s Odyssey comes to mind as I revise another article: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing…
Personal Organization with “The Ultimate List”
From GetYeDone to scribbles on post it notes, I think it’s pretty clear that I love to-do lists. They give at least the illusion of control over a busy writer’s life, allowing me to organize tasks verbally and spatially, and most of all there’s something very satisfying about striking through my latest conquest. Only recently, though,…