Just a note to say that the inactivity around here the past few days hasn’t just been due to Christmas running-around, but to my now-traditional Christmas Flu (or possibly Christmas Really Bad Cold. Tough to say). I seem to be on the mend, so hope to be posting again regularly soon. And to have fiction […]

Earlier tonight I watched a copy of an episode of the PBS TV show Nova about the building of medieval cathedrals. Some fascinating material in there, and solid information, though I felt it was jazzed up a bit more than needed (architectural surveyors use LASERS! Also, medieval masons may have incorporated references to the Bible […]

It’s been a while since I reviewed the posts I’ve put up here on the blog, so I’ll just do that now.

I’ve got a new post up at Black Gate about my bad habits in reading. It’s stuff that’s difficult to articulate, but I think I managed to express myself. I’m particularly happy I managed to mention the way sentences in prose act like panels in comics, insofar as I’m increasingly fascinated by the disjunction between […]

I wrote a bit the other day about how I used the ‘random article’ feature of Wikipedia to inspire names for the various dungeon levels in Fell Gard. More and more I’m finding it useful as a source for inspiration for other names and ideas. Even if sometimes I have to go pretty far afield […]

A 2005 Livejournal post by Scott Lynch has gotten a fair bit of play over the past few days. It’s a nice piece in which he demolishes a critic who wrote in to complain about the existence of a middle-aged female pirate in one of Lynch’s books (oddly, the reader claims female pirates are unrealistic […]

One new thing I added to the revision of Fell Gard is a set of names for the various levels of the dungeon. Or, more precisely, I added the idea that the levels have names. I haven’t given each of the names, but added a couple where they seemed appropriate. I’ll get to a full […]

I’ve got  a new post up at Black Gate, trying to put into words what makes J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth’s Moonshadow so powerful. I don’t know if I wholly succeeded. Judge for yourself here.

This isn’t really to do with anything I typically intend to cover on this blog, but: with the negotiations for the new NHL collective bargaining agreement looking to have gone through one of their periodic collapses, it’s worth remembering one of the odd ironies involved in the whole thing. Which is that the owners who’re […]

After having written all that I did about the aleatory process of Fell Gard, one last thought struck me. That is this: every writer builds (or grows, pick your metaphor) a story out of their life experience. That experience comes in many forms — things that happen to the writer personally, things they hear about, […]