Category Archives: Uncategorized

Realizing that endings give me trouble, I’m paying closer attention to them. I read two books with unsatisfactory endings this week,  and one with a thoroughly satisfying ending.  ‘The Baron in the Trees’ by Italo Calvino had an ending that … Continue reading →

Discworld convention, that is — I’m at the North American Discworld Convention in Madison, my first encounter with Pratchett fandom, and a really engaging one. It’s hard to believe, now that Terry Pratchett is a household name, but fifteen years … Continue reading →

Heading to North American Disc World convention day after tomorrow, wondering when it is appropriate to wear a shoulder dragon in Madison.  Are there rules — labor day, sun over yardarm, etc? TweetFacebookLinkedInTumblrStumbleDiggDelicious

I bought two artworks at the Lakefront Festival of the Arts this year, and only after getting them home did I realize that both of them appealed to me because they looked as if they came out of books. The … Continue reading →

The quote is from “Being in Being: the collected works of a master Haida mythteller, Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighaway,” translated by Robert Bringhurst. The stories were transcribed phonetically in 1900, in what were then called the Queen Charlotte Islands … Continue reading →

Fantasy writers often pay lip service to the difficulties readers can encounter when entering a new mythology (our own), but it’s easy to forget just how opaque an unfamiliar genre can be. In my own work, I count on familiarity … Continue reading →

I came home from church and sat down to catch up on twitter.  And what did I see but something from @jafurtado – a link to this Globe and Mail article about how Harlequin romance was revolutionizing the epublishing market. … Continue reading →

This book struck me as old-fashioned, and I mean that an an unambiguous compliment. I might have picked it off my father’s bookshelf forty years ago, when I was living at home and enjoyed books set in imperial China. My … Continue reading →

Arthur Rackham is one of my all-time favorite illustrators, so I was excited to see Stacy Ericson’s iphone images manipulated to look like Rackham paintings. They made me wonder about illustration.  Illustration in adult fantasy has been sparse and (to … Continue reading →