Cinnamon and Improvisation

Posting light today due to legal shenanigans yesterday. But I did bake cinnamon rolls, from Gluten-Free 101,

Worldbuilding: Giving Monsters a Modern Twist, Part 2

If I were going to create a monster, I’d dig for train tracks.

That probably gave you an urban image. Or an Old West one. Nope. The tracks I’m thinking of were in the Northeast, long-abandoned,

Worldbuilding: Giving Monsters a Modern Twist, Part 1

If you get a chance to check out Matthew Meyer’s three books on youkai (The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, and most recently The Book of the Hakutaku), do it. Not just for the wide variety of monsters. Although any book that has a youkai that specifically sets people’s raincoats on fire

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Worldbuilding: Dread Powers

This is probably more of a fantasy worldbuilding thing than an SF one. Which is a shame. The more intelligent a creature is, the more likely it is to spot patterns. I extrapolate from that to suspect any creature of human-level intelligence

A Few Heart-Shaped Musings

So. Valentine’s Day. AKA the day I used to sit back in bemusement and watch the scrambling, waiting for tomorrow and half-off chocolate.

These days I’m still bemused,

Book Review: The Front-Yard Forager

The Front-Yard Forager: Identifying, collecting, and cooking the 30 most common urban weeds, by Melany Vorass Herrera. 4.5 out of 5 stars, excellent descriptions, clear photos, and a lot of good background information on each edible. But I haven’t personally tried eating most of the plants in here,

Worldbuilding: Bits and Bobs

The news recently mentioned an auction where you could pick up “moderately priced bits of interplanetary rubble”. As in, meteorites; from the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere.

Worldbuilding: Reason for War

War is what happens when one side tries to grab something the other side doesn’t think it should have.

Crossing Genres; Or, You Got Spaceships In My Fantasy!

Growing up with old books is like growing up with old music. You end up with preferences that may not sort to modern classifications of taste. The overarching category of fantastic fiction predates the modern bookshelf split between fantasy, SF, and horror by several decades,

Like Pitons Into a Cliff

I recently ran across a time travel fixit fic whose end lines struck to the heart.

“She’d snatched the sword out of his hands and stamped it to the ground before he could do anything with it,