Path of Lava Crossover Ficbit – Not Okay

A/N: Tax forms argh, so another ficpost….

Leaning back in the passenger seat, Sonny sighed. “Okay. For the last time – and after three months of cold shoulder, I really hope this is the last time – I’m not going to say I’m sorry. Masquerade, partner. It’s how we live. How we keep things like the Inquisition from coming back again; and they killed a lot more humans than Kindred, okay?”

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Path of Lava Crossover Ficbit – Enter the Hapless Detective

“You lost, Detective?” The uniformed sergeant’s eyes were cold as he stood watch on the edge of the bloody San Francisco alley, the kind of chill a cop used to close down the hurt of lost officers and turn it on the scum who’d killed them. “Think we got just a garden-variety psycho, here.”

Worldbuilding: Ground Truths

Everyone has their own ideas of what they’d want to introduce to another world or time; everything from pizza, chocolate and shampoo to water filtration, basic sanitation, and vaccination. All of those are good things. But there are a few smaller things in particular I’d introduce to a place and time that didn’t have them, that most isekai or time travel books never notice. Specifically, steel-ground grain, information about vitamin C, and punctuation marks.

Crossover Ficbit: Path of Lava

Okay, long story short. I need to put in a lot of hours to pay off various bills, and I’m trying to still keep making progress on Colors. So… I’m dusting off a long and unfinished fanfic (at least 8 chapters!) and planning to use bits of that as posts here for days when brain is not braining. Chapters will go up on AO3 as I post through each one.  So… have a bit of Path of Lava. Warning, there’s some bloodshed….

A Bit of Map Squee

This is not going to be a full book review of Korean History in Maps, edited by Michael D. Shin, because I just got it and have started flipping through it to read. It is going to be some gleeing instead. Because this is an example of a good worldbuilding source, with the kind of information you want to build a basic structure for your story setting.

Worldbuilding: Secret Tunnel

…Ahem. Go ahead, keep humming, it fits. As you will see.

One of the useful things about alternate history for a writer (especially alternate history with magic) is that it lets you fudge a few things. Yes, still do all the research you can, but if there’s info you can’t get or that no one today knows, you can make your best (or most entertaining) guess and call it a day. This lets you maximize the neatness of the bits you do find, and make things shiny. Because reading is like being a magpie sometimes; I want that shiny bit and that one and that one….

Book Review: Wickedly Dangerous

Wickedly Dangerous, by Deborah Blake. Hmm… I’d give this urban fantasy about 4.5 out of five stars. It was a good read that kept me turning pages, and I’d like to get the rest of the series, but I would have liked a plot that gave the male romantic lead, Sheriff Liam McClellan, a bit more of an active role in defeating the bad guys. He plays a good part in the story, and this isn’t a problem that could be solved by more gunfire, but – I would have liked a little more partnership in the story. With Liam doing more active sheriff-y things while Barbara Yager (a Baba Yaga) handles the magic.

On Writing: Of Laundry and Other Disasters

Sometimes the best solution to one problem is to make a different problem, that’s then easier to clean up.

Take laundry. If you’ve done it yourself, and I suspect most of us have, you’ve inevitably made mistakes. Such as, oh, leaving things in the pockets.

Worldbuilding: 1600s Worries

Okay, let’s say you’re dumping your hapless character into the 17^th century. As I am, and many other writers have also played with – the 1632 series has some awesome books. But that’s at least twelve years later than when I’m aiming, and in the real-life timeline those twelve years make some significant differences in the setting. So what do Jason, Mary, and any other possible airplane crash (or other) survivors have to worry about?

Book Review: The Troubled Empire

The Troubled Empire: China in the Ming and Yuan Dynasties, by Timothy Brook. I’m giving this history five out of five, this is exactly the ground-level info I wanted on climate, culture, and the rest of the time period for my points of historical divergence in Colors of Another Sky. And I plan to look up other books and articles by this author. Especially Vermeer’s Hat and everything he wrote on Xu Guangqi. For one thing, this author not only has an extensive bibliography, he sorts it into primary and secondary sources, so you can go straight to the source or read a myriad of interpretations….