Joanna Bourne

On this lovely afternoon I've been thinking about immortality ... not so much as a personal preference, but the way it's presented i...

I just enjoyed a short story by Carrie Vaughn, The Book of Daniel , in Kitty's Greatest Hits .  A nice historical shapeshifter short sto...

  They call bread the staff of life, using staff in the sense of “a long stick used as a support when walking or climbing or as a weapon”, w...

 I should get one of these tote bags ... It reads "Every girl needs her morning coffee before a day of wrecking ships and drowning men...

 A casual, wandering, interesting interview with Gaiman that touches on his writing methods. Find it here in a small review of American God...

I came across this in my reading.  The article considers, "How does the hero confront violence without becoming violent themself?...

  Some good books I read in the last little while. I got them as kindle books, borrowed from my library. Hunter , Elite , Apex (Hunter Nove...

I’ve been thinking about “The Setting as Protagonist.” That is, when setting acts in the story. When it has its own narrative. Fr'ins...

  I've been reading up on Vikings. Nothing deep or scholarly on my part, just random bits about the social order of Vikings. (n.b. This ...

While this below is probably most interesting to those exploring the Medieval world, I think it has larger interest. This is how these folks...

 It occurs to me that some folks have never seen carbon paper in action.  The first couple minutes of this program show somebody using it. ...

I was thinking the other day about how we create characters, since I'm trying to do some of that.   What are the ingredients we knead an...

I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm a language fuddyduddy, clinging to past-pull-date English. Language is a living thing. I don...

Came across this in Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs, in the heroine's viewpoint. A private detective is guarding a  client . He says o...

For those of you who want to be obscene but not heard. Or let your time travelling characters curse effectively while moving silently in a d...

Sometimes in the midst of a beautifully written story ⁠— in this case Coraline by Neil Gaiman — you find a little vibrating diamond of a ...

 So. Here 's what we get up to in this neck of the woods. Happened a few weeks ago. "Investigators from the Sheriff’s Office proce...

photocredit: veronika_andrews  8-10-21    More and more hummingbirds are coming to sip my sugar water. More and more butterflies nestle in m...

Netflix is showing two Rurouni Kenshin flicks. The first, Ruroumi Kenshin: The Beginning , gives us interesting plotting, subtle acting, com...

Rives Park -- local here -- has a nest of copperheads. Some poor dog got bit and they're worried whether he'll make it or not. Anima...

Both these movies have multi-racial casts and pass the Bechdel test. For me, that's icing on the cake rather than a requirement. But — ...

These books are full of good storytelling, fine characterization, lyrical language, and intelligent world building. Eminently readable. Some...

Here’s how to get rid of those old library book titles that ghost in your Mac computer’s Kindle list.   1) Caveats. A...

  Sometimes there's lovely cursing: “Who the fuck are they?” I asked.  “That’s the gentry and their servants,” said blond Bev. “All the ...

I recently reread Peter S. Beagle's The Folk of the Air ,  contemporary fantasy, one of my favorite books. It's also set in Berkele...

Since I took time off from all extraneous pursuits a month or so ago I've not only been getting my head together, I've found time to...

I have a little machine called a Eufy that glides around my floors and picks up dog hair and cat hair from underneath the chairs and the bed...

Listening to Clifford Brown in this collection   because it is so mellow. I put this in the background of re-reading. Aaronovitch's Moon...

An exciting weekend in which I set up my external hard drive. On a Mac this means buying a black plastic box the size of a good novel, fiddl...

I came across, "He’d lost an exponential amount of blood," in a book recently. The weakening of the word "exponential" f...