The Blue Night Blog

First off, the cover is gorgeous. Kudos, Mark. The artists you found did *right* by Pawly and that scene. Anyway, off to the actual review of WERECATS RESURGENT. “‘Mission Impossible’ grows fangs and claws! For lynx werecat Pawlina Katczynski and her loved ones, meeting their isolated Forest Brethren cousins in eastern Poland was both liberating…

Read More Review: Werecats Resurgent, by Mark J. Engels

After the suspiciously-fast progress of ‘Sun Bird’, I started thinking about more book art sculptures with carved-wood bird spines. Lo, I found the Second Bird! Hailing from Bisbee AZ but made who-knows-where, of two-toned mesquite or another desert wood, and very woodpecker-like…this 11″ long sculpture has a flat back that will be ideal to support…

Read More The Second and Third Birds

Tl;dr…if you aren’t a fabric craft geek, this post will just bore you. That’s okay. I’m taking aim at a beloved part of recent Fashion History and dissecting it. For the 2017-18 fashion season, Dior released a now legendary Tarot-inspired fabric coat. If you don’t know much about embroidery, this mix of fabric pieces and…

Read More Cheat Codes of the Dior Tarot Coat

What’s a Wonderwall? Okay, yes, it’s an angsty 1995 ballad from Oasis. I take my meaning from the original songwriters: a wall in their childhood home where they posted photos & quotes that inspired them. In their case, mostly football (soccer to Americans). The Women-With-Studios meme shows off some incredibly creative wonderwalls on Instagram and…

Read More The Wonderwall

This is a very long post! Scroll to the end to see a finished book art sculpture! A month ago I found this carved wooden bird in a plastic bag (with some other oddities) hanging on a wall hook at Goodwill. $3.49 for the whole bag. Stupidly, I walked away and left the bag on…

Read More A Bird, a Dream, a Book

Tldr: WERECATS EMERGENT is a great book if you like military adventure fantasy and kickass heroines coming of age, with *shapeshifting* feline humans.  The author’s homepage is here: mark-engels.com The book’s main Amazon page is here. Look at this cover. It’s subtle but it gets the point across. I had nothing to do with this…

Read More Review: WERECATS EMERGENT by Mark J. Engels

Since I’m doing this within a couple of months, here’s the cover art for my *terrible horrible cringefest* 1987 fantasy novel SILK OVER STEEL, soon to be on Ream.ink. As befitting something that at at the time was a juvenile pastiche (I was 22, c’mon) of Patricia McKillip, Elfquest, Tanith Lee, Jack Vance, and Steven…

Read More Silk Over Steel cover reveal

My writing platform on Ream.ink has launched! I write sweet to scorching sword & planet and space opera fantasy. https://reamstories.com/page/lfr7ennrzk There’s a Lonhra Sequence short novel already up on Tier One. That’s BLOODSHADOW. This is in prep for launching the sequel SOULBINDER in a month or so, chapter-by-chapter. My Ream site will start with two…

Read More The Lonhra Sequence on Ream!

I’ve already voted. In Arizona, I have the fragile luxury of voting by mail, tracking my ballot, and knowing to the day when it was received and counted. I know a lot of people don’t have that chance. I wish everyone could, in every state. These midterm US elections are desperately important. They’ll either push…

Read More Midterms down to the wire

So after nearly 50 years, Roe v. Wade was struck down this June, by an overtly Dominionist Christian Supreme Court that has been at least 45 years in the making. Roe was the glacial shelf holding back a deluge of conservative wet dreams: overturning gay marriage and gay rights, the right to privacy (especially in…

Read More A Scarf For Vengeance and Hope

Two claims / discussions in #BookTwitter converged in my mind recently. 1. ‘Copyright has to be truncated so authors are forced to create more work, instead of resting on their past achievements.’ 2. ‘If authors (commercial or self-published) want go get ahead or even get noticed, they must write quickly and to-trend.’ First, on author-copyright.…

Read More Trends or Treadmills?

Content warning: guns and mutilation. When I was nine years old, Mom opened a cooler in the car, hauled a pork shoulder joint onto a meat hook and a chain, then hung it from a tree out in the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico. I was already enrolled in the local NRA gun safety classes. We were…

Read More More dead kids

I just learned of fantasy author Patricia A McKillip’s passing last week. She was a poet, wordsmith, and major inspiration of mine since 1977. That was the year I discovered a paperback copy of ‘The Riddlemaster of Hed’ in my junior high school library. It changed my life. The high fantasy of Tolkien, but with…

Read More In memoriam: Patricia A. McKillip

Happy late December! I’m going to start this series of posts by being extremely cruel and vicious. Fair warning, I rant about Covid and the economy. We are all still here (except for those of us who aren’t)* because the world can’t manage a mutating virus. In the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK, specifically,…

Read More Pandemic Year 2: In Review, Pt 1

PSA: Gotta blog? Use images in it? Be very careful about the images you use. Readers may discover some images on this blog might be disabled going back to 2012. The reason is one ‘professional litigant’ who apparently sniffs around blogs & websites for allegedly-stolen images. Claiming infringement even in fair-use cases, they use SLAPP…

Read More Some legal housekeeping