writing themes
Long post! TL:dr… I’m going to France for an art residency next year. At this place, Chateau d’ Orquevaux. Yep. I’m doing this. I applied on a semi-whim in December 2023, knowing that odds of being accepted were somewhere between 20% and never. I make a habit of applying every couple of years to *big*…
Read More Art Residency 2025: Chateau d’Orquevaux, part 1Come back to the Birdverse with this unforgettable tale about despair, hope, self-care, and friendship! Words shape thoughts and cultures. Fantasy is uniquely suited to reveal this in subtle, entertaining ways that sneak in high-level concepts on the sly. R. B. Lemberg’s YOKE OF STARS is a remarkable novella. It could only come from a…
Read More Review: YOKE OF STARS, by R.B. LembergFirst 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. EngelsWERECATS CONVERGENT, the second novel in Mark J. Engels’ The Forest Exiles Saga, starts off with a bang and doesn’t let up for a single page. Honestly, look at this cover! (I had nothing to do with making it, I just love it and how close it comes to the feel of this book.) Tormented…
Read More Review: WERECATS CONVERGENT by Mark J. EngelsThis 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 BookTldr: 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. EngelsSince 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 revealMy 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!Short novels, when done very well, are both honey-sweet and sharp as knives edged in fire. They mean something. They forge new connections in their readers, who are never quite the same people they were before reading that particular story. R. B. Lemberg’s new Birdverse book, THE UNBALANCING, accomplishes a startling amount of heavy work.…
Read More Review: THE UNBALANCING by R.B. LembergTwo 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?In ‘Vows of Empire’, Emily Skrutskie delivers a wrenchingly good and mostly unpredictable end (for now) to her YA space opera M/M romance ‘Bloodright Trilogy’. This review contains spoilers and reader deductions. I will reference characters and events from the first two books. For spoiler-free review, TL;dr….read the other books first, grab this one, &…
Read More Review: Emily Skrutskie, ‘Vows of Honor’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. McKillipCW: war, war crimes, and poison in a thinly-veiled faerytale. A lovely city thrived beside a blue sea. Autumn brought golden leaves tumbling with the wind. Winter gave crystalline snow and indigo shadows at noon. Spring sent all the perfumes of blooming fruit trees. In summer, sunflowers bloomed. At the center of the city slept…
Read More The Dragoncurse and the Sunflower CountryThree decades ago, DAW Books had enough cash cows & editorial moxie to publish some weird and lovely stories alongside their SFF best sellers. A recent house rearrangement unearthed some old mass-market paperbacks (as in: ‘Wow, I didn’t know I still had that!’) Two of these were from Ursula K. LeGuin pupil and academia professional…
Read More Forgotten Fantasies: Stephanie A. SmithTl;dr…Why ‘Outsider Artists’ *should* enter prestigious contests, and why many marginalized artists either give up or never even consider these opportunities. Every year I apply for every reputable art-related grant or show opportunity I might remotely qualify to enter. I usually don’t pay, unless the entry fees are modest (under $35 per entry). I do…
Read More Genres, Grants, and Outsider ArtistsFrom Emily Skrutskie, Oaths of Legacy, Book 2 in the Bloodright Trilogy, to be published later this year. Note: this review is based upon an ARC furnished to me for free by NetGalley. It’s always a joy when a second book in a series surpasses the first, and Emily Skrutskie does that and more with…
Read More Review: Oaths of Legacy, by Emily Skrutskie…And hi, Filigree’s Rule! I’d hoped to leave all my Filigree’s Rule writing posts up on this blog, but a stipulation of Amazon means I have to privately publish them now. Effectively hiding them from internet search. I’ve taken those posts, condensed some, expanded others, and updated everything I could into a more-easily read book…
Read More Bye, Filigree’s Rule…I’m spiffing up some older stories…foundational myths, if you will…from my Lonhra Sequence space-fantasy universe. One of the fun/infuriating things about hobby-crafting a universe for nearly 40 years, are all the small stories that make up those secondary worlds and their histories. Side-characters and historical footnotes who would very much like to tell *their side*…
Read More More Lonhra Sequence storiesWarning: linked content definitely Not Safe For Work, and includes graphic homosexual sex. On this momentous day, with the future of American democracy battered but still intact, I honestly can’t think of a better way to annoy (some) rightwing hypocrites today, than self-publishing a piece of *extremely gaaaayyy* erotic romance. After six months or so,…
Read More MAESTRO Reboot (Adult Content)Another year, another round of self-published stuff. Now I’m playing with a digitally altered and painted cover for my contemporary M/M erotic romance MAESTRO, while I add to that short 16K story. I needed brownstone houses. Fortunately, the Phoenix area has some, so I made a fool of myself getting shots of several at night.…
Read More New covers for ‘Maestro’