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 wireSo 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 HopeShort 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?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 kidsIn ‘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 Country