My Agent Told Me To Make A Blog

Sure, Tatooine has two suns, Arrakis is a giant desert full of sandworms and spice mines, and Doctor Who once visited a planet made of diamonds --but characters don't have to be traveling on spaceships to have adventures in non-Earth settings. Sci-fi has always done a pretty good job imagining strange and fantastic worlds, which always makes me happy, yet at the same time I've realized there's some cool real science that could be used to expand sci-fi and fantasy settings a lot more than is often seen. (And as cool as Star Wars can be, it's worth mentioning how silly it is that most of the places are mono-settings: ice planet, swamp planet, city planet...) Now, all of the pictures you see here are from the public domain. I want to show you a few other things, too, but I'm going to send you to the original sources (or at least, the links where I found them). It all started when I stumbled upon this reddit thread discussing plant colors on other (theoretica...

I find it's often assumed that, because I so cheerfully critique my favorite things into mangled corpses, I therefore look down on romantic comedies. Friends might engage me in a conversation about how silly and formulaic they are, naturally thinking Mrs. Must-Have-A-Clever-Plot-And-World over here will agree. But I'm actually all, "...I liked that movie". I think this gets into why the romance genre, with a capital R, is so distinct and separate from other genre fiction. You read it (or in my case, watch it) for separate reasons. Regular sci-fi/fantasy--yes, I want to be wowed by how clever and unpredictable and unique everything is. Romance? I just want to be happy and not think about life :( It fills a similar niche to eating cookies. When my husband is off in China for work, and I'm all alone and my brain is exhausted from the day, sometimes all I want out of my fiction is to cheer the main characters on and know they'll get together in the end. (As an...

Not blogging for a month gave me more time to read, so I actually managed to finish a couple books instead of my usual one per century. The last one I finished was the delightfully clever Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone. This is a difficult one to explain. On one hand, it's solid fantasy, with a lot of the usual--magic (Craft), fantasy creatures (gargoyles, vampires, "blacksuits" in service of the city's justice system), and the extraordinary (resurrected gods, ancient skeletal sorcerers, shadow monsters). But it's also an atypical setting--not quite modern, not quite urban fantasy, but definitely not the traditional medieval European. The main characters are lawyers for the firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao. The magic is intimately associated with contracts, clauses, and legalese. Characters might smoke cigarettes or do drugs behind bars. The priests are actually technicians, who manage the steam pipes that provide the city's energy with the fire-god...

I'm back for more blogging! And great timing, because in March, Blogger added a bunch of new templates. The makeover makes me super happy, because I've been trying to customize a more professional-looking layout for months to little success. Another change is that I'm going to drop from posting approximately twice a week, down to strictly once a week. That should prevent me from running out of stockpiled posts and winding up in a panic when life throws unexpected turns. The African Gray, by the way, is very happy, makes a lot of beep boop noises, has no manners, and we're still trying to fix the feather picking. I scheduled this post for April 2 so it would be taken seriously. I guess that means posts will be on Sundays from now on! Some important information for getting around the blog now: - There is a little list icon on the top left. This is how you can find the archives and tags, my profile information, a contact form, and the list of followers. You can cli...