Erotica, fantasy, and horror writer.

Most commented posts

  1. The Worm Ouroboros
    [Reading Challenge 2018]
    — 7 comments
  2. The Lady of the Green Kirtle (Part I) — 5 comments
  3. The Wild Lands of the North
    (and a bit about Giants)
    — 4 comments
  4. All Things Charn (Part I) — 4 comments
  5. Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/30/17: Mundane Fare — 3 comments

Author's posts

Dungies and Dragons

I saw someone wearing a tshirt with this design and thought it was hilarious! The “dungie” refers to the Dungeness crab at the lower left, which are renowned as a delicacy in the Pacific Northwest. The artist’s name is Ray Troll. He’s a native Alaskan known for his unique style and scientific accuracy of the …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/12/25: Chicken Breeds

“To a know a dinosaur, you must first know a chicken.” These common farmyard birds, developed from Asian junglefowl around 8,000 years ago, show many of the same characteristics of the prehistoric creatures they are descended from. They strut about on two legs, have plumage, scaled, robust clawed feet, are warm-blooded, and lay eggs, They …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/7/25: Unusual Magic Books, Part 1

In the AD&D universe one of the most prized treasure items a magic-user character could discover was a book of magic, because it gained access to a range of spells and not just the one or two that the player gained with each level. That’s the way it started out, anyway. Things might have changed. …

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Farewell to Tolkien March (and April)

All good things must come to an end, so does my two-month journey into all things Middle-earth. Like these guys are doing, I’m moving on to other shores. (It’s a still from a little-aired 1993 Finnish TV version of LOTR. I’m guessing, counterclockwise from the fat left, the characters are Boromir, who looks appropriately dopey …

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My First Hobbit.

My first encounter with Tolkien was reading The Hobbit at age 11 or 12. I found it lying around my sister’s house while on a trip there. It was the paperback edition to the left, which was published by Ballantine in the mid-1970s. That’s Tolkien’s own artwork on the cover. For years I thought it …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/30/25: In Praise of Dwarven Women

One of the elements that got fans so excited about The Rings of Power was its focus on Dwarves and their society, including their wives and female children. Aha! We might finally see what bearded Dwarven women looked like! Well, no, they turned out to be facial-hair free. Though in one episode from Season 2, …

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Apex Predators of Middle-earth

Though Tolkien described the landscapes of Middle-earth in great detail, he didn’t go much into its animal life, and when he did it was similar to what you’d encounter on a walk in the English countryside. With the addition of various fell creatures, of course. But these were met only if you wandered far and …

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A Few Substandard Hobbits

Slavic nations certainly had some unusual Hobbits, but what of the rest of Europe? Let’s see. This underground comix- inspired Bilbo is tied with this one as the most horrible Hobbit depiction of all time. It’s a J’ai Lu publication, which is par for the course. Is he fighting a troll? An aardvark? Who knows. …

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A Middle-earth Music Festival

I wonder if the promoters got permission from the Tolkien Estate for this?

Frodo’s Journey

I had a long discussion with my sister about how many miles, exactly, Frodo and Sam traveled from their home in The Shire to the pits of Mt. Doom. Oddly, this information wasn’t readily apparent online, for all the Tolkien websites and maps and graphics out there. After some digging, I came up with this. …

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