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

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/18/18: Superheroes

Thor looks disgruntled here (or maybe pleased? It’s hard to tell) but many other superheroes would be happy to take a break from their regular rounds of protecting the innocent. Maybe even some of these randomly generated ones. (Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes remains the best introduction I’ve read to the history of …

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Beat-Beat-Beat

I know it’s only a cheap comic, but isn’t it creepy?

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/11/18: Cursed Magic Items

Sometimes a dungeon master, or an author or game writer, wants to toy with their characters. Not in a life-ending way, but just to vex them a little. The following items do just that.   Cursed Magic Items Spoon of Canine Mucous: Any food this item touches turns into dog drool. Iol-Del’s Unlucky Siphon: This …

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Something’s Fishy

Pun, trifle,Lovecraftian horror, or fine art? You decide.   (The Water, 1563-64, by Giuseppe Arcimbaldo)

City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas [Reading Challenge 2018]

City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas by Roger Crowley Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York 2013 [Challenge # 3: A book taking place mostly or all on the water] I was a little concerned that City of Fortune, which was a history of the city of Venice between the 11th and 16th centuries, …

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A Medieval Feast

Next were borne round dishes of carp, pilchards, and lobsters, and there after store enew of meats: a fat kid roasted whole and garnished peas on a spacious silver charger, kid pasties, plates of meat’s tongues and sweetbreads, sucking rabbits in jellies, hedgehogs baked in their skins, hogs’ haslets, carbonadoes, chitterlings, and dormouse pies. — …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/4/18: Zimiamvia

In The Worm Ouroboros E.R. Eddison dazzles the reader with innumerable exotic and fantastically named people, places, and things. Unfortunately, they don’t all adhere to a consistent linguistic base, and no less a luminary like J.R.R. Tolkien criticized the author for this. Some character names sound Latin, such as Laxus, Corinius, Corund, and Corsus. Others …

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Uncanny Valley

The Geisha robot came too close to the Uncanny Valley for most patrons to be comfortable with.   (Art by Nick Keller)