So, I was recently reading this very excellent post/lecture/essay by Brandon Sanderson about the innovations Tolkien made creating the genre of High Fantasy, when, near the end, he mentions an interaction he had once with the mother of one of his fans. Just after he had signed the daughter’s book, the mother stopped and asked him something like, ‘Not to be rude, but how do I get her to stop reading all of this fantasy drivel?’. Sanderson then goes on…
Hello! and happy 2026! I have just had a nice, long Christmas vacation, and it is amazing how nice everything seems when one is rested. Last year about this time I did a 20 Questions post, made up as a new style of post for me because my brain was just about the consistency of luke-warm soup and I was out of oomph for writing entertaining words. Now, a year later, I think I am slowly starting to recover my…
I don’t really believe in ghosts. Or, more accurately, I think I believe that if ghosts exist, they do so in a way that’s just not relevant to me, that our worlds are completely separate, and that theirs does not affect mine. I’m pretty sure that’s what I believe. It can still be fun to indulge in a good ghost story on occasion. Especially around Halloween. Ghosts, and ghost stories, I think, have a way of connecting us very deeply…
These stories are all apropos of nothing. I offer them merely for the sort of entertainment one gains from truly random things. 1.1 How I learned coincidences that span the globe are just like other coincidences. So, it happened like this. It was my senior year of college, and someone in my belly-dance class had invited me to tag along to a hafla, which is just Arabic for ‘party’ and was pretty much just a group of other college students…