March 18, 2026 · 5:25 am

Magic gets weird

As I wrote a couple of years back, part of the fun of the magical power in Southern Discomfort is that it’s based on Celtic faerie lore and doesn’t make much sense. Maria, Cohen and the other characters are dealing with stuff that has rules but they aren’t logical ones. At least, I hope it’s fun for everyone who reads it (soon, honestly); it’s definitely fun for me.

For me there’s a jarring sense of shock when magic genuinely doesn’t make sense. That’s not something I usually don’t feel reading fantasy, however, Point the wand or the staff, fire a magic bolt or create a protective shield; if you’ve read a lot of fantasy or comic books, that feels natural. It’s the logical way magic would work if it existed. It’s the same way cartoon characters running off a cliff and only falling when they notice they’re in mid-air, which would seem impossible if I saw it in real life, feels perfectly natural in a cartoon.

I don’t mean stories with logical magic alls uck. I love Harry Dresden, Harry Potter, Tracy Deonn’s Arthurian stories, Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy, all of which fit in that category. I’ve written a lot of fantasy in that vein myself. But I do get a real kick out of stories that make me feel I’m truly grappling with the impossible.

Case in point, Dan Flores in Coyote Nation recounts the tale of coyote taking a cross-country trip with a hunter. One night they make camp in a little valley called Vaginas Flying Through The Air. The name is literal: vaginas, dozens of them, are flying around overhead, no explanation given.

I have no idea how the original indigenous audience would have taken this. To me it’s mind-blowingly weird that this place is just a feature of the landscape. That’s the feeling I’m talking about.

Or consider this piece from the Mighty God King blog, discussing how the author would write Dr. Strange (part of a series; he’d have been good at it): “One day, you wake up, and blue is gone. I don’t mean blue things. The things are still there: bluebells, the sky and sea, various types of whales, the road uniforms for the Toronto Blue Jays, the Thing’s underwear. They just – aren’t blue any more. It’s not that the blue spectrum of light is missing, either. Things that are cyan or magenta are still cyan or magenta; the disappearance of blue hasn’t affected those colours of which blue is a root component. And that’s your first hint that this isn’t a problem science can solve. Here’s another: most people aren’t even noticing blue is gone.” That’s … weird. It’s almost hard to imagine. I love it.

It’s the same feeling I get from stories like Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate where reality and time seem entirely out of joint, though for science fictional rather than fantasy reasons.

I don’t know if Southern Discomfort or anything else I write will pull of this effect. I’ll be delighted if I succeed.

Cover art by Gene Colan. All rights to images remain with current holder.

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March 17, 2026 · 12:02 pm

Your Tuesday Iran war update

In 2016, the media portrayed the Necrotic Toddler as the peace candidate, as opposed to the bloodthirsty warhawk Hilary Clinton. Siiiigh. The Toddler’s greatest ability has always been that people see him as whatever they want him to be, even though the truth of his rottenness has always been obvious. And of course if Clinton or Harris had broken off a war discussion to talk about fancy shoes, it would have been held up as proof women shouldn’t be in public office. Male privilege at its finest.

Of course the Toddler having Putin interfere in our elections proved an advantage too. And it’s still paying off: as the prospect of high oil prices looms, the Toddler’s lifting sanctions on Russian oil. Putin will undoubtedly give him a big belly scratch for being such a good doggy. Though covering his bases, the Toddler insists high energy prices don’t matter and “Axis Sally” Leavitt insists they’ll go way down as soon as we win. Oh he’s also speculating whether his war on Iran will somehow earn him the Nobel Peace Prize. Damn, he really wants a participation trophy. He’s also finding ways to milk the war for money.

Unsurprisingly despite the reckless efforts of the past year to gut every program that helps people, the administration has declared an unlimited military budget. Not that it’ll do much good: they did not plan for Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz. Whiny SecDef “Whisky Pete” Hegseth insists that’s a lie. I suspect he’s as uninterested in truth as his boss. He’s also outraged that press photographers don’t make him look good enough. When in doubt, whine the media are biased. FCC Chair Brendan Carr has gone further, warning the networks to provide more positive war news — or else (points to the usual odious Sen. Ron Johnson for pushing back)! The Toddler insists we will soon have the straits open as we’ve completely destroyed their military capacity. Oh, and while we’ve (allegedly) demolished one target “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.” Which fits with Hegseth declaring “no quarter asked or given.”

The Toddler is also whining that he expects Europe and others to help clear the Strait — “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO,” Says the man who threatened to take Greenland from Denmark and has spent much of his presidency grumbling how NATO sucks. So far, most of then are saying no. Which makes more sense than Hegseth saying the Strait is open — it’s only closed because Iran is bombing it. Well, yes.

And while we spend billions, cheap drones make Iran’s retaliations way more effective than they’d have been a few decades ago. Despite Hegseth’s fantasies about how testosterone-powered manly Americans will smash everything in their path. We have, however, proven very good at killing small girls, even though the school had an easy-to-find online presence. Hmm, is it possible cutting a program to minimize civilian casualties was a mistake? Not for Hegseth who thinks war should be brutal and bloodthirsty enough to make him feel manly. And I’m sure the Toddler doesn’t care.

And the Toddler understands nothing: “what’s become even more clear in the two weeks since is that Donald Trump doesn’t understand — and isn’t remotely interested in understanding — the reality of the situation in Iran. The administration’s entire gamble appears to be that Iran would be Venezuela — they could conduct a single night of strikes, decapitate the leadership, and then through geopolitical magic a Delcy Rodríguez figure would emerge to lead Iran peacefully and cooperatively.

Now that not-even-half-baked plan has failed to materialize, it’s clear that there’s no Plan B. Quite the contrary — we seem to have a US government that wakes up each day completely befuddled and surprised to find it’s involved in a conflict in Iran.”

Perhaps that’s why the best he can say about a satisfactory end to the war is “when I feel it in my bones.”

As several people have said, the Toddler is quite simply stupid. Completely stupid. Stupider than we imagine. He has no plan B because that would require thinking about consequences instead of doing whatever seems best for him at any given moment. As he’s always been able to buy, lie or bully his way out of a problem, he’s convinced there will never be any consequences for this approach. Alienating NATO? That’ll never cause any problems later, so why not? As Jamelle Bouie put it in his newsletter (no link, sorry), “Trump expected more or less instant success — a short conflict followed by regime change and another victory under his belt. The idea that there might be unintended consequences — and the fundamental reality that the Iranian government has both agency and the capacity to act — does not seem to have either troubled the president’s mind or figured much in the calculations of his closest advisers.”

This will not end well for anyone. Bouie, again: “But the world actually exists. Real lives are at stake. And his actions have weight that cannot be easily moved. There is no channel to change, and you can’t rewind the action. Trump made his foolhardy decision and now we must live with the consequences.”

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March 17, 2026 · 5:15 am

For Tuesday, three book covers I like

This Lou Feck cover makes me want to find out what the book is about.

This Frank Cazzorelli cover has a German expressionist quality to it, as if the woman’s terror were distorting the surroundings

This Richard Powers cover is from a Y/A book I read as a teen. It’s not as wild as many of his covers but it conveys the sense of Olympics+Science Fiction well.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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March 16, 2026 · 5:15 am

The past is a different country. In this case, an illusory one.

At Lawyers, Guns and Money last week, Paul Campos discusses the image below (from some point in the post-WWII pre-1960s years), which has shown up online with the following sentiment: “What did Democrats find so wrong with this version of America that they needed to completely destroy it and turn our country into the mess we live in today?”

Screenshot

This plays to the same fantasy nostalgia the Reagan era promoted (as David Halberstam wrote about in The Fifties), that the 1950s were a utopian world where a single wage-earner could afford to support the family (which is not a bad thing), Mom was a happy housewife, and everything was innocent and peaceful with none of that sixties chaos. In reality there were civil rights protests, many women (no, not all) starting to realize their lives sucked, and Alfred Kinsey’s research showing premarital sex, adultery and homosexuality were all more common than people thought. Far from being calm and complacent, the 1950s were riven by fear: gays everywhere, communists everywhere, black people refusing to know their place, women seizing too much power (Halberstam doesn’t cover all of this).

Democrats (and liberals/feminists/civil rights activists) didn’t destroy this. If anyone did it was corporate America, shifting jobs overseas (lower regulation, lower pay) and squeezing worker pay as low as possible (while CEO pay skyrockets) to keep Wall Street and the stockholders happy. We end up with a billionaire class that doesn’t give a damn about the rest of us.

And contrary to some of the comments on the post (“they did not ask for a free ride”), this couple probably did benefit from government help — federally backed mortgage, maybe the GI Bill to let the man go to college, Social Security to provide for them later. As Ira Katznelson has written, much of this was unavailable to POC, sometimes by design, sometimes because redlining would keep POC from buying a nice house in the suburbs. Private covenants also kept Jews out of some suburban neighborhoods.

What the original post calls destruction is freedom. The freedom for black families and gay couples to have a shot at this. The freedom of the wife to work if she wanted — as Stephanie Koontz’s The Strange Stirring shows, in several states a husband could legally forbid his wife to work outside the home, among other petty tyrannies. Yes, some women were happy staying home; many of them, as Jessica Valenti says, fought like hell to escape that life. As Kristin Kobes du Mez says, the positive aspects of tight 1950s communities were counterbalanced by conformity and repression, particularly of women.

I suspect for the poster Campos is commenting on, keeping women at home even if they don’t want to be is a plus. The 1950s nostalgia doesn’t envision an improved version of the decade — booming economy but with integrated suburbs, men free to be househusbands, women protected from discrimination on the job — restoring white patriarchy is part of the job. Republicans don’t want a future where drag queens, independent women and Muslims are equal citizens in this Republic.

Case in point, Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles who says Muslims don’t belong in America — pluralism is dead! A part of me thinks he has a point — sharing America with shitty bigots like Ogles obviously ain’t working out, so let’s ship him to Somalia. Sen. Tommy Tuberville is another anti-Muslim bigot who thinks NYC Mayor Zohram Mamdani is no different than the 9/11 terrorists. As Fred Clark says, rejecting pluralism will never stop with rejecting Muslims — as witness misogynist, slavery apologist preacher Douglas Wilson declaring America should ban public displays of idolatry, including Catholic display: “a parade in honor of the Virgin Mary, carrying an image of the Virgin Mary down the street, no. Right? A Eucharistic procession? Probably not.”

Or consider this: “As for the requirement that one of the coin designs celebrate the contributions of women to the great American experiment, the Mint cited the image of a Pilgrim holding the hand of, and being embraced by, her protective male partner.” — a look at how the Toddler administration overruled plans for coins celebrating Frederick Douglass and women’s suffrage in favor of whiter, more male images.

Tuberville on Mamdani.

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March 15, 2026 · 5:15 am

East and west coast, in fiction and non-fiction

First the East Coast — John A. McDermott’s THE LAST SPIRITS OF MANHATTAN is a literary novel about what the author says was a real party Alfred Hitchcock threw in the 1950s at a house owned by McDermott’s relatives. I don’t know if it’s really based-on-truth (authors fudge that stuff a lot) but I also don’t mind. I picked the book up for the historical fantasy aspect — as I write it, it’s interesting to read it — and for the cool cover (my apologies to the artist for forgetting to note the name).

Carolyn, one of the lead protagonists in the ensemble cast, is an upperclass young woman contemplating a marriage proposal; she’s not really into him but then again, what else is she going to do with her life? Meanwhile Peter, a hustling young Manhattanite winds up hunting for a haunted house for Hitch’s party; trouble is, Manhattan’s developed and redeveloped and built up to the point old haunted houses are rare. As it turns out, Carolyn’s family have a house that looks spooky enough — it’ll do even though obviously there won’t be any real ghosts there to disturb Hitchcock, his wife Alma, Henry Fonda (then acting in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man) and the other guests.

It’s an interesting setup but as I’ve mentioned often enough, literary fiction isn’t usually to my taste. McDermott’s literary stylings didn’t hold my interest, which is not his fault; I also found the more interesting stories (Carolyn and Peter) lost amidst the ensemble cast — I was much less interested in Henry Fonda’s tormented angst, for instance. Ultimately this didn’t work for me.

Now, the West Coast — ECOLOGY OF FEAR: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis is a late 1990s jeremiad showing the utter insanity of massive multi-million dollar development in Southern California given what an insanely unstable environment it is. Earthquakes. Wild animals becoming increasingly dangerous as we move into their territory. Drought. Tornadoes. Wildfire. All of which Big Money makes worse.

Malibu homeowners, Davis says, oppose sensible firefighting measure such as controlled burns because the ash and smoke hurts their property values; nevertheless if they lose their homes they can count on the state government reimbursing them. By contrast, frequent tenement fires in LA’s poor districts leave tenants unhoused, with little support, and the fire department can’t even bother to make the required fire inspections on the rat-traps.

It’s an interesting read that branches into disaster movies set in LA (he dismisses Blade Runner as having little to do with the real city’s architecture and locations), then a closing chapter on the future that predicts the growth of exurbs and gated communities will kill the suburbs as the suburbs killed the downtown. This stuff was interesting, even if I don’t buy his conclusions, but it also left me feeling like I’d finished one of the 19th century fin de siecle prophesies of doom like the Victorian books Stephen Arata writes about. I’m curious whether much has changed in the quarter-century since the book came out, but not enough to research it.

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March 14, 2026 · 5:15 am

Love and Death: Two Movies

After reading Vera Caspary’s novel Laura last year, inevitably I wanted to rewatch the 1944 adaptation. It took me longer than I expected.

LAURA (1944) stars Dana Andrews as McPherson, a homicide detective investigating the murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), who got a shotgun blast to the face when she answered her door one night. Was the killer Laura’s effete Southern fiancee Shelby (Vincent Price)? Ann (Judith Anderson) who knows Shelby’s no good but wants him anyway? Perhaps Laura’s closest friend, the snide, sneering columnist Lydecker (Clifton Webb)? Complicating things, the more he learns about Laura, the more McPherson finds himself falling for a dead woman …

This is an excellent movie and I definitely prefer it to the source novel. Which is not to say it’s a perfect adaptation: we lose Laura’s strong, independent spirit and McPherson’s surprising education (he’s way smarter than he looks). Still, a terrific film. “Let me put it this way — I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor’s children devoured by wolves.”

After the recent adaptation of Wuthering Heights I went back and rewatched the 1939 WUTHERING HEIGHTS with Laurence Olivier as a brooding, angry Heathcliffe, Merle Oberon as Cathy and David Niven as Edgar (the impeccably British supporting cast includes Flora Robson, Donald Crips, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Leo G. Carroll, Cecil Kellaway and Miles Mander). We open on a new tenant of the Grainge arriving at Wuthering Heights on a freezing winter night, meeting an aged Heathcliffe — and when the tenant mentions seeing a woman out in the snow, Heathcliffe has a meltdown. One of the servants takes it on herself to explain and we begin a flashback to when Cathy’s father brought Heathcliffe home …

My first thought was that this was more Tragic Romance where the recent movie was Doomed Obsession; then again, Heathcliffe here comes off more obsessed, particularly after Cathy’s death. Either way it works for me; I know from LeAnn’s discussion that it includes elements the new film drops (Cathy’s mean brother, for instance) though it drops others in its turn. Worth a look. “Haunt me then — haunt your murderer!”

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March 13, 2026 · 5:21 am

Do you remember Morris, the finicky cat?

Morris was the star of a long-running series of commercials for 9 Lives catfood, emphasizing he was finicky about his food — but he loved 9 Lives! Which I was thinking of this week because Plushie seems to be in a “Morris — hold my beer!” mood.

We have to give both dogs lots of drugs for their various ailments. Trixie will eat hers on soft food; Plushie’s finicky and unpredictable. Depending on the day he may eat gabapentin on either soft food, chicken-broth concentrate or Delectable cat treats. I have no way to know which the chosen substrate will be. This adds several minutes to the process and sometimes waste the drugs. It’s frustrating. Sometimes he’ll turn the gunk down on the plate but eat it off my hand. Currently we’re randomly switching day to day — that seems to help but he still sometimes gets picky. And no, we can’t force it into his mouth the way we do Trixie when we have to. Plush Dudley’s more likely to bite and too stubborn to force easily.

So far we’ve managed to keep him doped enough for his own wellbeing. Hopefully we can keep it up.

(Plushie rolling in snow, from earlier this year)

On the plus side, no dog health disasters this week, so that’s a win. And we took care of one house problem, some foundation work that needed doing. Nothing urgent but it’s good to have it taken care of.

Now, as to writing, this was a good week. I was disorganized after spending last weekend at Ret-Con. Even so I was productive. I completed my March writing goals on Let No Man Put Asunder and on Savage Adventures, covering Doc’s adventures up through The Red Skull. I also rewrote, and I think finished my short story “Mage’s Masquerade.” I realized a while back that some of the key supporting characters weren’t developed enough for readers to tell them apart (a complaint made about a much earlier draft). I think I’ve got it fixed. I also much improved “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” by chopping about 1300 words off the end. I’ll look at both stories the last week of the month and see if I still think they’re done (the first story, maybe, the second almost certainly not).

There’s still no Local Reporter work — hopefully we’ll be back next week. However over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about the comic-books of Earth-One. The cover above suggests they looked exactly like the ones in our world; as I detail at the link, probably not. I also post about Doctor Doom’s short-lived run as a co-star with Ka-Zar in Astonishing Tales.

Doom’s racism in that scene does not work for me.

Things will get crazier next week when I have some IRL tasks to take care of. Still, I budgeted the time for that, so hopefully it’ll still be another good week.

Art by James Bama (t), Carmine Infantino and Gene Colan (b).

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March 13, 2026 · 5:16 am

I sold some books!

Last weekend I attended Ret-Con, the local Durham specfic convention. It’s pleasantly close, maybe 6 miles up highway 54, which is nice, and I see a lot of people I know — fellow local author Samantha Bryant, Tera Fulbright of ConGregate, guest of honor Natania Barron and a few others.

I attended last year. This year, though, I had an author table.

It’s a small convention so everyone doing anything has to pass through Author’s Alley, plus my table was right in front of the dealer’s room. Plus I’m really good at bookselling — I used to do it for a day job — so any time I made eye contact with someone passing by, I asked if they’d like to buy a book. Sometimes they did.

The end result: $300 in sales. I feel quite pleased. There was a time I’d have treated this as special income and bought myself some sort of treat with a little of the money. These days it’s just income, plus my birthday’s approaching so I don’t want to buy myself anything yet. Still, the accomplishment is satisfying.

I sold copies of everything Behold the Book publishes except Atoms for Peace, which has been my best seller at other cons. Not that I mind, it’s just interesting to see the variation.

They like me. They really like me.

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March 12, 2026 · 5:15 am

“We truly do live in the New Gilded Age, where our elites simply do not give a fuck what it looks like.”

That was a quote from a recent post on Lawyers, Guns and Money, discussing how the current ruling class is not only shitty and corrupt, they enjoy flaunting it. In this case, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose husband has been barred from the department due to sexual assault accusations, and who’s also spent government money to throw herself a birthday party.

Some more examples, not only of corruption but stupidity —

The DOJ’s lawyers keep getting slapped with state-level misconduct charges. Pam Bondi’s solution isn’t to make them act ethically, it’s to ban such charges so her department can investigate (yeah, right).

“Just days before the United States launched a major military operation in Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents and staff members from a counter intelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats from Iran. They were ousted for a simple reason: Each was involved in the investigation of President Donald Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.” Well, no way that could backfire, is there?

I don’t think assigning a 22 year old with no counterterrorism experience to lead Homeland Security’s counter-terrorism hub will work out well either. Of course all that really matters to the current administration is blind loyalty to President Toddler.

“According to MRFF President Mikey Weinstein, service members report “unrestricted euphoria” among segments of the chain of command portraying the assault on Iran as biblically sanctioned and tied to end-times prophecy in the Book of Revelation. One NCO wrote that such rhetoric is eroding morale and violating constitutional oaths, particularly for troops in Ready-Support status who could be deployed at any moment.”

“the Mahmoud opinion was the low-water water mark for the ways this court plans to use religious freedom to wash away any protections and policies that might be opposed by religious parents.” — another example of the Supreme Court’s Republicans being partisan hacks.

SCOTUS striking down the Toddler’s tariffs “is actually an indictment of the Court. These tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.”

Can you imagine if Clinton or Harris were president and they started talking about interior decorating during a press conference on the war?

“Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) threatened Tuesday to use aggressive procedural measures to bring Senate work to a standstill if Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fails to respond to his offices’ inquiries about an immigration crackdown in Charlotte, North Carolina.” — I’m pleased Tillis has finally grown a spine now that he’s retiring. After ten years of toadying to the Toddler, it’s also too little too late.

The Toddler is now talking about conquering Cuba as well.

Conspiracy theorist and bullshit artist Chris Rufo is shocked that so many people have gone down the conspiracy-theory hole — OMG, some of them are anti-semitic and anti-Republican!

“why are these people so utterly obsessive about constantly expanding their already uncountable wealth up until the very last day of their wretched lives?

“In a video posted online last week, two detectives with the Miami Beach Police Department were filmed questioning Raquel Pacheco, a former candidate for statewide office and longtime resident of the seaside resort city, over a post she made criticizing what she said was Mayor Steven Meiner’s hypocrisy around Israel and Palestine.”

“It’s remarkable that Nuzzi (according to multiple reviewers) seems to think even now that her having an affair with a subject she was covering and whose political goals she was working to advance without disclosure in subsequent profiles and who she was running ratfucking operations on behalf of represents merely “private” misconduct, like she had an affair with some random person she met on a dating app. It’s even more remarkable that she thought it was plausible that it would remain private. And her belief that Kennedy would just fade away would be the most remarkable and damning thing if she probably wasn’t lying about that.”

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March 11, 2026 · 5:17 am

Is this a weakness or a foundation? Or both?

I am now 26,000 words into this draft of Impossible Takes a Little Longer. I’m wondering if I’m doing it right.

This draft is a big improvement because I relocated it to 1983 and that was definitely right. A lot of the worldbuilding makes much more sense if things happen in the 1980s — the Stardians and Un-Things occupying part of Dallas will play out better if they’ve only been there twenty years. Also the changes to the timeline are more manageable if I shave 40 years off them. They’re also closer to the real timeline which makes them more interesting — when it was set in the present, everything was far more unrecognizable. And I can make better use of pop culture references, such as the 1980s comic book Thriller (almost nobody remembers it, but it has a role to play).

Looking at the first 26,000 words, however, I’m thinking about a critique someone in my writing group made about the previous draft. The early chapters spend a lot of time on KC’s social relationships and unless that pays off down the road, it’s too much.

It does pay off. What happens to Skeeter Powell and Sarah Wyzbecki is vitally important, and I need to establish them as KC’s friends before the crazy stuff happens. And some of the discussion sets up themes that will play off later — violence, compassion, doing the right thing, empowering others, etc.

That said, it still feels like I’m taking too long to get to the meat of the story, the looming threat. It’s out there and KC has already had a couple of intense battles but the sense of menace I want isn’t there. I’m also thinking of the feedback I got on Southern Discomfort a couple of years back: that an urban fantasy needs urgency and tension from the start whereas I’m writing at the pace of epic fantasy, where the build can be slower.

Then again, it may be that I have enough action and menace, it’s just that there’s two chapters in a row that are heavily talky or not focusing on the main threat. If I were in the middle of Chapter Three or Four I wouldn’t feel the same. Perhaps I need some tension in the middle? Which could mean rearranging events, or simply making KC’s reaction more intense.

Not a fatal flaw, I think, but definitely a problem to be aware of as I keep going.

Cover by Trevor von Eeden, all rights to image remain with current holder.

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