May 17, 2026 · 5:18 am

Cutting and wishing: two books

Ever since reading Jackie Morse Kessler’s Hunger, I’ve been meaning to follow up with the sequel. I finally got around to RAGE: Riders of the Apocalypse 2 which continues the premise of having Death — a Kurt Cobain lookalike — recruiting teenagers for the remaining three slots of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (though the protagonists of both books are girls). In Hunger, an anorexic becomes Famine; in this one, Missy is a teenager who relieves a boatload of emotion (bad relationship, death of her cat) by cutting; then Death shows up and suddenly she’s got a much bigger sword and the option to cut other people. The book establishes there’s a high turnover rate in War, Famine and Plague, hence the need for new recruits

From some of the reviews on Goodreads, Kessler does a good job capturing the impulses that lead to cutting. However where anorexia feels connected to Famine, cutting yourself hardly mirrors War. Nor does the book deal with war as much as the first book did starvation — it focuses much more on petty feuds, resentments and small-scale violence. Missy’s big struggles with bullying and slut-shaming at school, plus with her family, don’t connect with the main plot other than to add to her stress. The book does better in the straight Y/A stuff, which is not what I expect to enjoy (I am after all, way aged out of the target market). Not a bad book — I do like that Missy’s family really does have some dysfunction, rather than just her misreading everything, everyone was nice all along (a reveal I rarely like) — but a drop from the first too.

THREE LITTLE WISHES by Paul Cornell and Steve Yeowell is an amusing riff on both rom-coms and three wishes fantasies. Kelly, the protagonist, is a lawyer and a stereotypically sensible, head-centered romantic comedy protagonist, the kind who clearly needs to loosen up and become more of a manic pixie.

Acting on a suggestion by her best friend, Kelly impulsively buys the contents of a storage unit in an online auction, then discovers they include the bottled spirit of Oberon, the faerie king — and releasing him gives her yes, three little wishes. Or big wishes. Well, that can’t possibly go wrong, can it?

In this case, it doesn’t. Cornell asks us to imagine what if the protagonist uses their wishes wisely? What if you don’t regret what you wish for? What if being sensible and thinking before you act is a good thing? I don’t think I’m giving too much spoilers — the fun is in how the creators execute all this — but in any case, the story is fun and worth a look.

Covers by Nick Cardy and Yeowell, all rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Comics, Reading

May 16, 2026 · 5:32 am

Time travel back to mother’s day, but not to Rio Lobo! Movies viewed

A hard-drinking Aussie writer with a collapsing marriage meets THE GREEN WOMAN (2022) who shows up out of nowhere, knows a lot about him and claims she went to college on Mars — hmm, is it possible she’s not just a woman in green body paint or a drunken hallucination.

This drama became a “talking lamp” very quickly (i.e., something to glance at while I did other things), primarily because the eponymous woman has a very affected manner that I presume is meant to show her strangeness but comes off like bad acting. Nor does it help that the married couple are both unlikable — and if the writer’s making $40,000 a year, why is his wife complaining that he needs a “real” job (spoiler, some of this may be unreliable narration, but even so …). The film did pull one twist I didn’t expect but that doesn’t make it watchable. “I’m hiding all the mail as part of an evil conspiracy against all bureaucrats.”


TIM TRAVERS AND THE TIME TRAVELER’S PARADOX (2024) has the titular mad (and completely obnoxious) scientist (Samuel Dunning) successfully throw himself one minute back in time, at which point he murders his past self to see if the grandfather paradox works. It doesn’t — and then another future self shows up and kills him because Tim needs more data points to form a definite conclusion.

Things get increasingly loopy and we wind up with multiple Tims joining forces to make sense of this, which put me in mind of the Aussie time-travel comedy The Infinite Man — though having multiple Tims engage in an orgy also made me think of David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. Unfortunately things get complicated as they have to deal with a baffled hit man (he shot Travers between the eyes! How is he still walking around?), grandfatherly hitman Danny Trejo and possible love interest Felicia Day (given she usually plays sweet goofballs, I imagine playing someone with a short-temper and a fondness for f-bombs was fun). Well worth seeing. “I do not want a repeat of the guinea pig incident — only shock the potato!”

If Howard Hawks‘ final film RIO LOBO (1970) were good, it would stand with the similar Rio Bravo and El Dorado — also written by Leigh Brackett and starring John Wayne — as a Western trilogy. Too bad it’s dreadful, a sad film for such a talented director to go out on.

During the Civil War, Col. Cord McNally (Wayne) entrusts his protege with transporting a gold shipment by rail. Confederates Cordona and Tuscarora (Jorge Rivero, Christopher Mitchum) successfully raid the shipment with inside help from someone in McNally’s unit and the protege dies in the fight. After capturing the two Rebs, McNally tells them he doesn’t take their actions personally — it’s war — but he wants the traitor’s name. In return for fair treatment, the two men promise to let him know if they ever discover it. Typical for 20th century treatment of the Civil War, everyone’s amicable — there’s mutual respect on both sides, and no political issues.

Post-war, the quest for the traitor brings McNally to Rio Lobo, where Tuscarora’s father is facing a land grab and the traitor may be lurking in the shadows. Following the template of the earlier movies we have Jack Elam as the irascible old coot and Jennifer O’Neil as a slightly immoral woman (where Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo was a gambler’s widow, O’Neil plays a medicine-show huckster). And inevitably the fight involves holding the Big Bad in jail against all odds until the authorities — U.S. Cavalry in this case — can arrive.

The ingredients for a good movie are there but when the streamer I was using glitched ten minutes before the finish, I didn’t care. Like El Dorado, this is more about the bonds between characters than the action but outside of Wayne and Elam, the cast isn’t strong enough to build those bonds. Reflecting the increased movie violence of the era, there’s also much more on-screen blood (not huge amounts, just more) than the previous films. Quentin Tarantino loved the two previous movies but found Rio Lobo so bad he cited it as a reason not to keep directing too long and lose his mojo. “I heard the racket and somehow I knew it was you.”

MOTHER’S DAY (2016) is one of Garry Marshall’s holiday-themed rom-coms from earlier in this century (New Year’s Day, Christmas Eve, Valentine’s Day) and like them follows the Love, Actually formula of multiple plotlines and an ensemble cast. Here we have Jennifer Aniston dealing with her ex remarrying a much younger woman, Julia Roberts reconnecting with the now adult child she gave up for adoption and Kate Hudson as one of two sisters trying to hide their spouses (one interracial, one a woman) from their parents. The weakest of the four films. “You look like you have a very welcoming bosom — may I rest my child on it?”

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Movies

Tagged as ,

May 15, 2026 · 4:30 pm

Sing hosannas and release the doves!

This week came the day we dreaded — Wisp going to the vet! She gets warier every year, plus we can’t feed her after midnight. Which means Snowdrop can’t get any food either as they eat together.

Fortunately it was mostly smooth sailing. The cats sat by where their bowls go, but didn’t complain too much. TYG was able to grab Wisp and throw her in the big cage; after about half an hour of plaintive meowing, I took her in.

The good news: she’s in great shape. Some tartar on a back tooth, only .25 pounds heavier than last year (we’d thought she’d put on a lot more weight). And she forgave us fairly quickly.

It was a week with a lot of appointments like that, all of them turning out well. I had a dental appointment Wednesday (checkup and cleaning), then Plushie had his eye checkup later that afternoon (still in great shape). Good news, but a lot of time taken up. Plus I had to submit a bunch of invoices to our various insurers for online purchases.

The downside, of course, was that all those appointments ate up time. Plus, of course, time after each to recover and refocus my thoughts. On top of which I had a late night Tuesday and Wednesday which left me zonked on Thursday. Despite which, I got some good work done. The best thing is that I successfully formatted Southern Discomfort for Draft2Digital and Amazon. Draft2Digital is invaluable but their ebook formatting sometimes makes my Word formatting look wonky. That’s now fixed. And D2D will provide me with a PDF I can upload to Amazon.

I did some work on Savage Adventures. I really need to get to work on a cover artist ASAP. Not that I’m close to done, but once I am, I’d like to move much faster than I did with Southern Discomfort. Speaking of which, the cover is done for the digital version (Amazon needs some technical tweaks); I’ll announce a release date next week.

I read “Honey on the Grave” to the writing group. They really liked it, which was great; it’s only about my fourth draft and it usually takes many more before a story is any good. They also gave me some suggestions for polishing it, which I will look at later this month. The meeting was the reason I was up late Tuesday; we discovered Zoom was automatically recording our readings with AI and because they guy who officially hosted it is no longer with the group, we can’t do anything to turn it off. We set up a new Zoom link with myself and one of the other writers as co-hosts; however some people had bookmarked the old link rather than clicking on it from the group’s webpage so we had to go find them and tip them off. A learning experience.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop I reviewed some books about African-American films and reposted my old review about Brother From Another Planet.

On the downside, waking up late led to me missing much of my usual morning exercise and stretching sessions. Next week should be better, though — zero appointments.

Leave a comment

Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Southern Discomfort, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals, Writing

Tagged as , ,

May 15, 2026 · 5:20 am

Hello, friendly Pomeranian!

Met this little guy in the checkout line at Harris Teeter.

Super friendly, super soft, what’s not to love?

Leave a comment

Filed under Miscellanea, Personal

May 14, 2026 · 5:15 am

AI and some other tech stuff

“When the model gave accurate responses, the people using it outperformed a control group of people relying on their own brainpower. When the AI gave the wrong answers, the people using it did much worse than the control group. In other words, people stopped thinking for themselves.”

“Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.” That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.”

I’m delighted Durham has imposed a 60-day moratorium on data centers. The city considered a longer ban but that will take a different procedure. I’m also happy Minnesota has banned apps that can take photos of people and strip them naked.

“Users of the platform can join video calls with an avatar of Jesus generated by artificial intelligence. Like other religious A.I. tools on the market, it offers words of prayer and encouragement in various languages. With the occasional glitch, it remembers previous conversations and speaks through not-quite-synced lips.” Ugh!

“An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds.”

How much does it tiring us if we’re constantly thinking “Is this AI?”

Some tech firms are cutting back worker benefits (PTO, 401k match, parental leave) to put more money into AI.

“Sales employees at Flock have been accessing sensitive cameras in the town to demonstrate the company’s surveillance technology to police departments around the country. The cameras accessed have included surveillance tech in a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community center, and a pool.” Here’s some intel from our local publication the Indy on What Is Flock?

Arizona State University used AI to turn professors’ lectures into online modules. The results were bad.

Well that’s alarming: Webinar TV scraped anonymous Zoom recovery meetings.

Another side-effect of all the money and tech being poured into AI: archiving the Internet has gotten harder and pricier.

Schools push back against excess tech. Jill Filipovic cheers them on.

Google is now using AI to rewrite headlines of articles found in google searches. As I don’t want to pay for the linked article, I’m curious whether it’s dumbing them down, sanewashing the Toddler or what — but it’s definitely not their call (headlines are not randomly selected, trust me). And let’s not forget, AI synopsizing news articles frequently gets them wrong.

“Five developers are planning to build six data center campuses in Archbald, which will cover a full 14 percent of the town, evict a trailer park, and border many residential properties. One campus alone, as The Scranton Times-Tribune reporter Frank Lefneskey pointed out, is expected to use more power than the region’s largest power plant is able to produce. “

China has superior EV car batteries. There’s a push to keep them away from Americans.

Some members of the Austin City Council are seeking answers from Waymo after video showed one of its vehicles blocking an ambulance as it was responding to the scene of the mass shooting at Buford’s bar on West Sixth Street on March 1.

Tech companies hate “right to repair” laws that allow people other than themselves to repair or modify tech. Their new angle to block them: national security.

If aluminum can be turned into a catalyst, that would be a scientific and technological game-changer.

Why the payphone was once a cutting-edge invention.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics

Tagged as ,

May 13, 2026 · 5:15 am

Downtown Charleston

After this post, our trip to Fort Sumter will be the last from last month’s Charleston vacation.

Downtown Charleston is a pleasant place to walk. And walk we did, about four miles total. They’ve definitely worked harder to preserve some of their older buildings than Durham has. Here’s the view as we left the Isle of Palms to drive there.

Then we wandered around, in between visiting the Slavery Museum.

We also found a place that made delicious crepes, including some vegan ones.

I was exhausted by the end of the walk, but it was still worth it.

Leave a comment

Filed under Personal

Tagged as ,

May 12, 2026 · 12:21 pm

A wretched hive of scum, villainy and red ink

I’ve mentioned before what bullshit it is that Republicans are supposedly budget-conscious managers of our tax dollars, in contrast to spendthrift Democrats. It seems to be welded into American thinking about politics, never mind that Reagan left office with a record budget deficit. As did W. As did the Toddler in his first term. And now? Due to the Toddler’s desperate desire to leave his name everywhere, we have the Navy committing to buy 15 $14.5 billion Trump class battleships over the next 30 years.

Or how about this? “President Trump said that his handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue. The actual cost is now more than seven times that, after the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, federal records show.” I assume either the Toddler’s getting a cost or someone in his social circle said pleeeeze give me the contract, I’ll make the pool so pretty for you. Either way, the Toddler is whining and butt-hurt that the media dared point out the real cost.

It’s probably not as expensive but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his family spent seven months on the road filming a reality show while still collecting his federal salary.

“I believe the president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it.”

How about a $10 billion taxpayer contribution to the Toddler’s board of peace? $1 billion for added security at the Toddler’s wretched ballroom. And who knows how much his Arch of Compensation for Having Small Hands will cost? Speaking of the ballroom, can you imagine how the media would mock a woman whose top priority was White House interior decorating?

This ICE contractor seems perfectly legit, no seriously!

Heather Cox Richardson adds a few more scum and villainy notes.

One of the burdens for Democrats is that once they get in, Republicans will demand a balanced budget and lower taxes on everyone and the media typically take this as serious criticism (some relevant discussion here). Let’s hope Dems are learning not to listen.

Now a few more examples of Republican lies, corruption and corrupt liars:

GOP Rep Harriet Hagemen: “The Aryan Nation, the Nazis, and the KKK are not far-right organizations. Those are far-left organizations, and they always have been.”

The right-wing liars refuse to let go of their lies about litter boxes for furries in our schools.

Paul Krugman: “We have created a machine which rips off consumers when the tariffs are imposed, then hands a bunch of money to corporations when the tariffs are ruled illegal. So this is really not great stuff, and it’s pretty big. The Trump tariffs have been something like 1% of GDP, and most of them illegal and therefore a ripoff of consumers. That’s a big deal. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars that were taken for no good reason.”

Black Florida Congressman Byron Donalds wants us to know SCOTUS ending the Voting Rights Act is no big deal because America no longer has any racial discrimination. A stock Republican talking point, but particularly odious after that recent ruling.

Speaking of which, the Roberts court is ignoring its own precedent — you can’t change electoral maps too close to an election — to favor Republicans disenfranchising black voters. LawDork says they’re also ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment issues, whcih may come back and bite them.

The Toddler’s liar-in-chief, Karoline Leavitt, claims the Unite the Right event in Charlottesville was a fake event.

I don’t know if Jacob Shell is a Republican but claiming if Democrats hadn’t tried to win in 2020, the Toddler’s era would be over is … a take.

You’ve heard the Toddler announcing the government will release all its files on UFOs? Some right-wing conmen — er, religious figures say the files include proof that aliens are demons. And Jesus is a velociraptor. Fred Clark puts it all in perspective.

To end with something sort-of cheerful, Sen. Bill Cassidy, who helped put RFK Jr. into the Toddler’s cabinet, isn’t likely to win re-election now that the Toddler stabbed him in the back. Couldn’t happen to a more worthless person.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics

May 12, 2026 · 5:16 am

You’re simply the best

As Brian Cronin said in a post some years ago, there’s a tendency for comic-book writers to make their protagonist, or whoever the current “hot” character is, the best at what they do. They have to be the deadliest assassin, the strongest martial artist, the best thief, the most advanced scientific genius, whatever, and it has to be canon.

After reading that, it occurred to me I see a lot of that in fantasy fiction too. Lots of books on Kindle where the protagonist has a magic talent so great she has to be destroyed/controlled/mated. The kid who trains with a sword and becomes “the best I’ve ever seen.” The sex demon in one of Patrick Rothfuss’s books who informs the virgin protagonist he’s the best she ever had.

For some characters this is baked into the concept. The Hulk is the strongest one of all. Karate Kid in the Legion of Super-Heroes is a master of every known form of hand-to-hand combat. Sherlock Holmes is the world’s greatest detective.

However as Brian points out, this isn’t a requirement for a great character. Lots of brilliant detectives followed on Holmes’ wake; Dr. Thorndyke (by R. Austin Freeman) and Professor Van Dusen (by Jacques Futrelle) are both genius detectives. Despite having entertaining adventures and solving ingenious puzzles, hey’re largely forgotten not because Holmes was a superior detective but because neither had his quirky, eccentric, forceful personality. And Doyle, as I’ve pointed out before, had no problems with Holmes being fallible. He misses the answer in some cases completely; in others he cracks the case but can’t save his client.

Karate Kid, sure, I’m happy to assume he’s the best fighter ever. However Denny O’Neil never felt the need to make his martial artist Richard Dragon the best there ever was; in his Bronze Age comics run, Dragon routinely runs into people as tough as he is, though he finds a way to beat them but he’s not invincible (neither is Karate Kid but that’s because he’s up against supervillains, not rogue martial artists). In the early Dr. Strange stories, he’s very clearly not the top dog: Baron Mordo is his equal, and possibly his superior while Dormammu is way, way beyond Strange’s magic. He wins because he outthinks his foes, not because his magic is vastly superior.

Brian’s post convinced me to go back and rewrite some of Let No Man Put Asunder. In an encounter with the mercenary Peacock (he dresses flashy — or as he puts it, some people dress in style, he dresses with style), Mandy learns how her new combat skills work, and he tells her the fact she landed a blow on him proves she’s one of the best. There’s really no reason she has to be that good; if people read the book it’s going to be because they like her and Paul as characters, not their raw display of power.

I rewrote the scene to establish Mandy’s good, not world-class. She points out she did manage to land a blow; Peacock replies that in battle, nobody’s invincible. Anyone can get tagged if they get distracted or the other party gets lucky.

I think that works better.

Cover by Curt Swan, Dr. Strange panels by Steve Ditko. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Sherlock Holmes, Writing

Tagged as

May 11, 2026 · 5:15 am

The delusion that “white people” is a totally neutral concept

Back when Hilary Clinton was running for the White House, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre said having her elected after Obama would be a bridge too far, two “demographically significant” presidents in a row.

Obviously, LaPierre saw no demographic significance to a white man getting elected — no significance at all. It’s natural. The default setting. And once upon a time, white America could assume that was true. White men ran everything, women kept house and raised the kids, normal people were all heterosexual. It’s when you have women or POC in a position of authority you have to wonder what’s going on — how could that possibly happen? Charlie Kirk said it was perfectly reasonable to see a black airline pilot and wonder if they were qualified; it’s simply a given in his mind that white people must have earned their job on merit. White people getting all the good jobs is again, not a thing that needs questioning — white male achievement is always earned. So if you’re not promoting enough white people, clearly you’re racist.

Not that this is uniform on the right: misogynist Scott Yenor has openly called for discrimination against women in hiring. Bigot US Rep. Chip Roy wants to end all immigration (I imagine he’ll make an exception for white South Africans) and freaks out that some kids don’t speak English at home.

But generally, what they want is not simply to bring back the days of white, male, Christian supremacy, it’s that people will stop complaining about it. Women and POC will accept that the lowest white man is their superior and deserves a bigger piece of the pie. Men won’t have to deal with the nagging voice that says just maybe having a woman cook and clean for them and handle all the child care isn’t a natural or equitable arrangement. It’s not enough to be top of the hierarchy, everyone must agree they deserve it. As Paul Campos puts it, “white supremacy is merely the belief that it’s the natural order of things for white people to be running everything, and that this natural order will continue to exist, absent massive and per se wrongful intervention by a “socialist” government (‘socialism’ in right wing discourse means above all using the powers of the government to try to ameliorate the effects of white supremacy).”

This is a common sentiment on the right, though it’s not unique to them. When they punch down at gays or women, the response they want is “Well, I disagree with what you say but I respect your right to say it”; when instead they’re called out for misogyny, racism or homophobia, that’s shutting down the conversation. No there’s a conversation, it’s just not going they way they expect it. The religious right are particularly prone to announcing how not treating them as moral superiors is equivalent to the persecution of the early Christian martyrs. They want all the glamor of martyrdom without the inconvenience of actual suffering.

The rich get the same stick up their butts. It’s not enough that they have incredible wealth (here’s one discussion on that topic), they want us to revere them. Zohram Mamdani proposes a tax on luxury residences owned by out-of-towners; hissing, spitting billionaires declare they should be praised instead of taxed — “tax the rich” is like a racial slur or an assassination attempt. As Paul Krugman puts it “They wanted to be able to live the privilege of their great wealth. They wanted to be able to just flaunt their wealth, performatively display their dominance, not have to worry about people chiding them for being politically incorrect just because they were abusive towards other people because of their gender or their whatever, their race, anything.”

And John Roberts and other members of SCOTUS’ Sinister Six get indignant if anyone suggests they’re political players, not wise, dispassionate solons. Roberts chose to be the man who destroyed the Voting Rights Act; well now he is, so he should own it. But he doesn’t want to.

The sniveling toddler in the Oval Office is particularly prone to this. His snowflake fee-fees can’t stand any suggestion he’s not the most wonderful president ever (particularly that he’s more wonderful than The Black President) so he freaks out and attacks anyone who says otherwise, then lies he’s successfully handling everything, whether it’s Iran, hantavirus or gas prices.

Even someone who’s not at the level of wealth or power that makes them think they’re above the common human herd can still to cling to being white or male as proof they’re special. For some people, it’s all they’ve got. Which is why we’re watching them work so hard to turn back the clock and undo the gains America made in the 1960s.

As Fred Clark at the Slacktivist blog pointed out a while ago (I don’t have the link), some people will have technical, legal arguments as to why diversity is bad, birthright citizenship is bad. Many of them will give lip service to equality — “Well, of course, I don’t think businesses should discriminate, but they should be free to do so.” Despite their lip service, they’re obviously comfortable with the uglier world that would result.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics

Tagged as

May 10, 2026 · 5:15 am

The first LitRPG? Plus some unsatisfying books

Andre Norton’s 1978 QUAG KEEP (cover by Jack Gaughan) fascinated me as a kid — the idea of tie-in Dungeons and Dragons novels was several years in the future so a story where a group of D&D players are mysteriously transported into Greyhawk (the original setting) and turned into their characters was something different. Rereading now, I find myself wondering how this came to pass — was Norton a fan? Did Gary Gygax or someone at DAW Books pitch her on the idea?

As far as the execution goes, it’s a mixed bag; overall, I enjoyed it but the worldbuilding is very fuzzy. We don’t learn the evil DM’s agenda in trying to fuse Earth and Greyhawk, don’t learn how the magic dice on the PC’s wrists work to alter their luck, and the characters are largely written as stock figures (cleric, ranger, bard, etc.) — I might have liked it better if the players’ personalities had carried over. There’s also stuff that feels odd because I started playing with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and there’s stuff here that doesn’t make sense by those rules. That said, Norton’s a good writer and she wrote the book so it plays to her strengths. Like her Witch World books we have characters under strange compulsions, shadowy forces of evil, standing stones as places of power — it works well enough.

OVER HER DEAD BODY: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic by Elisabeth Bronfen ponders the appeal of dead women as ta subject for art (Poe wrote that the death of a beautiful woman was a natural subject for poetry). That seemed like it would fit with my interests but Bronfen’s writing style is heavy academese and the first chapter reveals she’s approaching the topic from a Freudian perspective; as so much of Freud has been discredited, I gave up after a couple of chapters.

SHADOW OF THE LION by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and David Freer has potential too: Venice in the days when it was a major European power is a fascinating city so a historical fantasy of magic and skullduggery in 16th century Venice sounded promising. However the doorstop book lost me after 60 of its 700 pages. Like a lot of historical novels the story is buried under the period details to the point I have no idea what the story is, who the protagonists are or what the threat they have to fight is. Another DNF.

I did finish ILL WIND: Weather Warden Book One by Rachel Caine but it never particularly engaged me. This urban fantasy series is set in a world where nature wants us all dead and only the Wardens can shield humanity from the impact of hostile weather, earthquakes, floods, etc. Weather Warden Joanna is now on the run for being a)demon-possessed and b)having killed her mentor for causing the possession; now she’s heading across the country to ask a former lover for an exorcism. I found the backstory of Joanna and her lover confusing and inconsistent and the story’s villain is a disability stereotype (she turned to evil because evil could cure her horribly scarred face!).

The problem with BULLIES, BASTARDS AND BITCHES: How to Write the Bad Guys of Fiction by Jessica Page Morrell, is primarily a reader/book mismatch: the advice (even villains should have humanity!) might have been useful back when I started writing but that was a long time ago. There’s nothing terribly novel in her approach (e.g., give each character six defining traits) but most writing books I’ve read over the years aren’t offering anything radically new.

That said, Morrell’s analysis of specific fictional characters often falls flat. Conan, for example, is hardly an alpha male who can’t take orders (and of course, “alpha male” isn’t the biological reality Morrell assumes) — several stories show he’s willing to work as a soldier in the ranks. Nor does an argument that Lolita is morally complex fly (Lolita’s not a nice thirteen year old, therefore an adult having sex with her isn’t black-and-white wrong. Uh, yes it is).

Batman art by Jerry Robinson. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Reading

Tagged as