Somewhere I Have Never Travelled
I wish I remembered the exact moment I fell in love with outer space. One of my earliest space memories (sounds like a game show…) is going on a Girl Scout camping trip — I dreaded it, because I always felt so clumsy, and they were going to have us ride horses, and I couldn’t […]
May Books
May’s books are related to February’s books, in that I didn’t connect with a lot of what I read. The month started off right with Alien, the novelization of the movie by Alan Dean Foster. Some part of my brain thinks I read this a million years ago, but so much of the book was […]
Fantastique
I think the first giallo film I saw was The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. My young brain immediately mashed it up with The Maltese Falcon, because mysteries and birds and ladies and jewels and black and white films and — From there, things also filed under spooky and eeek were Les Diaboliques and Wait […]
April Books
What is this sorcery — writing about what I’m reading for four months in a row. Suspicious. The book I opened April with is the book I still haven’t finished, The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers. It is a book I didn’t quite expect, very Gothic, involving Byron and Shelley and ladies who […]
Splitskin
“Write what you know” is crap. If I only wrote what I knew for certain, I’d surely never write about outer space or time-traveling trains. But, writing things you don’t know can remain vaguely terrifying, even when you have researched, plotted, and spoken with people who know what you don’t. As of this writing, I’ve […]
Five Falcon Facts
My very first draft of what would become Rings of Anubis was called The Glass of Anubis. This idea still exists in the book, as it is the name of the object through which Anubis judges the dead who come before him. This glass was always envisioned as something of a mirror, that opened various […]
Awkward
I was an awkward kid, always more comfortable spending time in fictional universes than the real one. I had trouble relating to people in face to face conversations because nothing ever seemed to work out as smoothly as things did in books. Books were great, real life was a challenge. Why couldn’t people be outlined […]
Coming Soon!
A bungled museum theft. An ancient Egyptian riddle. The rumor of strange creatures moving beneath the streets of Paris. Eleanor Folley knew she was in for a challenge when she accepted the task of cataloging Mistral’s archive of purloined artifacts, but she never expected to discover an Egyptian mystery buried in the heart of Paris. […]
Something Sweet
As much as I love making fancy cakes with roses and leaves and basket-weaves (I love basket-weaving!), my favorite cake is so simple, you might not even believe it. I came across this recipe in a Martha Stewart magazine (I know, I KNOW), and I know I’ve blogged about it before, but that blog is […]
Official Position
Just think while you’ve been getting down and out about the liars and the dirty, dirty cheats of the world, You could’ve been getting down to this sick beat. ‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate (haters gonna hate) I’m just gonna shake, shake, […]