Swan Tower

Fasting is one form of asceticism: the renunciation, whether short- or long-term, of material pleasures.

What's this?

Alyc and I are over at r/Fantasy today, doing an AMA (AUA, really) for The Eye of Leviathan and anything else you might care to ask about!

Somewhere in the course of childhood, I got the impression that "fasting" meant "not eating anything."

Short list for me this month.

Uniforms, heraldry, flags.

The comedian Eddie Izzard has a bit in her show Dress to Kill where she characterizes colonialism as sticking a flag in the ground to claim a place, then ignoring the assertion of the locals that their home is their own because, well, they don't have a fl…

As I said on Bluesky, I utterly hate that the American social safety net in the 21st century seems to consist of "start a GoFundMe" campaign.

My apologies to everybody whose friendslist was suddenly inundated with posts from me!

There is a simple but deep pleasure in finding the right object for your needs.

Since it's good to have my feelings on the matter stated clearly in a more prominent place than scattered across various blog posts, I've added a statement on AI to my website.

We've all got a friend like this.

Heraldry is a peculiar mix of localized and universal.

[I just noticed this failed to cross-post from my website, so here's what didn't come through.]

Uniforms aren't purely a military thing.

Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, Amishi P.

A few weeks ago, I posted about Amishi P.

There's been an implicit assumption in most of my essays -- and often an explicit one in certain craft-0riented theory essays -- that I'm talking about worldbuilding in the context of prose fiction: short stories, novels, and the like.

Given that my job mostly involves sitting at a desk, I have to devote particular effort to getting exercise if I want to be in good health.

This is honestly closer to a theory-type essay, as I've already talked about more concrete angles like prostheses and assistive devices (in Year Four), and this time around I'm looking more at the dynamics of presenting physical disability in fiction.

As I promised when The Writer's Little Book of Platitudes got republished, I am continuing on with the series!

My latest M.A.

This is a piece of July reading, but I'm pulling it out from the usual booklog (which will come in August) both because I have more than usual to say about it, and because in this case, there's good reason to mention it before next month.

Climate change is on everyone's mind's lately, to the point where "climate fiction" is now a recognized subgenre -- both within speculative fiction and without.

The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains, Reena McCarty.