Feed your need for SF & Fantasy
It’s the most wonderful time of the year …No, really. As a professional musician, I’ve had to start working on my Christmas repertoire, brushing off songs that I haven’t played for nine months. Many of these tunes have been part of my ann…
Another few months, another set of CDs for my car listening pleasure, and another game of word association, as I string song titles together by links of varying degrees of sense:Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under? – Shania TwainThese Boots Are Made F…
I made a new set of car CDs for myself yesterday, and part of the collection is my playlist for Surgeburnt. It’s incomplete, technically – some characters don’t have songs, but beyond character specific themesongs, I have songs for specific relat…
Last week, I brought up the thorny topic (to me) of calendars. To me, our month and day names stand out as products of our world, so they don’t work well in a fantasy setting. (Exceptions would be alternate earths or the stealth fantasy-set…
So when I did my flash-and-poetry boot camp, I generated more ideas than I was going to need so I could pick and choose … but not too many more, so I wasn’t left dithering.There was one idea that I put down and didn’t end up using, but I think it’s a…
Suspension of disbelief is a marvelous thing. It makes possible our immersion into fantastic realms where wizards fly and griffins sling fireballs … wait, reverse that. It even operates in other genres, allowing us to believe in the amate…
I’ve been adding songs to my Surgeburnt playlist as I come across them, and noticing a pattern: all of Maren’s songs, except one, in some way reference death or dying. There’s a nihilistic attitude underlying the songs I’ve chosen, a s…
I’ve been mulling over alternate history of late: how does one historical turning point change the shape of the world? Much fiction has been composed and spilled on the subject. It’s also a difficult thing to get right: any one …
For your amusement, sympathy, and perhaps to snare an unsuspecting soul into the same trap that has tortured me for the last few days … for some reason, this song has been an earworm in the back of my brain:The Red Shoes – Kate BushThe song reference…
Years ago, I read Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters for a course. I was underwhelmed; it was a fairly good story, but nothing special. Admittedly, for me as a reader, it was more difficult to become engaged because the female lead was prob…