Monthly Archives: August 2021

The Big Idea: Elayne Audrey Becker

A picture, they say is worth a thousand words. But as Elayne Audrey Becker is about to tell you in this Big Idea for her novel Forestborn, two pictures may be worth an entire book. ELYANE AUDREY BECKER: The idea for Forestborn began, not with words, but with two pictures in my mind. The first: […]

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Whoops

Today was a day full of prepping for Dragon Con and having phone meetings about things I can’t talk about yet. So, uhhhhh, hello? I’m late updating? And have nothing particularly interesting to say? Here’s an Olivia Rodrigo video. Teens being snotty to exes! What’s not to like? — JS

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These Sticky Buns Were Fire

The short story of the event here was that some of the sugar glaze of the sticky buns escaped the pan and fell to the bottom of the oven, where it started to burn and scorch; this necessitated the evacuation of the buns from the oven and opening up all the windows in the lower […]

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Today’s Distraction From the Internet

A friend who is visiting has brought boxes of Lebanese food and desserts, and so I’ll be spending the day hanging out with them and utterly destroying my normal daily calorie count with these very delicious foods, and not being online. While it seems unlikely you will be having the same specific events transpiring for […]

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“Automated Customer Service” Gets an Emmy (and LD+R Gets Four)

Specifically, “Automated Customer Service” won an Emmy Juried Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation, going to ACS character designer Laurent Nicolas. Love Death + Robots got three other juried Emmys as well, going to Robert Valley, Patricio Betteo (both for “Ice”) and Dan Gill (for “All Through the House”). Four Emmys is a nice […]

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The Big Idea: Cassie Hart

As a madeleine was to Proust, so was a video game to Cassie Hart: A thing which spurred something inside, which then became art — the novel Butcherbird. CASSIE HART: It started in Minecraft. Glancing up from the water between two rows of wheat I was thrown back into my childhood when we used to […]

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Charlie Watts, RIP

Here’s an obit from Variety. I’m sure in the next few days we’ll see many more. He was one of the best drummers, in rock or outside it, and equally, the coolest drummer in rock by far. He dressed for the job he wanted, and the job he had. And while there are any number […]

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The Big Idea: R.W.W. Greene

Author R.W.W. Greene has someone he wants you to meet. It’s a person — well, entity — you’ve met before. And for Greene’s new novel Twenty Five to Life, it’s someone who was very important in setting the stage for the events detailed therein. R.W.W. GREENE: Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood […]

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The Dragon Curse

Krissy and I went to a Dayton Dragons game today (the Dragons being Dayton’s minor league baseball team), and something happened that always happens whenever I come to see a Dayton Dragons game at the field: They lost. And, this time, not by just a little. The final score was 8-3, after a particularly disastrous […]

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Someone Wants In

And to be fair, it’s warm and humid outside. I want to be inside, too. However, if I let this critter in, the chances that it’ll be hugged by one of the cats’ teeth in the very near future approaches certainty. It’s probably better where it is. Pretty specimen, though. Hope you’re having a fine […]

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Trying Out A New Recipe: Claire Saffitz’s Malted “Forever” Brownies

Welcome to another installment of me trying out recipes I saw on YouTube! Today we have Claire Saffitz’s brownie recipe. Not just any brownies, though. These are malted brownies! I wasn’t sure what that meant at first, but after reading the ingredient list, it turns out it just has some malted milk powder in the […]

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The Big Idea: Adrian Goldsworthy

The past is another country — especially when you are trying to write a novel in it. Historian Adrian Goldsworthy had the skills and expertise to write about the Roman-era military encampment that is at the heart of his novel The Fort… but how to bring that place and time alive? Goldsworthy talks about it […]

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The Interdependency Series on NPR’s List of Favorite SF/F of the Last Decade

Which, you know, is nice. Here’s the whole list, in case you’re curious. I think it’s a pretty darn defensible list of choices for the last decade in SF/F. It reflects both the current state of the art in the genre, and what’s been commercial and buzzy, concepts that sometimes but not always overlap. And […]

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The Big Idea: Richard Kadrey

It’s the end of an era: with King Bullet, New York Times Bestselling Author Richard Kadrey puts a capper on the long-running and fabulous Sandman Slim series of fantasy novels. In today’s Big Idea, Kadrey tells us how it all came to this, and how one faces the end of a thing both the author and […]

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