Prose

Couldn't sleep at all last night, and it's all because of history. Caught a little bit of Charlie Rose and a wonderful discussion of the Higgs bosun before drifting blissfully off, only to find myself awake at 2:30 or so. The episode of Sherlock Holmes then showing was a little too dramatic for sleep inducement, so I cruised a few channels looking for something interesting enough to keep my own thoughts at bay but soporific enough to send me back where I belonged, when I chanced upon this running on the other PBS station. Read more about Real People's History

Charles de Lint, or CdL as he is known among the fanbase, is primarily responsible for convincing me that I could put fantasy elements into a novel that takes place in the world I live in. Urban fantasy is a kind of everyperson's magical realism. Read more about CdL

It's my new favorite word. Paracosm. I learned it today in an op-ed piece by David Brooks, whose take on things political and cultural I sometimes appreciate and with which I, on very occasional occasions, agree. Read more about Paracosm

I drove to Nye Beach this last weekend for my first official reading of in a real live bookstore. The bookstore was Things Rich and Strange, owned by my friends Michael and Mary Babinski. Read more about A Worthy Rival

My fellow critics at Writer's Cramp are constantly carping about what they see as a certain passivity in my fiction. Where's the tension? they keep asking. Where's the conflict? Why does she keep stopping to eat? Why doesn't she kick some ass?

I have begun responding (rather sulkily, I must admit), "Isn't there enough tension in the world? Don't we have enough conflict?" Read more about On Edge

When I fall in love with a name, I find myself walking around the house rolling that name around in my head, concocting an image of the one who bears it. One of those names that has found a place in my imagination for all the years since I first heard it is the unlikely name May Theilgaard Watts. Read more about Reading the Landscape

A new season of True Blood is almost upon us. My daughter introduced me to , the first of The Southern Vampire Mysteries, a few years back but, to tell the truth, although somewhat taken with it, I didn't get very much further. I can't recall a single spine-tingling moment. Not one scene made me think twice about fetching something from the storage shed in the backyard after dark. Read more about Vampyr

She closed the book, placed it on the table and, finally, decided to walk through the door. Rose glanced once again at the journal. It had been there when she entered the room, open to the page that could have been written just for her.

“I am going in there now. It’s time to tell John goodbye.”

Had her father died here?

Five years ago he had walked out of the house. His car, his clothes, his personal effects all left behind. Hospitals had been searched, accident reports examined, and morgues investigated. Nothing. Read more about I'm Sorry

It was 1984. I was living in Green Bay, Wisconsin. There is a university there, from which I had graduated magna cum laude five years before. I had also become convinced that the man I thought I loved beyond all others was someone who could never really love me back. So I ran off with the bikers.

But this isn't a story about love affairs gone awry. It's a story about cultural relevance. About how the more things change, the more they stay the same. About why it's never a waste of time to read the classics. Read more about Classic Relevance

Got into another long back and forth on religion the other day on Facebook. It was fun, in many ways. I enjoy putting my thoughts out there, having them challenged, and having to think again about how I really see things and how to get that vision across. I can't say I was entirely successful, but I'd like to think I made at least a tiny crack in the certainty with which I felt confronted. Read more about Fundamentalists