I took a week off back earlier in January and just read library books and books from my TBR pile and a few old review books that I'd needed to finish up. It was nice. Then I got a gig for School Library Journal that involves reading a bunch of series titles on world history and writing them up, and so I've moved from urban fantasy books to titles ( Read more... )

A little while ago, dcopulsky, who was a student on the trips in both Ireland and Greece and Turkey, asked if I'd do an interview for his site Question Riot, where he posts new interviews on Thursdays. The interview is now up, and it gets into all of the different kinds of writing that I do, from my bread and butter freelance work to my fiction, RPG, and ( Read more... )

Rich was kind enough to send a second dispatch from the trip, this time from Skellig Michael. I'll post without further ado, though I may decide to write some of my own memories about that site. It's a wonderfully liminal space, and I think Rich has captured some of that here ( Read more... )

Back in 2006 when I made my first voyage to Ireland with Mark Vecchio and students, I had the privilege of getting to know then theater student, Rich Vaden. Since then, I've traveled with Rich to Turkey and Greece on another one of the myth tours (where he performed a Homeric Hymn for our group in the theater at Delphi), have seen him perform in ( Read more... )

All right, one week to get myself back on my feet, and here I am, returning to ye olde blog. (I was delayed in turning in my short story to my editor, and one of the things I forbade myself from doing was blogging before it was finished and ready to turn in.) But a couple of cool things happened today, and I wanted to make sure to blog about them, ( Read more... )

Three years ago, when I was the teaching assistant on the trip to Ireland, I mentioned Firefly, because it was quotable (and because I often reference it). Only one of the people on the trip -- a group of seventeen students and three chaperons -- had seen it. This eliminated a good chunk of my referential humor (since that had been one of my main ( Read more... )

Back in October, I contributed to Flames Rising's Halloween Horror Creatures series--and since I missed blogging for that whole month, I never mentioned that it had gotten posted! I did a piece on hounds of the Morrigan, using bits and pieces of real Celtic lore mixed with what I thought would be a fun monster, which is accompanied by a cool image ( Read more... )

So, I got to play one of my favorite D&D characters today--a character who made a debut in 3.5 but never got to go much of anywhere. His name is Urtog Fight-Good, and he's seen more life outside of D&D than any of my other characters, simply because his shtick is so fun. I've probably introduced more students to D&D during the Ireland trip and the ( Read more... )

Murphy's Ice Cream has posted the recipe for Honeycomb Ice Cream, possibly the best ice cream ever created by man. I searched for the true Irish recipe that I'd encountered at Murphy's in Dingle online, but my search came to naught, until Kieran at Murphy's promised to post it for me.

Thanks Kieran! You're the best!

Here it is, already December, and I have short stories banging on my door to be written in between the skads of reference work I've managed to bury myself in. As is my usual, since my deadlines are a little bit away, and I just finished a project, I'm letting myself breathe. If I followed this tendency a little less, I would probably not go psycho ( Read more... )