If you didn't acquire the awesome book I pimped last year because the price tag was (understandably) frightening, it will be available as a paperback in less than a month ( Read more... )

Another book for the primary-research worldbuilding wonks out there:

Medieval Italy, edited by Jansen, Drell, and Andrews. Link to Amazon hereYes, it is expensive at just over $50 (list price is $70), but it could be worth requesting from the library. If you like it, there will be a paperback edition next year ( Read more... )

Heavenly Ambitions by Joan Johnson-Freese Yes, it's scholarly, but it's not dry. Johnson-Freese discusses the evolution of the US space program (and other countries') and then launches into discussion of the militarization of space vs. a necessarily cooperative nature of current and future space missions ( Read more... )

For all you writers researching medieval and Renaissance France, the book I pimped a few months is available!

Paris in the Middle Ages, by Simone Roux.(That's the Amazon link. Abebooks only seemed to link to it available in Germany (though still our English edition), so I don't know what's up with that ( Read more... )

It's unusual for me to pimp books at all, and even more unusual for me to pimp an academic book, but I'm going to anyway.

Paris in the Middle AgesAs I said, it's an academic book. (It also happens to be a translation from French.) But considering that a chunk of my f'list are novelists and/or medieval history buffs, I wanted to bring this one up. ( Read more... )

You do know about this, I hope ( Read more... )

My first--and so far only--published story has received not only an honorable mention in the 2008 Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, but I was mentioned in the summation at the front for having an "effective story"--mentioned alongside Von Car and Jay Lake, which is some pretty nice company ( Read more... )

jpsorrow is running a really fun non-contest on his blog, hereThe challenge is to name the author and title of twenty books, working only from a little piece of the cover. If you would rather contribute to my glory instead of your own, I still need to figure out #s 1-4, 7, 10, 11, and 13 ( Read more... )