swan_tower did the recording of my short story, "Väinämöinen and the Singing Fish," which is now available on PodCastle for the low, low price of absolutely free. I have been playing with niecelets and talking to their parents and have not yet had a chance to listen to it, but I'm looking forward to it. I hope you enjoy it.

Lifted from an e-mail I sent to a friend earlier today ( Read more... )

I'm very pleased to report that PodCastle is going to do a podcast of my short story "Väinämöinen and the Singing Fish." I've attempted to give them a brief Finnish pronunciation guide. I hope it's useful. I'm not distant enough from it to be able to tell very well, I'm afraid. It seems to bode well for PodCastle's willingness to buy stories ( Read more... )

Kalevala humor never goes out of date. (My friend Ben WINOLJ sent me this link. Heehee. Ben, for those of you keeping score with the home game, is the person who sent me a link to a news article about two Gila monsters eating their owner's corpse, with only the note, "Thought of you. Ben." He later claimed that he meant to make a joke about ( Read more... )

A Finnish SF magazine, Spin will be translating and reprinting my novelette, "Irena's Roses." This is a first for me: I've been published outside the US many times but never translated. And for it to be a Finnish mag just feels so appropriate to me. Go Finns! Go me! Oh, I am so pleased.

We were driving down Hennepin, my dad behind the wheel and me in the passenger's seat and Lars, Henrik, and Sophie in the back. I was pointing out what various buildings were when they asked me, or else when I felt like it. We passed Franklin, and you can see the Scottish Rite temple behind Sebastian Joe's from Hennepin. "What is that?" they ( Read more... )

How to tell that George Maude, author of Historical Dictionary of Finland, and I have different worldviews, the one-sentence version: "Without Russia on its border, it would be very difficult to justify the maintenance in the current form of the Finnish armed forces." So true, George. So true. And without the presence of water, it would be ( Read more... )

Okay, so I expect weird dreams when I'm sick, even when most of the fever is gone ( Read more... )

Happy Kalevala Day! Possibly it is time to steal someone else's magic device. Or to kidnap yourself a spouse. Or to send your child's prospective spouse to perform impossible tasks that will likely kill him/her. Or...um. You know, maybe just eating some pulla would be good enough. You don't have to be authentic, maybe ( Read more... )

I'm sure you've all seen the video of the Helsinki Complaints Choir by now, but I just wanted to say: I love being a Finnophile. My hindbrain apparently had a very good idea what it was doing when it launched me on this very strange sequence of obsessions. It makes me happy ( Read more... )