I finished my latest Elric novel. For once he got the girl. I'm not sure I can deal. Elric is supposed to be tortured. He NEVER gets the girl. Something has to be wrong. Maybe I misread it.

I started on Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth. So far, girl getting hasn't been so much an issue. The stories have all been about sorcerer- ( Read more... )

The more fantasy I read, the more I really enjoy how versatile it is as a medium. I'm also coming to appreciate how some of the best fantasy blurs the boundaries between itself and science fiction. I just finished reading The Eternal Champion, a novella by Michael Moorcock, and was fascinated by the idea behind the world in which the story is set ( Read more... )

One of my ongoing frustrations with the internet is that search engines are not particularly good at retrieving the things you didn't know you wanted to see. In fact, they tend to return the things you've looked at before and give you more of that. In my fantasy search engine, I could say something like, "please show me something beautiful," and ( Read more... )

Lately I've been reading a fun little book called Exploring Black Holes: An Introduction to General Relativity. For those with a physics background, I could describe it as "Taylor and Wheeler Volume 2," and capture everything there is to be said about it. It's by the same authors, and done in the same style, right on down to the little "thinking ( Read more... )

Tonight I made a candle-light Christmas dinner for my family.

We had:

• Oysters on the half shell with horseradish and Tobasco
  
• Goose liver pate with truffles and cornishons
  
• Serrano ham
  
• Marinated mozzarella
  
• Stilton and Colby cheese with onions
  
• Glazed ham
  
• Green beans
  
• Sweet potatoes with marshmallows (my mother insisted on it, I was going to do red ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

These are the snapshots we took ourselves while we were in NYC. There's a zillion more out there on the internet. I swear we were among the most photographed drags in the parade. I keep running into people on the street who recognize me.


( Read more... )

I just got home from the new Star Trek movie. I loved it. It's a much tougher, adult Star Trek. The young Kirk in this movie makes the Kirk of the 1960s look wimpy. Death can be sudden and meaningless. It's a universe where people make tough decisions, take their licks, and everything doesn't always turn out okay. It's also a much more high ( Read more... )

Thanks to Rick Latham for taking these pictures of me.


( Read more... )