Erotica, fantasy, and horror writer.
There are over 6,000 islands in the nation of present day Greece, and to the ancient Greeks they must have seemed many times this number. Their entire world was made of islands, and the sea. From myth we know know the prominent ones, like Lesbos, Naxos, Aenea (home of Circe), Ogygia (home of Calypso), Delos, …
My favorite Twittersnip magic items of the 2023. 2023 Magic Items (Best of) Basket of Adoration: Whatever is put into this large woven basket elicits oohs and aahhs of admiration from viewers, and if it is a living being, the desire to nurture and protect it… no matter what sort of creature it is. …
My favorite Twittersnip spells of the year. 2023 Spells Aflen’s Loosen Whale: Makes a whale void its bowels in the middle of the ocean, releasing any ambergris (or other items) it might have held. Astrological Negation: Nullifies, for a set period of time, the bad aspects of the recipient’s horoscope reading. (If …
This short story about a near-future NYC. Netflix’s Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, about doctor and charlatan Paolo Macchiarini who implanted artificial tracheas in patients without adequate testing. Forgotten mascots of the Christmas season. See my list of fictional ones. Eigengrau and CEV. Hairless dogs.
It’s not really Christmas unless you eat or bake some sort of traditional German cookie! Like Lebkuchen, better known to the English-speaking world as gingerbread. Pfeffernusses are also popular as well as Spritzgeback, those cookies you pipe through a cookie press to form decorative swirls. In the US they are called Spritzen or simply …
Crown of Starlight (Chapter One) by Cait Corrain Everybody’s been talking lately about the publishing scandal involving debut author Cait Corrain and her fantasy novel Crown of Starlight, so I thought I’d put in my opinion. The whole story is here and tells it more eloquently and completely than I can, but the gist is …
Santa Claus is a European invention, and the idea of Santa wearing a red suit with white trim, black boots, and a stocking cap, an American one. Courtesy of the Coca-Cola company which costumed him such to match the red in their company logo, which was for an ad campaign. But even so, the same …
One of the things that fascinates me about visual AI generations is how they allow one to peek into the multiverse. Not the real multiverse, mind you. That hasn’t been proved to exist. But an illusion of a multiverse, with different products, people, animals and buildings, all skewed greatly or slightly from our own …
Curse tablets were a cottage industry in ancient Greece. Spells embodying the caster’s desires were written on plaques of stone, clay, papyrus, wax, even thin sheets of gold. Then, to reach the gods, they were thrown into wells or buried with the dead (often without permission from the dead one’s next of kin.) It’s likely …
