Erotica, fantasy, and horror writer.

Most commented posts

  1. The Worm Ouroboros
    [Reading Challenge 2018]
    — 6 comments
  2. The Lady of the Green Kirtle (Part I) — 5 comments
  3. The Wild Lands of the North
    (and a bit about Giants)
    — 4 comments
  4. All Things Charn (Part I) — 4 comments
  5. Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/30/17: Mundane Fare — 3 comments

Author's posts

Bandfics, Part 2

Not every band inspires a busy and passionate fandom. Using Archive of Our Own as a bellwether, I noticed several things by looking at the stats. One is the sheer amount of material. Excluding Elvis (450 stories) most of it dates from bands active from the early 1960s on. There’s no Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/10/23: Led Zeppelin Songs

 When it comes to Led Zeppelin songs, their titles recall mostly about one thing: Blues, Blues, Blues. Unlike Beatles songs, they didn’t dabble in storytelling or psychedelia. This makes the song titles themselves not too interesting, but they’re also easy to recreate. Maybe there’s a bootleg of these around somewhere…   Led Zeppelin Songs, what …

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Bandfics, Part 1

When discussing rock band fandoms, there are two types. The first is the “typical” one of love of the music, which also includes listening to albums, attending concerts, and discussing these with other fans who share the same passion. It can run along a scale. At one end are those who buy an album or …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/3/23: Hungarian Names

Above is a portrait of the most recent of Hungary’s exports: the Vizsla, wearing a traditional peasant outfit courtesy of AI art. The speedy, good-natured hunting dog joins the rank of other notable exports like paprika, ghoulash, video pioneer Ernie Kovacs, and Gene Simmons (by way of Israel) to name a few. Situated in Central …

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Zeppedee-doo-dah May: Led Zeppelin Fandom

It’s time for another themed month, and for May it’s… LED ZEPPELIN FANDOM! NOT musical fandom as in discussing the pros and cons of Jimmy Page’s various guitars or the band’s performances over various tours. I mean Led Zeppelin as people, characters, who inspire fiction and artwork, most often by female fans. Ready? Let’s go!

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/26/23: Shades of Yellow

Like the color green, the color yellow has a split personality. Yellow, and its cousin gold, can mean wealth, sunlight, cheer and happiness, even life itself. But it is also the color of sweat, feces and urine, cowardice and betrayal, just as green’s sour side is that of poison, jealousy, snot, and pus. Unlike green, …

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AI Art Adventures: Thangka Lions

A thangka is a Tibetan religious panting depicting a Buddhist deity or concept. It’s usually done on fabric in bright pigments. To my surprise, I generated a dozen of these using the following prompt: Lion, human head of Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo, who is credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet in the late Eighties. The …

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Elric: Acid, Goth, or Heavy Metal?

[Previous posting on Elric art here.]   Another way portraits of Elric can classified is by the musical genre they evoke or were influenced by. Elric was born in 1961 and matured over the decades since, which means his teenage years, the most musically-influenced period of a young person’s life, ran through the 1970s and …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/19/23: Shades of Green

  Now that Spring is here, it’s entirely appropriate to talk about shades of green, and how they are named. Pictured above is a set of green PMS colors, once the standard for the printing industry. Basic colors of ink were mixed together to create the colors in the squares, which were referred to by …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/12/23: Dark Acadamia (Secret Societies)

 Now let’s get down to what makes a Dark Acadamia setting truly dark: the secret societies! There are for students, and in the Ivy League schools, for the elitist of the elite. Dartmouth has its Sphinx Society, Princeton its 21 Club, and Yale, the most notorious one of all: The Skull and Bones, thrust into …

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