A Tale of Two Castles by Gail Carson Levine Harper Collins, 2011 The past year has seen a resurgence in cozy fantasy. In this subgenre the characters are genial, the stakes low. It’s slice-of-life, not slice-of-death, and centers on community and friendship. It’s been led by the runaway success of the self-published Legends & Lattes …
I dream about a certain bookstore/library sometimes. It’s not one I’ve seen in real life, but a combination of all the ones I’ve ever known. It always has the kind of books I am interested in: fantasy and science fiction, art and design, sociology and science and history and all the weird ways these intersect. …
If you’ve read my posts on AI versions of Narnia’s White Witch, Green Witch, and Queen Jadis of Charn, you’ll know I have a fascination with exotic costumes. I blame this on watching the Sonny and Cher Show in the early 1970s. (Some of my grade school designs for Cher would have put present day …
Recently on the Midjourney Reddit users have been posting the pics generated by using a prompt of their Reddit usernames, so I tried the same. Granted I have a leg up because it’s so descriptive and concrete. Using just Cobalt Jade, we get some kind of attractive mineral or gemstone formation. Neat! Cobalt Jade + …
The letter F is full of energy. It’s fiery, furious, florid, fuming fun. It’s also very earthy. Take flora and fauna, fungi, fornication, fucking. It’s the naughtiest of letters and the most disreputable. To name a character with an F is to make the reader look and think twice, like with this list. (To soften …
The first time I ever saw a lady dressed in traditional Welsh clothing was in a book about quilting. At the time I couldn’t make heads or tales about it, because it was so different from the Slavic ethnic costumes I was familiar with. But it was a real thing, women really did dress that …
Want to make your fantasy world really fantasyish? Add in some -wyns, -yrs, -wys, with a sprinkling of gws and lls, just like the characters and places in The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh folktales written down in the 14th century. Based on oral traditions that were older, they served as the basis for modern …
I thought I had seen all the maps of Narnia that there were to see, but I was wrong. Let’s take a look at this incredible one, which was posted on Reddit by its creator, DeFlame. Click on it to see the full version in all its glory. I emphasize this is NOT the Narnia …