Stratofanatic's Emporium

Ah, shucks .... another swing and a miss! Once upon a time, years ago, I wrote about " Golden Opportunity Nearly Missed (But Nonetheless Flubbed "), my first application to become a co-editor at Fafnir . As it happened, I re-applied the following year, and although still wasn't selected, the committee liked me enough to make me the journal's first-ever reviews editor, which I happily did for five years. (And we won a World Fantasy Award in the process!) Ever since leaving Fafnir , though, I've kept my eyes half-peeled for further editorial opportunities. Even got an offer from  MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, although I did end up declining that offer because I wasn't interested in doing reviews again .... Been there, done that, as they say. Anyway, last spring, I saw that Paul March-Russell of  Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction was stepping down as editor after a 10+ years, so once again threw my name into the hat. And was very pleasan...

My friend Doug Anderson, who manages the blog Wormwoodiana  on old forgotten fantasy texts, just informed me about an interesting new alliterative development: fantasy author Christopher Paolini, author of the Inheritance trilogy, is coming out with a long alliterative poem called  The Book of Remembrance . It's being funded on Kickstarter , apparently, and will feature seven "in-world" texts on "seven of the major battles throughout the history of Alagaësia." The alliterative poem will cover the fourth battle, "The Ambush at Stavarosk." Although I've never read Paolini, I know he's most famous for publishing  Eragon (2002) when only 19 years old. But much like Terry Brooks, I'm sure he's matured from his early efforts -- dude's been around for over two decades now! Either way,  any long new alliterative poem is bound to set my whiskers a-quiver. Here's an tidbit posted by Paolini on Twitter ( here and here ): So. When our gran...

It's a new year .... so time for the my reading-list recap for 2025. The majority of this cycle's books were Del Rey SF/F novels from the 1980s. (The special surprise was Clifford D. Simak's Mastodonia , which is by far my favorite by him.) I read a few other period-relevant texts, such as Tad Williams's first novel, but yeah, given my deep immersion in researching Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, that was my wheelhouse last year. Otherwise, my non-project related reading was relatively sparse. I read one long nonfiction book, A Civil Action , for my Law & Literature class that was cancelled. I read a few books for the ENGL 380: Literary Analysis class that replaced it. And I finally did Percival Everett's novel Erasure, and although some might find this sacrilegious, it's still true: the movie was better. FINAL STATS : Altogether, I read 9175 pages  (or 31 books) this semester. So, that's about the same as my total from last year . As per usual, except for...