WTF World?

I’m going to have Barry Manilow in my head all. Damn. Day. Er, anyway. This is a linkspam post. As you’ve no doubt noted from the many, many sites that have chosen to “go dark” today (in some cases only for US browsers), there’s a little bit of a protest going on, over extremely harmful internet regulation laws that may soon be passed by the US Congress. I’m not going dark myself; IMO that sort of protest is primarily effective for the most ubiquitous sites on the internet, not esoteric little hideaways like mine. But I’m doing what I can

I’m one of those people who’s perpetually behind the pop-cultural cutting edge. In fact I pretty much lurk at the blunt ass-end of what’s new/hot/now; I discover TV series years after they’ve been cancelled, I catch up on the popular movies only when I find them in the bargain bin, I’m years out of date on the coolest animanga and games. Netflix loves me; I order DVDs and don’t watch them for months. This is by choice, mind you: with a full-time writing career and a full-time job to juggle, something had to give. And I don’t mind being out

I get asked a lot how I concocted the worldbuilding of the Inheritance Trilogy — the politics, that is, as much as the mythos. People ask me how on earth I came up with a society in which the law is whatever the hell the people in charge decide to enforce, for whomever they deem worthy of justice; in which the right to kill is not a moral question or a quest for righteousness, but merely a cherished privilege of power; in which the wanton destruction of entire peoples and landscapes is constantly obfuscated by revised history; in which a

Please mind your manners and wipe your feet before coming in. Everyone else: sorry, but a couple of people (or one determined person with a lot of time on his hands) have not minded their manners re my last post. Apropos of which, the blog is on moderation — if you’ve commented here before successfully, your comments will be approved. If not, they’ll be held ’til I can get to them. Also, I’ve shut down commenting altogether on older posts — everything past 14 days old. Sorry, ’bout that. I’ll lift the moderation once the children get bored and go

Dear Hollywood: I get it. Those of you who control the purse-strings: You say you’re only interested in the color green, but your behavior doesn’t bear that out. I know you’re really only interested in stories of straight white men doing straight white mannish things, whatever those might be. I get that the voices of women grate upon you like a rasp over nutmeg and you’re not really interested in desegregating racially either. Seriously, there’s no need for you to justify yourself or try to explain that you’re not bigoted, it’s just the audience that you’re concerned about… because frankly,