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A while back I bought Samuel Graham’s The Origins of the Bible: The Facts and Fiction Behind the World’s Greatest Book. Ha! This was not at all what I expected. I was looking for a study of the secular and pagan influences on the writers and translators of the Bible. Instead, this book is apologetics,…

There are things you never understand until you’re a parent. For instance, cheering over piss. My littlest is 3 years, 9 months old. We started seriously potty training him last week. There’d been earlier efforts, but, being the most stubborn of our brood, he resisted and won out. I took him to Sprawl-Mart last week and let…

If you missed last night’s chat at The Red Light District — and I can’t imagine what could have been more important to you! — but want to know what was said, there is a transcript posted at the message board. Many thanks to all the fine folk who showed up to take part in…

About 3,000 more words than at the last update, and I crossed another threshold — the manuscript is now over the 300-page mark. 76,871 / 100,000(76.9%)

I visited with 7th graders at my son’s junior high this evening. Eleven of the kids wrote, designed and published books as a project for their English and reading classes. It was quite an experience. Five of the young authors were present and talked about their books, which ranged from a tale about a pencil…

I finally got around to making some recommendations for HWA’s annual Bram Stoker Awards. I found two surprises when I went to the list of current recommendations. The alarming one is that Gregory Lamberson’s Personal Demons wasn’t yet recommended in the First Novel category. The recommendation deadline is coming up. Works have to have at…

Today I revised a short story I wrote last year for a particular anthology. It was rejected, which meant it needed heavy revisions since some plot elements were built around the mythology established for the anthology. And, suddenly, after several re-readings, I realized why it was rejected (maybe). A major point of the ending made…

Villagers used to execute and bury criminals at crossroads. Suicides were buried there, too. The idea was that the ghosts of these damned souls — and during the Dark Ages the church/courts had the power to determine your place in the afterlife (supposedly) — these damned souls would become confused at the crossroads and unable…

Perhaps this article will explain my bird phobia. It likely could at least explain the prevalence of bird-headed deities among ancient cultures.