In February I devoted two blog posts and 16 different social media posts to a “New Year Dragon Project” display of dragon-themed artwork. When I discovered that this Chinese New Year’s animal was the Dragon, I immediately thought about all the amazing artists I know, who paint or sculpt – and indeed, specialize – in dragons. But for the sake of my sanity I settled on only four, whom I know well enough to anticipate they’d be willing to work…
Do you read science fiction as an escape? If you hoped the politics would die down after the election, and now you just want to get away from it all in a sci-fi world, I’ll try to break this gently. Politics in science fiction is pretty much baked-in. No romance, no adventure story, no mystery, and no historical drama can completely evade society or politics, even when it’s not the focus. But most of these are based on actual events…
It’s once again time to do something in celebration of Library Week! Last year on Artdog Adventures, I posted a different library-related quote each day. The brilliant Simini Blocker illustrated all of them. Of course, The Weird Blog didn’t exist yet, this time last year. This year, I’m no less grateful and delighted that we have libraries in our lives. I have a lot less time for blogging. But I owe it to libraries and their impact on my life to do something in celebration of Library…
The Capricon Project – Detectives in the Wild My first panel at Capricon 40 was one of the three I’m scheduled to moderate, “Detectives in the Wild.” In it we explored the many ways that mystery stories show up in speculative fiction. Deirdre Murphy, Mark Huston, and Clifford Royal Johns joined me as co-panelists. All of us have written, or are writing, speculative fiction mysteries. Just between the four of us, we covered the mystery sub-categories of Cozies, Amateur Sleuth, Detective, and Police Procedural. The panel’s description made it…
Recently I’ve wandered into stranger-than-usual territory in three urban fantasy books. Actually the third one may fall more into the speculative fiction category, but it mostly takes place in a city, and some elements come across to me much more as fantasy than as fiction that’s based in any science I’m aware of. It’s been a while (June 2018) since I posted any book reviews on this blog, but today I’d like to share glimpses of the stranger-than-usual territory explored in Extreme Medical Services, The SparkleTits Chronicles, and Hollow…
The Artdog Quote(s) of the Week We’re closing in on the end of November, and also the end of NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month). All month I’ve posted things to encourage writers, whether or not they’re specifically participating. But for all who are participating, this week you go into the homestretch. The toll that project fatigue exacts You’re so close! But sometimes, as we near the end of a long project, exhaustion sets in. Especially if you’ve been extending yourself to make your goals, you may be short of sleep or creaky from bending over your…
Could our dogs be verbal virtuosos? Perhaps more than we may think! This is the second post in a series about dog cognition. In case you missed the first one, click: “How much does your dog understand?” I’ve also written about working dogs on this blog. That post touched on dog cognition, but didn’t go into as much depth. This series started when I wrote a guest post on dog cognition for Booker T’s Farm, a blog devoted to books and dogs (a great…
Panels and readings are among my favorite things to do at science fiction conventions. Yes, I know this makes me “sercon” (oldstyle fan-speak for “too serious to be any fun”). But I’ve decided I’m just gonna have to “own it.” Diss me if you must, but I like going to panels and readings where I can get new ideas and listen to interesting stories more than I like going to parties where I can’t hear what anyone is saying and most of the people are drunk. I’m…
Authors, Reading–Part Three In the last two weeks I’ve published photos and information about readings I attended at SoonerCon 28. Part One profiled science fiction, alternate history, and fantasy readings. Part Two spotlighted two fantasy and two alternate history writers. Today’s authors include one each who write fantasy, science fiction, and middle-grade whimsical “creepy stories.” Since each brought a physical copy of their book and was kind enough to hold it up for me, I did composites of each person….
Authors, Reading–Part One I’m apparently weird, but I enjoy going to readings. I attended a lot of them at SoonerCon 28, and thought you might enjoy seeing the photos I took of the authors. You may have heard of some or all of them. SoonerCon 28tried to group their readings thematically–but sometimes the authors didn’t get the memo, so we had kind of a nice smorgasbord. I hope you enjoy this series of posts. Wherever I could, I’ve linked the authors’ names to their websites and/or books,…