I love him so much.
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LOOK AT THOSE LITTLE PAWS
LOOK AT THOSE CUTE FANGS
Yes! Look at the cute fangs! It’s like, “I is predatory creature with sharp bits, and I luvz you!”
Announcements
Hey all!
Three pieces of news!
1) I have broken 200 pages on my new novel, City of Dreams! Look for sample first draft excerpts to be coming soon!
1a) Of course, excerpts from my older works will continue to be posted. Watch this space.
2) My author interview is up at Booksgosocial! Go and have a look!
3) And finally, the book trailer for Dreams of the Boardwalk is complete! Have a look!
We Are The Old Ones
It’s a very common trope in science fiction: humanity are newcomers to the cosmic scene. There are empires out there that are older than the existence of our species, or even our planet. Their technology makes ours look like toys. Their knowledge and intelligence makes us look like children. Their personal abilities make us look like puny, feeble creatures. Sometimes that makes us the…
What I Meant When I Was Talking About An Amazonian Wonder Woman
Artwork by Nebezial. Go take a look. The rest of his work is awesome, too.
Meanwhile, take a look at those powerful shoulders, how tall she is. That’s how an Amazon is supposed to look. The comics usually get the height right, but the rest of her looks like every other superheroine (i.e., lie a hostile Barbie doll), which is a shame. Superheroes are all about the power fantasy; let ‘em look powerful
let me tell you something:
no one is going to look at you, broken and shattered
and think -
damn, you are beautiful.no one is going to come pick up your broken pieces off the floor and
assemble them into a beautiful whole.hell,
you won’t even look at yourself and think -
I made broken look beautiful.you know why?
because all those writers lied to you.
yes,
all those with their poems of scraped knuckles and
blood dripping down chins,
pomegranate songs and loves that ripped through you like
hurricanes.liars.
so you and i,
we are going to make a plan.you are not going to romanticize days when your brain tells you to smash that mirror,
you are not going to romanticize the lover who doesn’t understand you
but still writes about you.here is what you are going to romanticize instead:
you are going to romanticize the first day of spring,
its gentle hands all over your body,
lifting you up until you are as light as a feather.you are going to romanticize the tea and honey kind of love,
no hurricanes,
but sunshine that builds you up from within,
that helps you make it through the worst days.you are going to romanticize gentle hands of a friend
in yours,
telling you that it is going to be okay.because it is.
and don’t trust poets,
we’re no good,
we love pretending that our jagged edges tantamount to a beautiful disaster, but in reality -
there ain’t nothing beautiful about shaky hands holding a cigarette and
empty eyes staring at the cracks in the walls.you know what is beautiful, instead?
the days when you can look at yourself in the mirror and smile,
scars and all.music that makes your soul flow like a river,
books that offer comfort,
families flocking together like overgrown birds to keep you safe and warm,
friends that give you strength when you can find none,
lovers who make you laugh through tears.baby,
from now on
you are going to romanticize healing;honey dripping down your fingertips,
August nights that stick to your skin,
the day you find your purpose,
long car rides and singing so loud that no one can shut you up now.bad news:
no one is coming to save you.good news:
you can save yourself.
Lana Rafaela (via wordsnquotes)
Excerpt from Hometown: Introducing Angelina
Excerpt from Hometown: Introducing Angelina
The free giveaway is over, but Hometown is still very much available for download and even for free on Kindle Unlimited. If you’d like a look at what you’re missing, have a look at the excerpt below, which introduces our heroine Angelina.
*
Angelina Santos-De La Cruz walked toward the shore, the lakebottom silt squishing delightfully between her toes with each step. She didn’t want to get out,…
“I feel homeless. Like this isn’t the place that I thought it was. I feel like I don’t understand where I am. Where we all are. Last week students started chanting ‘build the wall’ in the lunchroom of a local middle school. Some of the Hispanic children started crying. If you’re the principal– how are you supposed to stop that behavior? If the president can behave in a certain way, how are you supposed to tell a child that it’s unacceptable? How does that hold up? It breaks my heart. I’ve had friends reach out to me. They’ve told me: ‘I understand the reasons that you’re upset. But those aren’t the reasons I voted for him.’ And I’m just starting to understand that. I’m realizing that a lot of people wanted change more than they wanted kids not to cry. We all have our own code of ethics. My bottom line happened to be tolerance. Their bottom line was abortion. Or the Supreme Court. I guess we all have the right to choose our own bottom line.“
I have a number of white friends who say things like “I don’t see race” or “the only race is the human race”. This cartoon illustrates why such well-intentioned sentiments don’t actually help.
Fastachee
(Illustration by Nikolai Ostertag comes from PathfinderWiki and is © Paizo Publishing.)
First of all, look at that fastachee art. That is awesome. Nikolai Ostertag knows his business. It reminds me of Skottie Young’s work on Marvel’s various Oz series—that delightfully over-jointed, cobbled-together, natural-but-not look. I love it.
Second, it’s so nice to to get a Native American (Seminole and Miccosukee, to be precise) monster that still fits so seamlessly into the (by and large) Eurocentric fey family. I feel like I could use these in practically any campaign. (Plus I’m sure there could be rice and manioc-themed fastachees too).
Third, holy crap, a Tiny fey at CR 11! Which makes sense, when you realize this fey can sense—and cast spells through—any ear of corn within 18 miles. That means it can baleful polymorph or flame strike you from a day’s ride away. Tick one off, and you better have some teleport spells handy, because you could run a half marathon and not get away from it.
It’s going to be rare that parties fight one of these “Little Givers” (as they’re known in Seminole mythology). They’re neutral good and the literal manifestation of the life-giving properties of the corn plant, after all. Still, if the PCs throw their weight around too much in a settlement a fastachee has adopted, they might encounter subtle reprisals. And if PCs are part of a disproportionately more powerful force—say, a colonial expedition or invading army—or if they visit wholesale destruction too near a fastachee’s domain, the corn-silk gloves might come off.
Most fastachees are benign…but when they go wrong, the results are terrifying. Adventurers fleeing from a river town full of deep one hybrids and other horrors make their way into farming country. There they discover a town whose corn crop is thriving…but the few farmers they meet are skittish and afraid. Determined to fend off the corruption downstream (or perhaps already corrupted by it himself), the local fastachee has formed the town’s children into a society that is part militia, part mystery cult…and any signs of corruption are to be rooted out.
Ghorans exhibit an almost religious devotion to fastachees. Some ghorans credit the fey with the creation of the ghoran race, and even those that don’t still have heard tales of a helpful fastachee saving whole ghoran villages from invaders. Adventurers who are wounded defending ghoran interests might be brought to a fastachee for healing and other aid. But such help comes with a price—the fastachee might send them on an obscure errand of his own (and he has more than enough ears to keep tabs on them as they carry it out).
Prohibition is a booming business opportunity for adventurers, particularly ones that can fend off drakes with one blade and the revenuers with the other. When a group of adventurers are contracted to see a shipment of elven spirits safely from Canada to St. Louis, it should be a milk run. But thin men harry their route south, and a run-in with a spiritualist and some mummies blows their cover in Springfield. They can lie low with some halflings if they’re polite…but if they flash too much magic or any kind of firearms, the fastachee who protects the Small’uns will run them out of town.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 114
Seriously. The fastachee’s Plant Projection (Su) is one mile per Hit Dice. And that’s a radius. For you East Coasters, that’s all of Manhattan and most of the other boroughs. A fastachee standing in the right place could eavesdrop on Congress and then command plants just outside Baltimore the very next round. Or, to put a more corn-oriented spin on it, 60 fastachees could pretty much protect Iowa—all of it.
My grandfather was from near Springfield. And plenty of folks from the generation before him had Prohibition stories, as the Illinois legislators weren’t about to let their whistles run dry when Chicago was so wet. As I recall, one car mechanic once got a call to go out and fix a supposedly abandoned truck. By the time he was done, there was an envelope full of money on the seat that wasn’t there when he started, and he decided it was best not to investigate too carefully.