Considering what I am about to write (yes! they bought it!), I guess you might like to check out these
… courtesy of Open Culture.
Now a shower, a bite, and then at least 16 hours of sleep.
I have lost my voice, but I also mastered a 5-hours game of Hope & Glory with 7 fantastic players.
I’ll try and find a photo and post it.
But now, I’m going to sleep under the shower.
Later!
One more book as Halloween comes closer – and again an old review I was paid all of four bucks for last year.
American Elizabeth Hand has had a long and honored career as a writer of fantastic fiction, with a long list of titles and a good number of prizes including the James Tiptree Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. Like many hard-working authors, her bibliography also includes novelizations and tie-ins with popular franchises such as X-Files and Star wars; but it is in his original works that the spark of originality and wonder are found that justify the success, the positive reviews and the awards.
Wylding Hall, published in 2015, is a novella, which nevertheless captures in less than 150 pages more ideas, surprises and twists than many novels six times more massive. Continue reading
For each white man (independently of duration of journey)
Clothes; macintosh mg; ditto sheet; blanket-bag; spare blanket
Share of plates, knives, forks, spoons, pannikins, or bowls
Share of cooking-things, iron pots, co£fee-mill, kettles, Ace
Spare knife, flints, steel, tinder-box, tinder, four pipes
Bags, 6
Provisions for emergency—
Five days of Jerked meat, at 3 lbs. a day (on an average)
Two quarts of water (on an average), 4 lbs.; share of kegs
Total lb each white man: 66Francis Galton, The art of travel, or, Shifts and contrivances available in wild countries, 4th ed., 1872
My mother of course never read Francis Galton’s essential travelling handbook, that some have called “the original rough guide”.
In case you are interested, Galton’s own web-page, Galton.org (old Francis was ahead of his times, you see) holds a pdf version of the second edition, dated 1856 – perfect for use as reference for Hope & Glory, incidentally. Or maybe you’d like to check out the Long Riders Guild’s fine paper reprint.
And what better book as a supplement and resource for a game in which travel and exploration play such a big part? Galton’s book has it all, and it’s a great read if you want to capture a certain Victorian mindset. Continue reading
I hope a subtitled version will be available, because this is my sort of movie, and it is exactly what we are going for in Hope & Glory.
Less than 12 hours after the paintings by Astor Alexander started making the rounds, a call hit the usual suspects, for an anthology of pulp retellings of faery tales.
The only rule: not the ninbe princesses portrayed in the original paintings.
Which is a pity, because I love Pocahontas – Private Eye.
Anyway, that’s what writing to a call means – you go with the publisher’s requests.
And so I did some research, dug out Giambattista Basile, and sent a pitch straight away (and this makes three submissions to three different publishers this week). Continue reading
Karavansara 