Where do writers get our ideas, you ask?  Sometimes, we get them from other writers. There were many inspirations for my first novel, The Night Inside, but one of them was definitely a story by another writer.   I read Suzy McKee Charnas’ wonderful collection The Vampire Tapestry, which features a vampire quite unlike most of the others I had encountered to that point. There’s nothing supernatural about Weyland and […]

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We went to The Great Upheaval: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim show at the Art Gallery of Toronto yesterday afternoon.  I like modern art, particularly abstract impressionism and related styles, and we’ve been to MOMA, the Pompidou in Paris, The National Gallery in Washington and museums in almost every city we’ve visited.  We’re the people who […]

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  At last, some real news can be revealed. In the first big news, the talented team at ChiZine Publications is bringing out my first three novels as e-books, complete with stunning new covers.  A special thanks to Gillian Holmes for The Night Inside and Blood and Chrysanthemums.  They’ll be released in a few weeks. Secondly, […]

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No question at all. Patricia McKillip. If I could figure out a way to magically steal every scrap of poetry, plot, inspiration, craft and beauty out of her soul, I’d do it. (Ok, maybe I wouldn’t do exactly that but I’d    certainly be tempted…) I read The Riddlemaster of Hed in high school, while I […]

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The next writer I discovered (around the same time as Tanith Lee) was C. J. Cherryh, with her first novel Gate of Ivrel.  With a cover like this, how could I NOT buy it?*  The worlds created for this book, and the 3 sequels, operate at the intersection of fantasy and science fiction.  The main […]

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Because I can happily blather on about our trip… I realized I’d been remiss in not providing a link (mostly because WordPress appears to have changed something and I haven’t figured out why the link function doesn’t work anymore).   Until I figure it out, here’s the info, old-school:  www.flipkey.com/marcilhacsurcele-cottage-rentals/p250972/    Or just google “Marcilhac stone gite” and you’ll find […]

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      I’m a rotten traveller.  I get horribly stressed about missing flights and trains, I agonize over picking places to stay or eat, and I generally spend a good portion of any trip in a state of subdued anxiety.   As a result, I was inordinately proud of myself for taking two trips to France, one in […]

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If Andre Norton’s Witch World series opened my eyes to the idea of fantasy fiction that was not aimed at young adults, Tanith Lee’s The Birthgrave blasted apart everything I had thought a narrating hero had to be.   This is one of the few books I can actually remember buying.  My family was on vacation […]

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I’m talking about Andre Norton and the fact that I might not be the writer I am without her influence.  Probably any number of writers would say the same thing, especially female ones, especially female ones of my generation. Oddly enough, I read none of her YA fiction growing up.  The first book of hers […]

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  Like just about every SF fan of a certain age, I was a huge Star Trek fan as a child.  I didn’t watch it on the first run but probably in the first years of the reruns, when I was 10 or 11.   While I never wrote Star Trek   fan fiction (which is not to […]

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