LAST RITUALS by Leigh Lundin Tomorrow is Independence Day in the Republic of Iceland. The entire nation of Iceland (or Ísland) has a population 1/60 that of New York City, and they like it fine that way, thank you very much. It’s the westernmost of European countries, on the Arctic Circle between Greenland and the […]

HYPHEN THE TERRIBLE by John M. Floyd As some of you know, I like to veer this column off the beaten track now and then, especially into the movie and TV world, but it’s been awhile since I strayed into Style/Grammar/Punctuationland. While poking around over there I covered (or uncovered) the topics of semicolons (April) […]

STORIES OF NOVEL WRITING by Steve Steinbock It’s getting very near the end of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and I confess, I didn’t do much with it the last ten days or so. It isn’t that I ran out of steam – although to an extent, I did. Rather, I found that just as […]

UNIQUELY AMERICAN by Deborah Elliott-Upton In the immortal words of Dolly Parton, “Here we go again.” Has it already been a year since we celebrated Thanksgiving via cyberspace? I’m usually one for carrying on traditions, but not this Thanksgiving. For the first time in years, I will not be basting a turkey, making chutney or […]

BURNING QUESTION by Rob Lopresti Lately I seem to be drawing most of my column inspirations from Melodie. (More on that in a week or two.) As my father used to say, great minds run in the same gutter. Her terrific piece about the horrors of being next to a wildfire reminded me of a […]

SPOOKING ME II by Melodie Johnson Howe Before I was interrupted by the fire, I was writing about my excursion into the CIA. Even spies need to eat. And the CIA has one of the biggest food courts I have seen. Think of a football field filled with neon signs reading Burger King, Barbecued Ribs, […]

SERIES-OUS BUSINESS by James Lincoln Warren A common feature of genre fiction is the series protagonist. There are rare examples in mainstream literature—John Updike’s Rabbit books and John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga come to mind, and there’s also Anthony Trollope—but generally speaking, the series character is confined to science fiction, crime, adventure, suspense, horror, and fantasy. […]