Writing projects sometimes get started in unusual ways. Some time back in early 2007 I was chatting electronically with an old friend and former neighbor, the gifted Somtow Sucharitkul —…

Teenage wizards Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez have been working the New York suburbs for nearly thirty years now, through nine novels’ worth of adventures. As the dawn of their…

It’s a cheerful moment at the start of a much-loved story… “[Bilbo] had a horrible thought that the cakes might run short, and then he — as the host: he…

Does anybody have an 800 number for the ancient Mayans? Because I need to lodge a complaint. Seriously, 2012 has been something of a wash all around.  Tragedies. Mass shootings.…

Teenage wizards Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez have been working the New York suburbs for nearly thirty years now, through nine novels’ worth of adventures. As the dawn of their…

It occurred to me suddenly that I’d forgotten to post about this at “Out of Ambit”: so here’s a copy of a posting that’s appeared on Tumblr and at LiveJournal.…

The second I saw it, the image above turned into a kind of mental “money shot” for me. I’d been awaiting this particular movie with interest for a long time,…

It’s not a bad thing to take a moment, an hour: a day? …to think about this: regardless of the presence or absence of turkeys. So today I’m being grateful…

Next Monday is Cyber Monday, and starting at 0800 UK/Irish time that day, our Ebooks Direct store will be launching the New Millennium Edition of Book 2 of the Young…

Before Peter’s Mum died some years back — before she went into the hospital — she and I were sitting around together in her little back-of-the-house sitting room, and she…

Normally I try to keep  food postings more or less over at EuropeanCuisines.com, the part of the household where most of the cooking craziness in the household manifests itself. But…

I did my first ebook collection of short fiction a bit more than a year ago, and Uptown Local and Other Interventions seems to have pleased a lot of people;…

This is just a quick note to those who’ve in the past purchased an ebook copy of the Young Wizards Hallowe’en novelette “Not On My Patch” , to let you…

If you’ve already heard enough about this, or just don’t care to hear a couple pages’ worth of venting right now, please avert your eyes now. Thank you. …I’ve had…

  The New Millennium Edition of the first Young Wizards novel, So You Want to Be a Wizard, is now available in ebook format from the online Ebooks Direct store.…

To celebrate the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars today, the ninth Young Wizards novel, A Wizard of Mars, will be available for FREE download until midnight Hawai’ian time. Use…

(Image above: the entry of the Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute: via David Ronis) I was bitten very early by the opera bug. I think this happened…

This note is for those of you who’ve purchased and downloaded a copy of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses: The Author’s Cut from the Ebooks Direct store in the last six…

This is going to be a rant: so if you don’t care about obscure early 20th-century fantasy writers in general, or E. R. Eddison in particular, look away now. I…

Playing in the baechle (2), a photo by Diane Duane on Flickr. Baechlen are small paved streams and brooklets that run through the streets of Freiburg’s old town — a…

This is a work I did long before there was much of an (accessible) internet on which to discuss it, and it’s a hoot to find now that the bits…

Cathedral or cliff-face?, a photo by Diane Duane on Flickr. The forced perspective of the photo doesn’t begin to give a sense of how overwhelming this structure seems when you…

So we saw Marvel’s Avengers Assemble last night. (Aka The Avengers in the US.) Don’t ask me why we get to see this first, instead of North American audience  getting…

ATTENTION ALL: please read the spoiler warning below before clicking on anything in this post. Thanks! 🙂 There it is: right now, possibly one of the most familiar images in…