Cowgirl Contemporary Fantasy

I owe y'all an apology.  As I sit here on a picnic bench, using WiFi outside my tent, which has to be a crime in somewhere, I realize that I have not yet finished my series on psychopaths. I should explain.  The last segment, one that discusses good and bad fictional psychopaths, requires my reference materials.  After my house flooded in May, all of my books were boxed up and in storage.  I just got them back last week.  I'm right in the middle of preparing two reviews, one I hope to post tomorrow, and another that will go up at The Portal any day now. I will finish the series as soon as possible, as it is one of my most popular, except for  How I Lost a Chunk of Hair to my Grandma's Vibrator.   Copious apologies.

A little while ago, I blogged on the cliches about small towns that writers seem to enjoy.  There's something I couldn't believe I left out of the post.  The other day I noticed that Netflix made the movie  Knockaround Guys  available for streaming, a movie that takes place in my hometown, though little, if any of it was filmed there. With a cast that includes names like Vin Diesel, John Malkovich, Seth Green, and Dennis Hopper, it's hard to imagine what could go wrong with it.  Plenty.  The cliches were so thick I needed a shovel.  I actually liked the way the mobsters spoke and behaved.  The portrayal of my hometown is what pissed me off. Check out this bar scene. My mom used to bounce in the bar in which this scene takes place.  So did my brother, occasionally, when he wasn't being the D.J.   A kid a little older than my sister and I once came up to her and said, "You know, I've seen a lot of scary stuff in my life, but whe...

My husband is a pretty punny guy, and even though I'm a writer, puns tend to fly over my oblivious head for a few seconds.  He was rolling them off in the car the other day, and the puns were smacking me on the forehead so hard that I was pretty sure I had a puncussion.  (A-thank you!) I wanted to share with you the best pun I've ever heard.  I do not know what twisted mind managed to come up with it, but it was told to me by my good friend, Cathy, who is another punster of the finest order. Are you ready? Soooo, Ghandi was a spiritual leader that walked a lot, so his feet grew very tough.  He was extremely thin, and his poor diet gave him a pretty rank case of bad breath and a frail body. He was a.... Super callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis. Do you have a good pun?  Please share!

Picture by Bob Canada Sometimes logic isn't about A + B = C.  Sometimes it's * + % = platypus, or in the case of Russian folklore, maiden + drowning = rusalki.  Russian folktales are wonderfully unpredictable to a cowpoke like me, and I love the twisty concepts of justice embedded in tales.  Consequently, The Secret History of Moscow completely rocked my world.   Ekaterina Sedia , born in Russia, weaves Russian folktales together and integrates them with a modern urban fantasy plot. The protagonist, Galina, has spent most of her adult life bouncing in and out of asylums, and subsequently does not expect anyone to believe her when her pregnant sister turns into a bird, leaving the baby behind on the bathroom floor.  Driven by love and the guilt that the healthy, whole sister was the one taken, Galina joins a homeless artist and one of Moscow's finest in the search for Masha beneath Moscow's ancient streets. Her prose was as smooth as rich as a whiskey on ...

Finally, I'm able to reach my computer again.  The flooding in my basement made moving my bedroom into the office a necessity.  My darling husband reorganized everything today and made it possible to get online. Yay!  Go husbands!

Up here, we tend to say "crick" instead of "creek."  Well, there are cricks where there have never been cricks before. The school at which I teach is comprised of four different communities.  One of those communities flooded badly on Sunday, and I thought, "Wow.  I guess it doesn't get much worse."  Shut the #)%* up, Scooter. Today, the biggest city in Montana was hit with torrential rainfall like nothing ever seen.  The manhole covers were blown clean off of the sewers.  My house on the outskirts of town is flooded with water from my septic field, as is most of my block in one way or another.  We managed to get my son to his grandparents' house out of town just before the irrigation canal burst and flooded everything a block north of us.  Both routes out of my dead-end street are now blocked by high volumes of water. I was devastated by the water in my basement at first, but now I'm feeling fortunate after I saw happen to those around m...

Two weeks ago I wrote a post regarding the relationship between speculative fiction and science .  In it I used Gene Rodenberry as a prime example of "boldly going where no man has gone before." Today I ran into a letter written by Gene Rodenberry regarding the very same subject.  He says,  "The links between science fiction and science are well established and I am very pleased to associate myself with the Planetary Society." Click on the link and read the letter in its entirety.  Not all of his scientific predictions came true, but he was a visionary, that's for sure.