ivebeenreadinglately:

{Photo by rocketlass.}

However, it is Bullard’s account of the myth, rather than the mystery, that offers the most acceptable account of alien sightings and abductions. Or at any rate the most familiar and easiest to take. Aliens who whisk innocent sleepers off to their spaceships and give them medical examinations or impregnate them are only doing what fairies and hobgoblins have been doing since long ago and far away. Perfectly ordinary people in folk stories the world over are regularly stopped on the road and taken away by mischievous or sinister Others. In Western European culture, mermaids drag sailors to the depths, Oberon and Puck do a number on Bottom, Rumpelstiltskin demands a human child of his own in return for a magical favour, the witch entices lost children into a gingerbread house, the inscrutable Pied Piper, dressed half in yellow and half in red, seduces away rats and then, when the citizens of Hamelin prove incorrigible, whisks off the younger generation. In the Bible there was a time when giants walked among us and sons of God or angels mated with fair-faced human females, or appeared to individuals to tell them that they were pregnant with a changeling, or to deliver a warning of things to come and save the world from itself. These stories of underground and parallel worlds have comforted or terrified human beings for centuries. Why wouldn’t we include the space above our heads in our narratives, and why wouldn’t we update the stories?

From “What might they want?”, by Jenny Diski, in the March 22, 2012 issue of the London Review of Books

Rereading A Clash of Kings reminded me of how great Hammerfall is so now all I want to do is listen to metal and write about magic.

I was apparently watching GoT before GoT was even a thing!

vainbuthonest:

I do not know what manner of thing she is. None of us do. She killed her mother in the birthing, but that’s never enough to account for it.

They call me wise, but I am far from wise, for all that I foresaw fragments of it, frozen moments caught in pools of water or in the cold glass of my mirror. If I were wise I would not have tried to change what I saw. If I were wise I would have killed myself before ever I encountered her, before ever I caught him.

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UGH just when I start feeling at peace with my writing, I reread this.

(Source: neilgaiman.com, via featherandarrow)

Starting the year off right: Re-reading My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.

My latest used bookstore haul: The Jesus Incident and Destination: Void by Frank Herbert, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Ringworld by Larry Niven, and Winter’s Heart by Robert Jordan.

I’m going to need another science fiction/fantasy/horror/graphic novel bookcase soon. The two I have are overflowing.

merenwen84:

Approaching Caradhras by Canis-Lupess

(via jumpedship)