Years ago I taught a class on “The Business of Writing” at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. One of the segments was how to write a query letter, and included a sample query letter I wrote to give my students an idea of how to get their toe in the door. From my syllabus: 3] …
The Knights Templar began in 1113 when Frankish knight Hugues de Payen volunteered his and nine (unless it was thirty) other knights’ services to King Baldwin of Jerusalem to guard the safety of pilgrims traveling from where they landed on the coast to the Holy Sepulcher. Unless they were founded in Easter of 1119, when…
Read more Unless they were guilty of idolatry, heresy and sodomy as charged.
Excellent overview of a people, place and time, even if I do suspect that Lewis is a wee bit undiscriminating in her love of her subject. It begins with a brief history In 1390, however, Sultan Bayezid began his conquests in Asia Minor. His Muslim troops were unwilling to fight their co-religionists, whom, anyway, they…
Read more Sounds like the direct ancestor of ransomware, doesn’t it?
...all the information I have just supplied cannot be verified and may not bear in any way on the circumstances of the girl's death. My spies in this matter are less than trustworthy and their reports often contradictory. It is the nature of the politically motivated to spread misinformation more readily than the truth. So, everything I have just said may be completely false and misleading and deliberately so.
# Permanent link to Christ and Cleopatra
I wrote this column the Fourth of July 2002, the year after 9/11. It was published in Alaska magazine in September 2002, is collected with all my other columns and features in an e-book, Alaska Traveler: Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier, and is now available in audio. I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom of late,…
Three centuries after Shakespeare died, across the pond New Yorkers rioted over the relative merits of Macbeth as played by a British actor versus an American one. The National Guard was called out, people actually died, and the British actor had to be hustled out of the country for his own safety. America had embraced…
Part of a shipment of robots lost at sea, Roz wakes up on a remote island, where she learns to speak animal and make friends with the local residents, rescues and adopts a gosling, learns how to build shelter and make fire and plant a garden, and helps the locals survive a harsh winter. And…
Read more She learns to speak animal and make friends with the local residents
This is why I can’t read reference works in e. You can highlight in e, sure, and you can search, but searching is not the same as dogearing or sticky noting, and forget about scribbling marginal notations. So I’m railing against Adrian Goldsworthy again, this time because of this passage in Caesar: Probably in late…
Genre-bending graphic novel about a little girl, Nimona, with special powers, or maybe that’s special powers with a little girl inside them, who forces her services upon a wanna-be villain. There is some fun stuff here, like the big bad Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics, and names like Ballister Blackheart and Sir Goldenloin, and…
Read more “Reanimating the dead isn’t hard but they make TERRIBLE minons.”
This is what my dining table looks like these days. I’m beginning the third novel in the Eye of Isis series, and I’ve written enough of Tetisheri’s story now to revise her calendar. Calendars are very important in series–when did she do what, where, and to whom? Writing a calendar for the Kate Shugak novels,…
