Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 331

I’m Mostly Alive

The head cold I’ve been fending off since we landed caught up with me. Since we still have older, adopted son and wife and grandkids here, I spent my energy on being sociable.

Sorry. Post tomorrow.

WHAT ROUGH PROMO, ITS TIME COME AROUND AT LAST by Free Range Oyster

WHAT ROUGH PROMO, ITS TIME COME AROUND AT LAST by Free Range Oyster Alma Boykin Ivan the Purrable and the Twelfth Dancing Princess An Alexi’s Tale Novella

In Russian tales, the third son is the clever one, the hard-working one, the one who gets the victory, the girl, and usually a kingdom. And then there’s Steve…

Stavros George doesn’t believe in Baba Yaga or Chernobog. Steve believes in structural engineering, materials science, and that people need to tip their pizza delivery guys more. To...

Distance and Death

I don’t remember how or when my brother taught me the saying “distance and death dress everyone in his best smile.” I know that I’ve known it, seemingly all my life.

As you guys know I’ve been reading about Islam. I’ve also been meditating on the glamour that Europe has always exerted over a certain number of Americans, a glamour all out of proportion to what it actually is and how people actually live there. And of course on many people’s (particularly leftists’) view of cultures that are co...

Something to keep you amused

We have company. To be exact, our child-by-late-adoption (as in he was grown and married. Also, he has parents, but he acts so much like our kids we decided he was 3rd son,) his wife and practice-grandchildren are spending time with us. This means I spent the last six hours in the kitchen, talking, which is why this is so late.

I also didn’t feel like writing a post. So I thought I’d put up from pictures from the visit to Portugal’s military museum. Keep in mind most of the pictures didn’t co...

A Very Old War

First of all, sorry this is so late, but my husband was updating my machine to Windows 10 so it was not reachable/useable by me, and I occupied myself with unpacking suitcases (one to go. Since we spent yesterday out of the house dealing with pets/house/and such I only could do it today.) On windows ten, rest assured this was done over my kicking and screaming. Mostly because not only do I hate having my work space disrupted, but because it did some really weird stuff to my travel computer, i...

What A Strange Trip It’s Been

So, the Hoyts are back in town. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I wrote at most 1k words while out of town. Mostly because of heat. We were clocking in the eighties and nineties. Okay, nothing weird for CO at this time, but 50% humidity or better, and local culture hates fans.

We actually don’t have air conditioning in the new house. This will be fixed once I finish Revenge and get paid. It will go to that, mostly. BUT even without air conditioning, we’re a mile high, which means w...

“Litfic: Literary Science Fiction and Recent Hugo Winners” – Jeb Kinnison

“Litfic: Literary Science Fiction and Recent Hugo Winners” – Jeb Kinnison

I’m one of those people who straddles STEM and the literate arts with reasonable skills and interest in both. I took time off to study literature-type writing with a crew at Harvard, and John Updike visited one day. He made it clear he was a craftsman aiming at a specific audience, highly-literate Northeastern upper class sorts, but I doubt he would have looked down on someone writing for readers who like adventure st...

It Goes By Itself

One of the things that this trip has highlighted — I’ve now been in the US for 30 years, and functionally, although with some “window” into Portuguese culture, I’m now American. But there is that window.

This means I spent a lot of time in this visit telling my kids/husband stuff like “no, you can’t do that/ask that” and when they say “why not?” I say “because it would be a social solecism, and I can’t explain why to you.”

I run into this in a lot of Jane Austen and her contemporaries. In mod...

A Whole Raft of Books – Free Range Oyster

A Whole Raft of Books – Free Range Oyster

Ladies and gentlemen of Hoyt’s Horde of Huns, we bring you another stack of books! We’ve some interesting submissions this week: an anthology edited by one of our frequent promo posters, omnibus editions of Karen Myers’ Hounds of Annwn as well as her latest novel, and some great adventure stories from TK Naliaka. On those last, I want to add my personal recommendation. I worked on the first two as editor, and have read the third. They were a lot of fu...

The Inevitable Guilt

Years back, when an obscure film maker of a you tube video got arrested for …well, objectively for being a perfect scape goat.

I watched my husband and his sister go the full rounds with Dan saying “If they arrested him for anything, it was for making a movie against Islam, and do you want to set that precedent” and her saying “Well, he was violating his parole which required him to not post on the net.”

Even though we tried to make her see that without the need for a scapegoat, he’d never ha...