DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 14

Review: The Angel of Crows by Katherine Addison

The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sherlock is an angel, not fallen, definitely not fallen, in a London where a wide variety of supernatural elements exist. The Angel of Crows is a collection of intertwined episodes, which is similar to a collection of short stories, yet structured […]

What makes a story gothic?

Frankenstein, Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera. If you like stories full of atmosphere, horror, and bittersweet emotions, then you may enjoy a good Gothic story. That story may go back a few centuries or it may be completely modern. The characters will be dramatic, the language will be flowery, and the atmosphere will hang in the […]

Flash Fiction: The Future of Birth Control

It’s a perfectly normal day when I decide that it’s time to go to the coffee shop down the street and end it. The skies are blue, blue with a slight tinge of purple, blue so clear that it feel like living inside a marble. The cloud overhead is white and as soft as a puff of cotton stuffing. I walk through the iron front gate, which is pulled back during business hours, into the courtyard. I walk past the juice shop to the right—bee pollen, vegan cheese, poblano avocado dressing—to get to the coffee shop. The courtyard is paved with bricks in a basketweave pattern. The umbrellas are open, the mismatched patio tables and chairs set out, but there aren’t many people here yet. It’s four o’clock on a Friday and some goth is humming over the stereo, a mournful tune backed by a drum machine. The rainbow flags are out—we still celebrate Pride month here. Palm leaves rustle and birds chirp and squeak.

The Millennial Tarot

Please note: this is not currently a serious project! I am actually working on a tarot deck to go along with a novel series, tentatively named The Clockwork Gothic. It turns out that trying to put together an actual tarot deck seriously changes how you see the tarot. I was journaling one day and came […]

New Release: A Shrewdness of Swindlers

An old world dies during WWI and another rises in the Roaring Twenties: cruel, sharp, glittering. Magic. 10 tales of fantasy in the Jazz age. A SHREWDNESS OF SWINDLERS Available at all the finer ebook distributors (and a few scummy ones, too)! (That is, no longer as part of the Storybundle.) Now, with short story […]

A Shrewdness of Swinders: Preorders Live

Dames, detectives, and deception…magic meets the decadence of the Roaring Twenties in ten tales of glitter and jazz.

New Release: Wild Magic Storybundle, Featuring A Shrewdess of Swindlers

There's the real world...and then there are our worlds, secret, wild, and free. Ten books of fantasy that peeks out from around the corners. Click here now.

The Grandiosity of the Grandhotel Pupp

The history of the Grandhotel Pupp has stretched from the dawn of the eighteenth century all the way to modern times. You can see it in movies symbolizing the epitome of wealth and elegance; it is one of the inspirations for the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel. The James Bond movie Casino Royale was filmed there, as was the Queen […]

The Folly of Whitaker Wright

(I’m going to be developing some neat stuff about Whitaker Wright later! Research!!) The tale of Whitaker Wright begins in Stafford, England, and ends in Surrey about a hundred and fifty miles away. But this is not a small tale. While Whitaker Wright was born the eldest child of a humble clergyman, he rose to […]

Heinlein’s 5 Rules of Business

(Please note! This is a fictional list! Heinlein didn’t write five rules of business–see explanation below. You can find Heinlein’s actual five rules of writing here: www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm.) Robert A. Heinlein is one of my science fiction “mentors,” a writer I never met but whose works influenced me greatly as a reader and budding writer. I […]