Barbara's Blog

  Just a quick check-in. Just got back from the Celsius 232 Festival of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror in Aviles, Spain - a WONDERFUL festival, and unlike any other convention I've been to. It's not in a hotel, but bookshop kiosks are scattered all through the 17th-century Old Town. This was the hotel they put me up in - a 17th-century nobleman's palace (that served REALLY fine breakfasts!) (The other picture is of me in front of an old fountain). Soft gray weather. One day it did drizzle. Two days there was a religious festival - the Virgin of Carmen, who guards all vehicles, fishing-boats in this case - with parades of drummers and a life-size Madonna carried through the streets. In the evening everyone in town walks their dogs. The final notes from my editor on 'Death in the Palace' are due in a week, and I will post at greater length then. (I am also having the house re-piped, so there are plumbers in and out and for a week there was a back-hoe in my fron...

  Father's Day memories of a Classic '50s Dad: kind, responsible, worked hard for his family and his Church, loved nature and took us hiking and camping and to museums (and to Disneyland - back when it was affordable! - even though he hated crowds!). Loved us. Loved my Mom. Like the animals in the wild that he loved, he believed in teaching his young to survive on their own (bank accounts when we were in our early teens, "always have an emergency fund.") Fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Roman history, Zane Gray; told us about the Iliad and the Odyssey (and got us the Classic Comics versions when they came out). Like Hector in the Iliad, who says of his baby son, "I would like one day to hear men say of him, 'He's a better man than his father.'" Knowing him - having him as a mentor - was one of the greatest gifts of my life. Love you, Dad! In other news: The next Benjamin January novel, "Murder in the Trembling Lands", will be out next month...

  HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! Here is a deeply unflattering picture of me on the beach this morning, wearing 4 layers under my gi and looking like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, after doing 1100 sword-cuts with my iaido group at sunrise, a dojo tradition of "spirit training." After the Misogi - as it's called - we walked down to the ocean, to watch the waves materialize out of a horizonless gray eternity of fog.