An Emulation of Sociability

I immediately have issues with counting and what I would say tomorrow not matching entirely what I would say today and the distinction between formative and impressive and my sieve of a memory (I'm on my third adult brain chemistry…) so I do not get to a hundred. I get to some.

"The Waking of Angantyr" (Elder Edda, author unknown)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King
C.J. Cherryh, "Wave Without a Shore"
C.J. Cherryh, Fortress in The Eye of Time
C.J. Cherryh, Serpent's Reach
Dorothy Sayers, all the Whimsy novels
E.R. Eddison, A Fish Dinner in Memison
E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "The Ballad of the Battle of Gideon"
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "The Ballad of the White Horse"
Glen Cook, Dread Empire
Glen Cook, The Dragon Never Sleeps
Gordon R. Dickson, Soldier, Ask Not
Gordon R. Dickson, Tactics of Mistake
H. Beam Piper, "Omnilingual"
Iain M. Banks, Hydrogen Sonata
J.R.R. Tolkien, "Leaf By Niggle"
J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"
John M. Ford The Dragon Waiting
John M. Ford The Final Reflection
Lois Bujold, Paladin of Souls
Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter
Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills
Patricia McKillip, Fool's Run
Patricia McKillip, Riddle of Stars
Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown
Rudyard Kipling, "As Easy as ABC"
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling, the collected poems
Rydyard Kipling, "They"
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Other Wind
Ursula Vernon, Digger

So someone I know is putting names in a hat for a shawl in the hope of rewarding civilised conduct.

It's wool, which means I am best off admiring it from a distance. One of you might want to admire it from much less distance, and already be conducting yourself in a civilised fashion, making the whole thing very straightforward.

Yes, it's the last day of 2019. No, I didn't quite make it, schedule-wise.

Release date is Friday, 17 January, 2020.



Egalitarian heroic fantasy. The first Creek standard-captain known to history, certain curious facts concerning the graul people, and an operational test of the Line's altered doctrine.

Google Play
Everywhere else via Books2Read

Pre-order is live now on Google Play; it should start going live for Kobo, Apple, and the other Draft2Digital targets under that Books2Read link over the next several days/first week of 2020.

In a specific narrow radius, all is well with the world.

So Ontario has an election in a fortnight.

The choices are:

- to continue a Liberal government that has had some good ideas (getting rid of coal! reasonable educational standards) but has been severely flailing and doing insane things that might not even be corrupt. Selling off the public utility corporation is probably corrupt somewhere but it looks like it's got some sort of perceived philosophical necessity driving it, which is more worrying. Someone that detached from material reality might do anything. (Such as trying to pretend Grassy Narrows isn't there, and isn't a problem.)

- to vote for a conservative. I remember Mike Harris (may the wasps find him sleeping) so I won't be voting for a conservative in Ontario until the PC Party caucus hangs Mike Harris in a public way that acknowledges their collective guilt. If you don't remember Mike Harris, the guy the PC party picked as leader was born rich and apparently doesn't know how to do anything. Really bad record in relative terms as a Toronto councillor which is saying a great deal. Plus they have no attachment to reality at all; you can't lower taxes when we're moving further into the time of angry weather; lots of drainage needs improving, lots of roads need more and larger culverts, more trees come down on power lines, more flooding, and so on. Public spending is going to increase for the rest of this century, or at least as long as we can keep civilization going.

- to vote for the NDP. The NDP platform is this damp doubtful thing where, yes, they're concerned for a public drug plan and early childhood care and generally being seen to be a bit more just. They're not showing any real signs of being attached to reality and really, really worried about food security and getting fossil carbon out of transport and replacing the housing stock with stuff that can cope with the time of angry weather and not being able to light stuff on fire for heating.

So I'm going to vote for the NDP. There's a reasonable chance they won't do as much harm as the Liberals are doing, they may not have concluded that taxation is illegitimate, and they will certainly do less harm than the Tories, who are innumerate throughout AND formulating policy by feelings AND completely unclear on the nature of money. Any one of those should disqualify you from government.

(No, I'm not going to vote Green. The point of voting this time is to keep the PC party out of power. And while I would like a Green party to vote for, it would need to be a pro-tech, numerate Green party rather than the one we've got, which is mostly innumerate moralizers.)

I've committed book again. It's up for pre-order on Google Play Books; it will be available via Draft2Digital's various channels, but I want to give the quality reviewer folks a chance to send me typos before I start that (slower and less predictable) upload process.



This isn't a Commonweal story. This is something Past Me wrote, and refered to as The Doorstop.

It's been said that everyone of a certain age who winds up writing fantasy in English has a response to The Lord of the Rings in them.

This book is mine.

It's about grief, duty, and royalty as responses to violation of the natural order. Also adversity, social change, terrible sartorial choices, and an obscure literary revenge on Thomas Hardy.

The acts of vengeance taking place in the text aren't obscure at all. Some people make Adversity very, very sorry it ever said anything. Gruesome and terrible things happen.

There were giants in the earth in those days.

Purchase options over on Dubious Prospects

Which is not precisely news, since it's been up on Google for a couple of months now, but



can be had via Google Play Books and Kobo now.  I am most pleased that the book-processing gnomes at Kobo figured out how to handle the thing.