On relatively short notice (just less than a month), I decided with two friends to climb Mt. Fuji.
This wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds. I had traveled with these friends in Japan before, specifically for a week of mountain hiking on the Kumano Kodō. While I live in a former swamp at just 400 feet above sea level, I know from other hikes that I handle altitude well enough to transition quickly. So I hopped a plane and burned some miles to Tōkyō.
But I didn’t land and immediately start hiking; I love visiting Japan, and we made a few stops first.
unprecedented sale on Fired Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out
Cover reveal and follow for The Poet’s Eye
75% off Audiobook Sale!
I’ve never seen this before! I don’t set the pricing on the audiobook of Fired Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out, and it’s rarely on sale—but just now, it’s on a 75% discount. That’s just $3.25 USD for the whole audiobook!
Please feel free to share this link with friends or clubs or whoever, to grab while the sale is on. Again, I don’t set the price on this edition, so I don’t know when it will happen again. Go get it!
The Poet’s Eye cover reveal
I’m so excited to share this beautiful cover with you!
The Origins Game Fair theme this year is Legacy of Gaming, and that was reflected in the anthology of short fiction, A Trove of Legacies.
Each year the Origins authors collaborate to put together an anthology of short fiction. My story, “A Signet to Save,” is a side story featuring Lisveth and Galen from The Poet’s Eye. Copies of the anthology are $20 here at Origins — and you can get all the authors’ signatures (and that of the cover artist) as well!
Cover reveal! Feast your eyes on Carpe Noctem, a collection of stories about the night. A little spooky, a little edgy, and an extra surprise you might not expect from a book…
Night transforms the world. Owls and bats claim the sky from songbirds, nocturnal predators prowl beneath cover of darkness, and cloying shadows grow thick enough to swallow a scream. As the saying goes: people aren’t truly afraid of the dark—they fear what could be in the darkness with them.
The twenty-two authors featured within the pages of Carpe Noctem descended into these midnight waters to explore the deepest horrors and wildest wonders which darkness cloaks. This anthology is not for the faint of heart.
Carpe Noctem offers an exclusive solo-roleplaying game by Maxwell Lander to serve as your guide to this collection of nighttime tales. Or you can journey alone. What’s the worst that could happen?
Featuring works by Teresa Aguinaldo; Tyler Battaglia; Stewart C Baker; Beth Cato; Barry Charman; Tommy Cheis; Jonathan Chibuik; Derek Des Anges; Richard DiPirro; David J. Fortier; David Jón Fuller; Chadwick Ginther; Joseph Halden; Richard Lau; Jennifer Lesh Fleck; Avra Margariti; Thomas C. Mavroudis; Cat McDonald; Paul McQuade; Ville Meriläinen; Tais Teng; and Laura VanArendonk Baugh.
I have a talk about senjafuda, paper seals marked with one’s name or pseudonym pasted at shrines and temples, originally as an act of devotion. The pasting later also became an act of self-promotion or as a contest against priests or other pasters (who can get their name to the highest point on the temple ceiling? and so on), and more stylish senjafuda were created specifically for trading and collecting.
Senjafuda pasted inside the Sazaedō in Aizuwakamatsu.
In the 1700s, a samurai named Hagino Kinai Nobutoshi went on pilgrimage on behalf of his lord’s brother, stricken with smallpox. He famously pasted many senjafuda at shrines and temples, legitimizing and popularizing the practice as a person of rank doing this in his official capacity.
In 2017 I traveled to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, which was the location of longest totality for the solar eclipse. You can read about how that went over at this post. But during this season of celestial event anticipation (we have another total eclipse happening this spring, this time in my backyard), I want to re-visit a story I told back then.
Totality
This tiny sliver of sun was still throwing strong shadows — or shade. Photographed through the telescope.
I’d seen partial solar eclipses before, but never totality, and wow. I’d read repeatedly that there is a real difference, and it’s true. The partial coverage was fun, especially as it advanced, when the sunlight got all weird like someone had screwed up the Photoshop brightness/contrast settings. You want to worry that you have eclipse blindness already (you don’t, it takes a day or two to show effects even if you stupidly stared directly into the sun), but it’s just the atmosphere refracting the reduced light.
Totality was a very trippy experience. The sun was SO BLACK, and my poor phone camera just wasn’t equipped to handle the contrast. Cicadas sang as twilight fell. I could see the corona with my naked eye. There was a 360-degree sunset. It was really cool, and not nearly long enough even at the country’s longest totality. (See the photos on the original post.)
I’m sad to be missing the eclipse this year, but at least I got to experience it in 2017!
Little Green Men
That eclipse trip prompted me to look up details on the alleged alien invasion in that area decades before.
On August 21, 1955 — yes, the 2017 solar eclipse date was an anniversary — 8 adults and 3 children reported an assault on their farmhouse by “little men” they claimed were extraterrestrials. (The color green was added in later media reports, and this may be the trope-namer for the phrase.) They fled to the Hopkinsville police station to ask for help, saying they’d been fighting the creatures for 4 hours.
The whole affair started when one of the men went out to retrieve water from the well. He saw a bright rainbow-colored light which he described as a flying saucer shoot overhead and land beyond a nearby treeline, hissing. He went inside and reported it to the family, who laughed at his tale — until not long after when the little men, with gangling arms, stumpy legs, and a swaying gait, approached the house and began to peer in through the windows.
It wasn’t a city, large and anonymous and impersonal. It wasn’t a tiny village, either, with only a few households of families local for generations. No, this was a town, of exactly the size you’d think of in a heart-warming holiday tale, and populated entirely by middle-class folk with harmless quirks and mildly interesting jobs.
Henry (he sponsored lighted wreaths for two lamp posts on the town square) noticed it first. He watched for a moment, and when it was time for his coffee break he went next door to the post office (garland on the counter, with some fairy lights twisted in) and pointed it out to Tanya. She was intrigued, and she thought to take a photo and text Miranda (who saw to the lighted and animated Grinch figure in front of the library). Miranda knew Todd (lighted candy canes for the courthouse lawn) would have a good view, so she asked him to walk by and report.
