Fantasy, and Why We Need It
Today I intend to justify fantasy as a genre. Not that it needs justified, no more than any other genre, but I’m going to anyway.
But first, I’m going to tell you a story.
Fantasy, and Why We Need It
On Today’s Slavery.
Serious post today, folks.
While writing Shard & Shield, I spent a lot of time researching Greco-Roman slavery, as slavery is integral to one of the cultures in the story. Research always leads one down unexpected roads, and I learned a lot about slavery in other areas of the world and in world history, too.
Most Americans, hearing the word “slavery,” think of the African trade to the American south, and they think it ended with the ratification of the 13th Amendment. That’s foremost in our cultural awareness — but it’s not quite the truth. In fact, slavery is far, far from ended.
There are more slaves today than at any previous period in world history.On Today’s Slavery.
Foxes. Don’t mess with them.
In my fox research for Kitsune-Tsuki and Kitsune-Mochi, I came across this clipping of a hunting trip gone wrong.
I understand that people hunt, some for pleasure and some by necessity. (My husband grew up in an area where hunting provided much of some families’ diet.) But hunting should be quick and clean and respectful.
A hunter in Belarus apparently opted to save a bullet by bludgeoning a wounded fox to death, instead of shooting it cleanly. The fox fought back.Foxes. Don’t mess with them.