Author: stantlitore

Would YOU let this guy inside your imagination? Is this the face of an author you can trust?  😉

Among my favorite responses to this question so far:

“I think, as long as nobody feeds him after midnight, it’ll be fine…”

“It appears as if this creature dines exclusively on books– ravenously, I might add– so I could at least stall him for a while.”

“If you think you can trust an author, why would you bother reading his book?”

If you shake a book hard enough, stories fall out!

That’s my oldest, River, helping me unpack inventory — and having a great time.

More photos here and here.

Stant Litore

My wife and I, our tradition is that most nights, I read her to sleep. We read The Lord of the Rings, then The Dresden Files, and now, after many years, we are back in Middle-Earth again.

Last night, due to her chronic pain and her stress about finals, she couldn’t sleep. She woke me gently at 2 am and I read to her for an hour: Merry & Pippin’s captivity.

This morning, waking for an early day at work, I groaned to myself: This is going to be a rough day. But I couldn’t stop remembering the soft little murmurs my wife made, half asleep, as I read to her. When she is more wakeful, Jessica laughs or comments on the story as I read; last night, she was too sleepy to do more than make little sounds. She was so tired. I think she was able to sleep at least a little once we reached Fangorn Forest. And I wouldn’t give up that hour with my wife, listening to her murmurs and waiting for her to sleep, and holding her hand and reading to her, I wouldn’t give up that hour for all the rest in the world.

Stant Litore

Attorney Qusair Mohamedbhai’s editorial in today’s Denver Post is something I believe every American needs to read. You may think Trump’s rhetoric about “if you want to hurt terrorists, kill their families” and his fantasy about mass deportations is just so much hot air, but it’s one very public instance of a much more widespread problem, a problem that is growing more serious each year. In the past decade, we’ve seen increased incidents of harassment and violence against Muslims and against people who “look Muslim” (like Sikhs — as in the case of a store clerk in Michigan who, in December, was called a “terrorist” and shot in the face). We’ve seen mosques vandalized or lit on fire (there were 29 documented attacks on mosques in the U.S. in 2015). The New York Times reported that between mid-Nov and mid-Dec 2015, there were 38 hate crimes perpetrated against Muslim Americans in the U.S. This is a real thing, and it hurts real Americans. And that’s why everyone needs to read this and start paying attention.

From Mohamedbhai’s article: “There is now a dangerously thin line between making discriminatory statements to rouse conservative voters and taking discriminatory actions. We do not wish to believe that such systemic anti-Muslim constitutional violations by our government could really happen. When federal agents come to register me, will I pass the Good Muslim test if I wear a John Elway jersey? If I can name countless Front Range breweries or have hiked Colorado’s fourteeners, will I meet the bar to show that my American Muslim family is just like everyone else?”

I am so happy. My friend just received acceptance into college. Fadi is one of my favorite people — and one of Inara’s, too. He is one of the kindest men I’ve ever known, and a man of fierce faith and fierce dreams. He has lived as an orphan and refugee (often in desperate fear for his life) since he was six months old, has lived in six countries, knows eight languages. He spent his teen years in slave labor to a family in a refugee camp. He came to the States less than two years ago; in the time since, he has graduated high school and now he will be going to college to study medicine. There are few human beings I admire more. He has never relinquished his dreams. And no matter what infernos he has walked through, he has emerged a man with a deep and kind heart, a thirst for knowledge, and compassion for others. A man who makes Inara’s face light up with joy whenever she sees him. His is one of the stories I will be telling my grandchildren one day (and I hope he will be visiting to tell them stories, too). Grandchildren need stories about people like Fadi.

This ‘being human’ thing — some people do it right. Some people do it so right.

Stant Litore

I was delighted to see this tweet from an Islamic Studies scholar I know at the University of Denver, this morning:

I hadn’t thought of it that way (“Muslim telepaths saving the world”), but I love the description — and I am continually delighted by how readers choose to describe this unusual, weird, and beautiful series.

And it’s true: Ansible: Season Two is here. The paperback is available now, and the kindle edition will be available Monday (you can pre-order it now). Here’s what it’s about:

“The battlefleets burn and blacken in the infinite day of space…”

The previous Ansibles found themselves marooned, but Zahid, last survivor of “Ansible 15718,” commands an interstellar fleet, and Sahira, the psionic savant we meet in “Ansible: Night Land” and “Ansible: Strike Force,” will take the battle to the pneumavores, humanity’s fiercest predators.

In Season Two of Ansible, humanity’s last conflict continues to blossom open, dark fire and dark flower, torching all of time and space. These are your descendants’ stories. Their cries in the dark. They are not to be missed.

PRAISE FOR ANSIBLE:

“Litore’s stories aren’t only entertaining. They are stories invading our lives, unexpectedly. You encounter them, as you might encounter people. They are those random elements in life that happen to you, like a mugging, like childbirth, like falling in love and marriage, like death and the funeral that follows. They are moments that leave a mark, and leave you changed.” – Andrew Hallam, Ph.D., Metropolitan State University of Denver

“Stant eloquently writes passages that are so moving, full of passion, fury, loneliness, blind drive … He takes us to places of amazing beauty, awe-inspiring, as well as places where the implications in the story can leave you almost in despair for the human race.” – Nikki Ebright, Director, Myths & Legends Con

And if you’re new to the series, check out Ansible: Season One.

Sometimes, you find out that you’ve touched someone and made a difference, though you were scarcely aware of it at the time. Today, I received this kind note in the mail: a photocopy of a letter that was left with the course evaluations for my “Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget” class at Castle Rock Writers in November:

The note reads, in full:

I loved the examples – C.S. Lewis, “David + Goliath,” Odyssey,… You weave details succinctly and compellingly. Details rock! Other side ->

A scene that speaks volumes:

The class sat in rows, pens poised expectantly as the lecture began: “We are drawn,” the bespectacled speaker began, “to moments of–“

With a stiff, halting roll-step, a small, rotund figure appeared on the stage at his elbow. “I need a chair,” she rasped. Tufts of badly-dyed hair stuck up from her head; she clutched an overstuffed bag to her chest.

The speaker pivoted from audience to her. Gently, he reached for her elbow. “How about this chair here?” He spoke respectfully as he guided her across the chasm of space to the other side of the lectern.

“Thank you,” she whispered as she settled in.

Pivoting back to the audience, he continued. “–moments of strength that reveal character.”

: )

Thank you from an observer of character in action.

I am touched.

And thankful to whoever left me this note. I don’t know if the note-writer was the woman looking for a seat, or another student. I’m just thankful for the note, and thankful that I was able to help.

Sometimes, the small things you do — or the things that look small at the time — matter. Being there for people matters. Telling the right story at the right moment, or being there with a hand when needed. Those are the moments that matter.

And sometimes, you find out they mattered.

I am touched.

Stant Litore

P.S. I will be teaching variations on this class at at Writers on the Rock in February and at AnomalyCon in March. And the class is also available as a book. I hope the class continues to inspire and empower emerging writers – and maybe I will see one or two of you there.

Recent conversations with my wife:

Wife: “Yes, I met him. It was at that party where that one student kept hitting on you.”
Me: “Wait, what? Who was hitting on me?”

This is the end of a train of thought that started with a brief conversation yesterday. I am a devout Christian, and my wife is Pagan, and passionately so. When I think of my four closest friends, they are an atheist, an agnostic, and two Christians. I teach classes on the Bible, comparative religions, and writing. I write; I father; I husband. I won’t speak for my wife (she can do that), but I often have the curious impression that there is some war going on all around us and somehow people expect us to be on different “sides,” but she and I didn’t get the memo.

Or possibly we are just too busy. Living fierce lives of faith and raising children and making beautiful things … no one told us how hard and energy-consuming these matters are…

In any event, you are all welcome to my blog, to my Facebook community, to my books, to my online house. I believe passionately that we are called (whether we respond or no) to live as the incarnate hands and feet of God in the world, telling stories of hope and redemption, and loving others fiercely and without conditions or qualifications. So one of the things I do is share stories and encourage others to, also. Because love (actual love) begins with the hearing of others’ stories. If you love, and if you enjoy stories and enjoy them fiercely and want to hear others’ stories, that makes you part of my tribe, and welcome at my fire for as long as it burns.

Stant Litore

This is not a gray world.
May your days be alive with the electrifying colors of God’s presence and wonder.
May you look up and around you even in the midst of your burdens.
May you look for God’s love in the faces around you, in the falling of rain, in the sound of footsteps in snow.
May you take in the colors of the life God gives you until your eyes and spirit ache with them.
May you be as a bride seeing in every hour the face of her Beloved.
May your wonder make the colors visible to those who walk with their heads down.
May your surprised joy and your devotion make the voice of God audible to those who walk with their pain loud in their ears.

Sometimes, I get a bit of fan mail or a letter that makes my whole week, that makes me glow inside — and not from radioactivity. These moments matter to me especially because I suffer from periodic bouts of depression, a dark sense of futility that rides me piggyback for a while. It’s hard to shake off, and I usually find ways to boulder forward at full run until it slips and falls off by itself; it’s a heavy beast and has a hard time balancing on my back for long when I’m at full gallop. Last week, the beast was whispering the #2 hit on its chart: that nothing I put on paper matters to anyone, that I am merely adding clutter to an already cluttered literary landscape, that my stories are mere waste, that I am mere waste, and on and on. It is a vapid lie (as top hits sometimes are), but a hard one to shake, nonetheless. (If you’ve read What Our Eyes Have Witnessed, you have encountered the beast in those pages, as it stalks down the alleys of Rome after Father Polycarp.)

At these times, I turn to kind words from my readers; those words become my armor, proof that my work has an impact. Most of my readers know me, I think, as super-high-energy-creative-guy and don’t see me carrying the beast on my shoulders. One has to be super-high-energy-creative to fight the beast and win. And I always play to win.

Today, I received the kindest letter from the woman who runs Castle Rock Writers, a local writers’ convention. It was unexpected, and in it she shared with me a huge list of excited, happy feedback from writers who attended my class “Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget” (here is the book version of the class). The letter dealt the beast quite a blow; I am thrilled to learn that the class helped so many writers.

I certainly invite you to take the class if you are in Colorado and have the chance to; I’ll be teaching it as a one-hour crash course at Writers on the Rock in February and in three one-hour chapters at AnomalyCon in March. Future dates to be announced later.

Stant Litore teaching at Castle Rock Writers 2015

Here is a bit from the letter I received today:

Hi Stant,
    Your workshop was a big hit. Here are the comments from the evals… One eval had a very lengthy commentary so copied it and will put it in the mail….

1. Fantastic examples, utterly brilliant, amazing.
2. Well done and enjoyable.
3. The best.
4. Great workshop, but definitely could use more time. Lots of great material.
5. Excellent! Want him back!
6. Wonderful examples, excellent organization of topics, super helpful.
7. He had my attention immediately. Very well spoken, awesome presentation. Whole class very attentive.
8. Good explanations. Great examples. Fun storyteller. Answered questions well.
9. Great information. Interesting speaker. Thank you.
10. Lots of knowledge and practical advice-thanks!
11. Great talk. Thanks. Already bought your book today
12. Excellent all around presentation!
13. Great examples and outline to work with.
14. Great information, well-paced, succinctly presented-Thanks!
15. Would like a longer session with Stant.
16. Really great.
17. Terrific.
18. Good 5 points of reference.
19. (a very long one so not all is here). I LOVE the examples, C.S. Lewis, David and Goliath, Odyssey. You weave details succinctly and compellingly. DETAILS ROCK!

Stant Litore teaching at Castle Rock Writers 2015

Wow: a whole list of reactions and thank you’s from other writers who appreciated the class. I did not ask for them; I think Castle Rock Writers collects evaluations after each of its sessions. I didn’t know they would be shared with me (that doesn’t usually happen in a convention format); I am delighted. I suppose I will keep teaching this class.

I hope you are all enjoying the novels, and if you are curious about future runs of my course “Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget,” keep an eye on my blog here or write to me at zombiebible@gmail.com. Or, of course, get the book.

Gratefully,

Stant Litore

I’ve seen a number of conversations short-circuit rather messily lately when the concept of “privilege” comes up, and I think many people are defensive about the idea of privilege — in part because the topic is heated, and in part because they don’t understand the idea, or are misusing it. There are two misconceptions about “privilege”: 1) that the concept implies that you are racist, sexist, or an agent of oppression; and 2) that having privilege is a bad thing. And these two assumptions make people defensive, so the conversation short-circuits. But both of these statements are false.

First, privilege usually means that you are the beneficiary of past oppression; it isn’t connected to your own attitudes and actions; it’s something you inherit from the past.

And second, privilege itself is a good thing; what’s unjust and destructive is that not everyone else gets to enjoy the same privileges. Those who do are the beneficiaries of a system that grants privileges only to some, not to all.

For example, as a man, I benefit from the privilege of being able to walk down the street without fear of catcalling, stalking, harassment, or rape; and as a white man, I benefit from the additional privilege of being able to take a stroll with no fear of being accosted arbitrarily by law enforcement. Most of the time, I am not even aware that this is a privilege I have — but it must be very visible to anyone who doesn’t have that privilege! In a just world, this security in walking down the street ought to be a privilege extended to everyone, not merely to one select group. My privilege in walking freely down the street without fear is itself a good thing; what isn’t good is that many are deprived of that privilege that I enjoy.

On a more subtle level, I have a privilege of being able to confidently expect that I will be among the taller and more physically powerful people in a room I enter. This frees me to act and assert myself in ways that others have been socially and historically conditioned to avoid, or in ways that would be very risky for people who don’t enjoy the same privilege I do. Though the privilege may be invisible to me at the time, I may in fact actively avail myself of it constantly, whether to dominate a conversation, get a thing done, etc. Similarly, I have the privilege of expecting that my words will be heard; I have the privilege of being assigned an immediate level of respect when I speak; I don’t have to wait for a member of another gender seated elsewhere in the room to second my words in order for them to have merit in the conversation. So privileges grant not only security to those who have them, but freedom of action and power in social situations.

The reason it is important for someone who does have privilege to be aware of it is so that they can also be more aware when others around them are not extended the same privilege. The woman on my left in a meeting may have things to say that have as much or more merit than what I have to say; if I am aware that in this particular social situation, I am being granted greater respect or more privilege to speak, and if I am aware that she is being granted less, I can take action to either get out of her way or actively use my privilege to ensure she has opportunity to speak, as well. And it’s important for me to be aware of privileges that I’ve been extended but that others haven’t so that I can listen with attention and respect to injustices raised by others (for example, someone reporting harassment) rather than dismissing their account out of hand as an exaggeration merely because I can’t imagine being subjected to what they’ve had to endure.

Sudden awareness of privilege is a driver of social change, advocacy, and effort. Many in the first world find their lives changed the first time they actually see that people — smart, good, everyday people — in many towns in the third world don’t have access to running water or to clean water. Realizing that many white people are exonerated of the very crimes for which black people are jailed can lead to a push to reform the prison system, or the court system, or to educate people about the problem.

Realizing that millions of children in Calcutta wore no shoes, Mother Teresa took off her own and gave them to a child — and then gave every box of shoes shipped to her to others. It is hard to be told about privilege because a too-natural response is to dismiss it; “I’m not a bad person”; “just because I wear shoes doesn’t make me racist”; “I have shoes because I work, and I can pay for them; other people should work, too.” But when you see the evidence of privilege before your eyes — when you see children running down a street without shoes — you might be more likely to be moved to take off your shoes and offer them to a young girl whose feet are deformed or cut or bruised. Or even if you didn’t, even if you kept your shoes on your feet, you might conceivably buy some shoes and bring them to that girl. Or you might tell some people and gather a box of shoes. Or you might start a nonprofit.

That decision to go get some shoes doesn’t have anything to do with deciding whether you’re a racist or not a racist, or whether you’re a good or a bad person: it’s a decision to deal with an injustice of which you were previously unaware but that is now right before your eyes, rather than turn your back on it.

And what a better world we’d make, if we listened more when we were told about our privilege (or, more accurately, when told about privileges we enjoy that are currently denied to others), if we considered it mindfully with open ears, if we could respond to an injustice prior to being confronted with it visibly. Becoming increasingly aware of your own privilege is critical to living as a just and respectful person.

Stant Litore

None of you need my advice, nor am I qualified to give it; few people are. So this isn’t advice. It is a plea.

Listen.

Listen more, this year.

That’s my plea.

The world of social media is a raucous den of howler monkeys (I can certainly be one, so I feel often at home here) some days. Folks are shouting, pontificating, slandering, mocking, criticizing, justifying, rationalizing, arguing, or protesting. The Internet is sometimes a fun place, sometimes, but not always a friendly place. My plea is just: listen. Not everyone here is a good person with good intentions, but everyone here has a story and experiences and an entire world that only they have ever seen, and that world and that story is not likely to be what you expect. The more you listen, the more stories you have. The more stories you have, the bigger your heart grows, so that it can have room for all those stories. The bigger your heart is, the easier it is to listen. And the more you listen, the more stories you have. And the more stories you have, the bigger your heart is… And so on. And the more people who have big hearts and spend much of their time listening, the more stories get heard. Decisions get wiser. People get less angry and less fearful.

So listen. Listen a lot, if you can. Listen long, and compassionately, and deeply.

I want to listen, a lot, this year.

There are a lot of stories out there to listen to. Many of them will surprise me.

Only twice have I ever been moved with a desire to ‘unfriend’ a person online: once over a case of stalking, and once over a spewing of hate (in that case, the other person was kind enough to unfriend me first). My readers and fans and Facebook friends are of varied genders, ethnicities, religions, political opinions, and nationalities. That is not because I “toe the line,” or am politically correct or incorrect, or because I don’t have opinions. I do. I have a gender, an ethnicity, a religion, an array of political opinions, and a nationality: there are a lot of defined boxes that I fit into. But I think I have a diverse readership and a diverse Facebookship because I like listening. I like hearing, sharing, and telling stories. And then hearing more stories. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I have books, rather than just manuscripts hidden in a back drawer. That’s why I spend time here, and not just locked away by my writing desk. I love your stories. I love my own, too, and I love to tell them and talk about them; but I also love your stories, and I yearn to listen.

My prayer and hope, each year, is to be a better listener.

My plea to you is: Listen. Listen from the heart. Listen because you want to know the other person, not just their politics or some other facet of their identity. Listen to their heart and their story. Listen, a lot, this year. Listen and hear.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

This post originally appeared on Galleywampus (Sept 2015); I ran into it again this morning, and it made me happy:

An accident before birth leaves Miles Vorkosigan deformed and rejected by his society and culture, though he proves himself a military genius.

Raistlin Majere, the greatest sorcerer ever to live in Krynn, performs his magics from within a shattered body that suffers chronic pain and fatigue.

Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever fights half-handed for the health of the Land, but on Earth, he is reviled as a leper.

River Tam, aboard Serenity, is possibly one of the smartest (and also most lethal) people in the ‘verse, though her mind is torn by post-traumatic stress.

Some of these characters are heroes; others, anti-heroes or trickster figures. What they share in common is that they are not Conan. Scifi and fantasy have often glorified the supremely able, the man of great sinews and strength who can stand against a thousand with his axe one-handed, with his ray-gun or phaser, or with his donkey’s jawbone.

But almost as often, scifi and fantasy have opened doors to looking at the least able in our own society. SF imagines the technologies that improve the lives of the disabled, and fantastic fiction grows the mental and heart muscles we use to place ourselves in the shoes of others – even in the shoes of those we don’t consider to be much like us. These are stories that bring us into inevitable collision with difference, and that demand, implicitly, that we face the extent to which we “other” others and create lepers in our communities.

Most of all, speculative fiction celebrates the potential of the human imagination. If you can imagine a thing, Miles Vorkosigan insists, you can do a thing. He drives his more able comrades to great deeds with the gleeful words, “If I can do it, you can do it!” Our ability to imagine – an ability to the able and the less able share alike — is actually the greatest ability, these genres suggest. Imagination takes us to the stars, permits us to solve problems, and, most importantly, sparks our empathy with those who do not look like us or cannot do some of the things we do or who do them differently.

This is something very important to me personally, as the father of two daughters, River and Inara, both of them intelligent and fiercely imaginative, but one of them physically disabled. My little Inara was born with crippling seizures that took some considerable medical panache to bring under control; these have left her with cortical blindness and delays in speech, motor function, and physical growth. Often in supermarkets or bookstores we are stopped by well-meaning bystanders who tell us how sorry they are for us, Inara’s parents.

We are not sorry. We are, every day, impressed. We see Inara paint amazing canvasses with her toes and glorious oil colors, painting all the poems she cannot write. We see her solving obstacles with a degree of ingenuity the more physically able are never required to develop. We see her reach out to other adults and children with deep empathy and kindness, though she must do so without words.

When I wrote my one-armed character Koach in No Lasting Burial, and wrote of his compassion and heroic defense of others who suffer, I found him speaking these words in that novel’s pages: “The only lasting impediments are those we shore up within our own hearts.”

To us – writers and readers alike – speculative fiction throws down the gauntlet of imagination, calling us into a duel with the least tolerant and accepting versions of ourselves, provoking us to questions like these:

• Is ableism only a paucity of imagination? When our technology – a prosthetic, or a feat of genetic engineering – can serve as an equalizer, how significantly should we actually treat the line of division between the “able” and the “unable”? To a soldier in a full metal power-suit, everyone else – you and me included – are unable, less able.
• How sensible is it to judge the people around us based on physical or mental ability when we might find ourselves tomorrow in the midst of a universe populated by sentient species with a stunning diversity of degrees and types of physical and mental ability? If the most breathtaking art in the galaxy is created by Lilliputians, then what does height mean as a standard of an individual’s merit? If we encounter an alien race with brains three times the size of our own, how do we then judge or measure our own intellect?

Often, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been labeled the first work of “science fiction,” and it is the memorable and horrific tale of a ‘monster,’ a physically strong yet physically disfigured individual who initially has little command of language and is outcast from society. In Mary Shelley’s deft storytelling, the Creature learns language and confronts his parent, who was the first to exile him. As readers, we are caught, mesmerized, listening to the voice of that other who has been driven out. We recognize and then admire—perhaps to our shock, at first—the magnificence of his intellect and the depth of his yearning for human companionship.

From Victor Frankenstein’s creation to Jaxom’s time-traveling white dragon Ruth to Miles Vorkosigan’s crooked-legged dance across the stars, speculative fiction is uniquely able to help us imagine, re-imagine, what it means to be able. We learn in the pages of these stories that everyone we meet, regardless of their most immediately apparent level of ability, may have strengths and characteristics that we don’t expect but that might enlarge our own lives and our own experience of our world, if we only allow our first response to be curiosity and interest rather than violence or shunning, if we only take the time to get to know them, listen to them, or love them.

Stant Litore

A few Christmases ago, I helped Christine Emmert, a talented playwright living in New England, publish her novel The Nun’s Dragon; I reveled in its story of a dragon’s wintertide arrival at a medieval convent, at the mysterious death of the convent’s least orthodox nun, and of a battle in the sky on Christmas Day. Turning those pages, I was reminded of something that is very easy to forget during our holiday season: that the season is a time for wonder stories:

• For those celebrating the Christ Mass, there is a story of a virgin birth, of wise men traversing mountains and deserts to follow a new star in the sky, of thrilling escapes from mad kings and of the saving of a dark world;
• For those celebrating Chanukah, there is a story of a lamp that did not go out; for eight days, while a people prayed and hoped, the fire burned without cease;
• For those celebrating Yule, there is the most ancient of wonder stories — that though as the Starks tell us, “winter is coming,” the sun is coming after, and this cold winter world where food is scarce and wood hard to kindle, yet the ground will soon burn green and alive with the sun’s returning heat;
• For children of the modern world, there are also wonder stories about a jolly man in a sleigh, a red-nosed reindeer that lights the way through fog, a snowman brought to life, a nutcracker searching for his princess, and so on…

We shelter ourselves from winter within the heat domes of cities, but we cannot quite forget — especially this year — that there is cold, and hunger, and suffering, and violence, and wolves just outside the door. Maybe even in the front room. The winter holiday — whichever you celebrate — is a time for sharing stories that promise that the world of winter wolves and ice and brittle wind is a temporary thing, that there is a greener world that will come after.

Christine’s book reminded me of that.

That has always been the beautiful thing, to me, about dragon stories, too. They remind us to experience wonder. Many of our modern fantasies involving dragons are stories of rebirth: whether you are reading of the revival of failing dragonkind in far-distant Pern, or of a mother of dragons whose eggs crack in the heat of a death-fire and fill the world, for the first time in centuries, with the music of infant dragons.

My first two encounters with dragonkind were images rather than stories, but being an imaginative child, I wove stories around them. One was the cover of an Asia album showing a sea dragon; the other, the cover of Jody Lynn Nye’s The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern, showing a dragonet flying toward the viewer with a mapmaker’s quill clutched in its talons.

I saw that cover again and again in two-page spread ads for the Science Fiction Book Club, in magazines throughout my childhood. That image came to stand in, to me, for all the covers of all those books that promised wonder stories, and which we could not quite afford. (Later, in college, I sought out all the books, but I started with Jody Lynn Nye’s. And recently at a con, I had the chance to share with her how much that book had meant to me.)

The message in this post is just this: Don’t let your winter holiday pass without wonder stories. Please. This season, reserve a few moments to marvel. For most of us, you and I, it has been a long time since we were children. Or even if it hasn’t, some winters it feels that way. This season, find a few good books. Find a few people to share stories with. Find a few moments to laugh. Listen in the dark while the snow is falling for the trumpeting of baby dragons, or for the flicker of candles that never go out, or for the bells jingling on the ends of tassels on the saddle blankets of wise men crossing the world to find the greatest of all wonders: a new baby.

Stant Litore

Took River to the zoo today. While they were turning off the lights in Tropical Discovery, my daughter sang a lullaby to the crocodile.

I think, much as I have reserved Wednesday nights consistently for intensive work on my novel, I will reserve Sunday afternoons for outings with River. She needs more time that’s just about her (rather than her and sister), and I think that if I don’t do the fatherhood thing as well as I can, successes in other areas of my life count for little. So, with the exception of a few convention days in the year, Sundays are for River. And always will be.

Stant Litore