Blog Posts

Blog Posts

Retro Nostalgia: The City of Lost Children (1995), Visual Rhetoric, and the Critic’s Confused Apparatus

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May 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children (1995).  It is perhaps the most recognizable example of contemporary surrealist cinema, and it remains one of Caro and Jeunet’s most well-regarded works.*  The surrealist nature of the film is fairly evident from even a casual viewing, as it embodies just about every layer of the film’s plot, characters, visuals, and underlying “myths.”  It’s chaotic, moody, and, at times, bewildering.  The City of Lost Children‘s, in other words, is not simply a fantasy; rather, it is a fantasy which has been divulged of its realistic undercurrents.

Blog Posts

Book Review: The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard

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Malcolm Mays has been running from a tragic event in his past. His flight has taken him to the tiny community of Ione, Oregon. There, he has bought an old, abandoned house to make his own, sight unseen. Much to his surprise, the town knows all about the House, and its reputation casts a long shadow indeed. Worse, Malcolm is getting impossible letters from a prisoner, Dusha, in the Oregon state prison who should be long dead. A prisoner that tells Malcolm that the house will “welcome him” but that Malcolm must prepare for Dusha’s release from the prison at the end of the sentence. Impossible letters, a haunted house, dark secrets, the dread coming of Dusha, and Malcolm’s own tragic past come together in The End of the Sentence, a Subterranean Press novella, a collaboration between  Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard.

Blog Posts

“Ten Post-Apocalyptic Novels Written by Women” by Nicolette Stewart

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There are 1000 ways to end the world, and fictional explorations of those possibilities have been popular (more so whenever disaster seems near at hand) for going on 200 years. But why do we love to watch the world burn?  Is it a desire to start over?  A catharsis for our fears about things out of our control? Or just a fun thought experiment in which we can examine the actions and reactions of humans put in the most extreme of situations?

Blog Posts

“Writing Toward Acceptance” by Sarah Remy

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Non-Binary Genders are gender identities that don’t fit within the accepted binary of male and female. People can feel they are both, neither, or some mixture thereof. It might be easier to view gender as a 1-dimensional spectrum with male on one end, female on the other, and androgyne in the middle, but the reality is that gender is more complex, and 3-dimensional models with axes for male, female, and how strongly you feel attached to that gender identity have been suggested. Recently I’ve begun a little experiment:  I’ve started asking various friends of various ages if they know what ‘non-binary’ means. Granted, I’m not kind enough to give them a hint with a qualifier:  do you know what non-binary means in regards to gender? Hints are not part of the experimental parameters. Hints might be cheating.

Blog Posts

My Superpower: Heather Rose Jones (The Mystic Marriage)

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My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Heather Rose Jones to talk about how the power of root cause analysis relates to The Mystic Marriage. You might not think that the same superpower would come in handy both as a fantasy novelist and as an industrial root cause investigator. But I have a preternatural ability to maintain multiple competing unfinished causal structures in my mind, feeding facts into them bit by bit until a pattern emerges from the swirling chaos, the contradictions fall away, and what remains is—if not the only truth—then at least one possible truth that is consistent with the facts.

Podcast Updates

Quick Update on the RSS Feed and iTunes (Check Your Feeds)

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http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/PodcastUpdateFeedsAndITunes/Podcast%20Update%20–%20Feeds%20and%20iTunes.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSFolks following us on Twitter may have noticed some concern regarding our two RSS feeds:  the full feed to the blog/podcast and the podcast only feed for iTunes (or folks just trying to snatch the podcasts, not the blog).  This is what happened: We use Feedburner to funnel the podcast to iTunes and podcast directories, and we keep a dedicated podcast feed so these directories only get pinged for media files and not for blog posts (which limits how many eps show up at a time).  A few days ago, I went into Feedburner to update both feeds to make sure the information was up-to-date.  For the podcast, that included an updated description, updated cast list, and so on.  In the course of doing this, Feedburner started renaming both feeds to the same address.  I don’t know why, but it happened so many times in a row that I actually got confused which feed was supposed to have which address. Eventually, I got the feeds corrected, but by then, iTunes and iTunes derivative programs were registering a problem with the feed; at least two people reported that they could download episodes, but could not properly subscribe.  Since iTunes can take up to a week to register changes to a feed, I have no idea if this is a permanent error or if the changes to the feed confused iTunes enough that it’s locked onto a feed that doesn’t exist or isn’t the correct feed.  On top of that, Feedburner now registers a massive drop in subs to both feeds, which may or may not be relevant depending on when it did its last subscriber “catch” and depending on how many people checked their feeds on Friday (the last day Feedburner would have grabbed subscriber numbers).  Either way, it’s weird. I don’t currently have a solution for iTunes or iTunes derivative users.  It may be weeks before I can fix whatever is wrong with our iTunes page (a week to find out if the feed corrected itself and possibly another week to correct any errors that might exist).  It may turn out that all of this is worrying for nothing; the feed could correct itself on iTunes and everything could work out just fine. For everyone else, the feeds should work just fine, though you should probably update your RSS reader or podcast catcher so it grabs the appropriate feed.  If you want the full blog, use this feed; if you want the podcast ONLY, use this feed. Sorry for the inconvenience! Download the audio version here.

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