News and Site Updates
It’s a two-sale day! “Eternally Bound” has been purchased by Lightspeed Magazine (which is currently running a Kickstarter), and “Sorcerer, Councilman, Priest has sold to Strange Pilgrims!
As if to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my first novel hitting the shelves, I have three publications and a roundtable today! “All Under Heaven,” “Gorgoneia,” “In the salt-drowned lands,”, and “Closer to the Heart: A Poetry Roundtable” are all out now!
It’s raining poems! “Core Sample” is out today in DreamForge Anvil.
From the Journal
New Worlds: Purity and Impurity
Having referred a few times to the concepts of purity and purification, maybe we should circle back and talk about what those mean. If your thoughts immediately went to the online meme of the “purity test,” you’re not entirely wrong. That checklist of sexual and sex-adjacent acts hints at the idea that you’re “stained” by […]
New Worlds: Celibacy
Having mentioned celibacy in the previous essay, I now want to return to it and unpack in full. Celibacy is a more complicated term than it seems on the surface, because we don’t consistently distinguish it from abstinence: witness the rise of the term “incel,” or “involuntary celibate,” which might be more appropriately framed as […]
New Worlds: The Ascetic Life
Fasting is one form of asceticism: the renunciation, whether short- or long-term, of material pleasures. But hoo boy is it the thin end of that wedge! People can adopt an ascetic lifestyle for purely philosophical reasons; Stoicism in the classical era headed in this direction, though I think most of its adherents were more concerned […]