So, there are novels coming, two of them, telling an epic story of a princess and her maid faced with a brutal, inescapable future. Their journey, though, into another reality of unbelievable, technological magics helps them to know that ‘The Appearance of Terrible Things’ is never what it seems.   But, that is a story for another time…   Coming sooner than that is ‘a peaceful transfer of power and other tales,’ a collection of short stories and poems...

They are up there, so far removed, following the ways of wind and mist. Billow and wisp, streak and waffle, puff and thunderhead slide across each other on different planes, above and below but also existing all at once, together and separate within the endless blue.   It is a blue that’s been often painted, and described, and sung by lofty voices but that cannot be replicated so easily in tint, or word, or note. These clumsy attempts only dance around the pureness of azure

Hey, little rock, I see you there, laying in the road, half covered by the weird, sandy dirt they call ‘road base,’ the foreign composite that’s supposed to combat the mud here, but doesn’t.   Your perfect disc would be coveted by some, by those that frequent lake and surf. It’s the delightful rounded flatness of you and your dark basalt face, that certainly brand you also not from here, a foreigner among native granite and sandstone, brought by the belly-dump trucks whose