Et Dieu . . . créa la femme

setsuled has written fanfic, "Moving Innocent," for my story "Moving Nameless" (Singing Innocence and Experience). It is stark and sweet and beautiful and, appropriately, sees under the skins of things; and there's a very good chance it's better than its source material. Go. Read. And then make him write more, because between this and Boschen and Nesuko, there is brilliance at work.

Also go and read the interview with Caitlín R. Kiernan at Creative Loafing. She describes her most recent novel, Daughter of Hounds, as "a story about loss of innocence and growing up, about betrayal and the price of secrecy"—all of which here factor into the ways that worlds do or do not touch, and what happens to the people caught in the overlap, and how children are like and unlike their parents, no matter which side of the world they come from. Structurally, it may be the most complex of her books, with its two plotlines that skim and parallel and shadow one another without ever touching, Emmie's pull into a fantastic underworld for which Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader have only partly prepared her, Soldier's furiously violent life there that is all she has ever, as far back as her memories reach, known, until the two stories unexpectedly converge and the reader realizes how there was only ever one all along. In this brief transit where the dreams cross / The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying . . . The place of solitude where three dreams cross. All the characters have different dreams; the plot is full of plots. Daughter of Hounds cannot be a thoughtless read. It's also cleanly written and truthful and I would be curious to see what young adult readers would make of the book. Myself, I love it.

The winter issue of Goblin Fruit has been favorably mentioned at Endicott Redux.