Kaleidocast Is Kicking

Kidlings and podlings, just a reminder:
The Kaleidocast Kickstarter is now live, and they are already 35% there.
ICYMI, Kaleidocast is a podcast produced by the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, featuring audio versions of short stories by luminaries like Jonathan Lethem, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, and - yes! - yours truly.
Their Kickstarter is meant to turn the project into a full-fledged, no-holds-barred SFWA paying market on a par with Analog, Asimov's, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
They have great, great, GREAT prizes (from  signed books to tuckerization to custom-written stories) and, well - if you like where SFF is going, this is how to hop on the train and take the ride.
Go, my pretties!
Support Kaleidocast!

Do You Like Weird Sci-Fi Art? Of Course You Do

Let's deconstruct:
It's a space rabbit.
It's pink.
It's eating a planet...
But none of that is enough. It also has to be shooting laser beams from its nose.

So God bless the '70s Sci-Fi Art Page.

Kaleidocast Kickstarter

For two seasons now, my speculative-fiction friends in Brooklyn have been doing a super-sweet podcast called the Kaleidocast. Its first season features readings of short stories by (among others) Jonathan Lethem, Richard Bowes, and yours truly; the second season will feature Nnedi Okorafor, Shan Chakraborty, Carlos Hernandez, N.K. Jemisin, Phenderson Djèlí Clark, and...yours truly!

To top it all off, they're doing a Kickstarter. Go to it here.

Sign up! Get stuff! Pledge enough and I will sign a book for you! Pledge even more, and it might be one of mine!

What more do you want?

Just Like in L.A.

Yesterday I hiked Inwood Hill Park.
It was just like hiking Fryman Canyon in Los Angeles.
Except for the humidity.
And the trees.
And the mighty river below it, instead of the wee drainage ditch.
And the wet, vivid green of the leaves, instead of dusty beige.
And there were no body-righteous types in Day-Glo exersuits.
And the Spanish I heard had a Dominican accent.
Okay. You know what was the same?
The slope. It was steep as hell.
And I sweated a lot.
That was the same.

Armor Is Not That Heavy!

So, mea culpa. In The Wrong Sword, I made some (frankly almost inevitable) jokes about the weight of medieval armor. This is something of a grand tradition in medieval stories, starting at least as early as Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, where cranes were imagined to hoist knights onto their horses.

Now, I never went that far, but I did describe things like the armor stopping just a moment after the wearer does, and our stalwart (but underweight and undertall) protagonist toppling under the weight of full jousting armor.

Seems I was overstating things a wee bit. Not to say that armor is light as a feather, but this great post on the Medievalist blog shows us what an athletic wearer can do in Late Medieval plate armor. Enjoy!