Each of us have a comfort book–or even a comfort genre–that we turn to when we just want to relax or when times are tough. I go for cozy mysteries. I like them because they tend to be witty, fun,
Urban Fantasy versus Paranormal Romance
You know, despite all the subgenre studies we’ve done here, I still have a hard time differentiating between urban fantasy and paranormal romance. I mean, logically, I can spout off definitions but I have a hard time with actual books
The Differences Between Urban and Contemporary Fantasy
As we touched on just barely during the Subgenre Study, while many people consider urban and contemporary fantasy to be synonymous, they’re not actually. Examples! Story 1 takes place in modern times in a major city. The story is both
Visualizing Characters
You know how you go to watch the movie-version of a book and you’re like, “This character doesn’t look anything like what I thought they would?” That rarely ever happens to me. I don’t know why, but when reading, I
Friendship in Fiction
As you know, Squiders, I am a giant, tribble-carrying Trekkie, and occasionally I get lost on Trek-related tumblrs that then eat half of my morning. (Let us not talk about this morning.) But today I learned something about my very
The Debate on Genre Separation
My friend Sarah is a librarian at an elementary school. She’s been working on this big project, suggested by the kids, to separate all the books into their respective fiction genres. She even let the kids pick out what genres
What Have We Been Reading Lately?
I love to hear what you guys have been reading and your recommendations for things I should be reading, so let’s get a discussion going, shall we? I’ve been all over the map lately. Here are the last three books
Howl’s Moving Castle Readalong: House of Many Ways
Did you find this one a tiny bit unsatisfying too, Squiders? I think I’ve finally figured out why both this one and Castle in the Air leave you feeling a little grumpy, and that’s that the main character isn’t the
Holy Frijoles!
Know what’s crazy, Squiders? Turtleduck Press is three years old! Once it was just a pipe dream, but now we’ve got three years of novels, anthologies and short stories under our belt, and, to celebrate, we’re releasing a special volume
The Future of Fantasy
Well, now that we’ve spent six weeks exploring some common fantasy races, we can start to look at fantasy trends instead. If you guys are familiar with fantasy, you know it goes through trends. We’ve been in an urban fantasy
