Worldwide Exclusive: The Guild's Latest Announcement

Guild fans the world over have come to expect the unexpected from Felicia Day and her creation, The Guild. Now comes the unexpectable unexpected. Which is unexpecteder.



Thanks to xtranormal for the tools.

Zuzu's Petals! Zuzu's Petals!

You know the drill, my little gingersnap.



God and sinner reconciled, indeed.

BloodWaterGodMagic vs. Charlie Brown

Thanks in no small part to Charlie Brown's Christmas Special, we (Christians, non-Christians, and Anti-Christians alike) have been duly guilted into struggling against the insidious and confounding spirit of "commercialism" at Christmas.

Television advertisements extoll the "magic of Christmas" and suggest that that deep and meaningful magic is contained in a Lexus. If you want the magic, you ought to buy one.

I think the ads may be right.

You've got to remember that I come from a magical land of barbed wire and hog manure citadels. The rocks where I make my bed are ensorcelled, and my cave buzzes with the childlike whispers of the faerie-dazzled.

So I don't have the knee-jerk rejection of claims of magic that most humans do. Even if they come from a car dealership.

The fact is this: Christmas is magical. You know this to be true.

The question is, what is the source of the magic?

Some will say that it is a cultural magic: society has determined the Christmas season to be one of familial homecomings and bonding, a time to party with friends and receive presents.

Others will note that there is an inherent magic in the acts of Christmas: that, at some level, Father Christmas is a real spirit, and that gifts are his icons, imbued with some fragment of that unidentifiable joy.

Another possible source is a social-personal one: that there is, as part of the so-called "collective unconscious" a natural "need" for Christmas magic, a sort of primordial, protean phenomenon structured to salve a person's spirit whilst drawing him into the Unknown Greater.

These all have their merits, but none of these notions have the ability to completely describe the source of Christmas magic. After all, gifts can disappoint, depression afflicts, acutely, the lonely at the holidays, and Christmas or its pagan alternatives are celebrated widely, but not universally.

Besides, anyone who knows magic knows that its true source is more, well...sacrificial than that. Whether eye of newt or iocane powder, real magic has components that are rare and hard fought, almost exclusively bought at the risk, and often loss, of blood or life.

Some time ago, near a gnawed-on feed trough, a god burst forth through the blood and water of his mother, in the helpless person of an infant named Yeshua. Certainly, there were miraculous spirits in the world, and strange tidings and joy, but those were ripples from the source of the magic of that hour: a wriggling, swaddled and bloody baby born amidst dung and wheat mash. Those ripples continued out, and later drew rich and educated men to bring extravagant gifts to the toddler to celebrate his reign.

They may as well have left him a Lexus.

That's why I don't have a huge problem with the so-called "commercialization" of Christmas. All of it, the presents and food and excess and laughter, can be taken to points of abuse or exhaustion, but they don't have to be, and, often, more than often, they are not. And these things only exist as radiating ripples of the Magic of Christmas, which has its source in Our Savior, born a man, all those years ago.

The so-called "True Meaning" of Christmas is not "Stop Being Materialistic." It is "Start Living Abundantly in the One Who Loves Abundantly."

And sometimes, just sometimes, an abundant life may be found in the driver's seat of dazzling new Lexus.

Havah: Addenda

I was discussing the novel with an imaginary friend of mine, and I realized that I forgot to mention some big ideas that are very organic to Tosca Lee's Havah: The Story of Eve:

The origin of the Lilith myth
The origin of the "Venus of Willendorf" statuette (or its predecessor)
The truth and myth of what we now call "race."
The dichotomy of the natural strain and natural primacy of monogamy.
The substance of divorce.
The meaning of animal sacrifice.
The "primitive/progressive" myth.
An exploration of our distance from God.
The importance of blood and death for the redemption of men.
The distinction of naming.
Man in God's image.

And...
The obviousness of God's handiwork in childbirth.
For those of you keeping score at home.

Fear of Girls 3: High Rollers

Doug and Raymond are finally back with their continued quest to avoid meaningful human contact.

And Church.

Happily, they fail.







Looks like their venture paid off in the veritable bonanza of gaming glory that is Mohogo.com.

I've got to wonder if this is what Felicia Day went through?

PS - A new series seeking distribution, Midnight Chronicles, starring FoG's Charles Hubbell has some very cool trailers up now.

Havah: The Story of Eve - Further Explorations

If you enjoyed Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, Tosca Lee's Havah: The Story of Eve will leave you breathless. Havah exceeds the excellent The Red Tent in nearly every category: delving into more intimate historical detail, stretching the scope of speculation with sound research, and breathing life into characters that could so easily fall flat. Importantly, Havah avoids the stereotyping of our ancestors that plagued some parts of The Red Tent.

If you think you know the plot of Havah, think again. It truly is an experience you won't soon forget.

Here are just a handful of the questions that I found being addressed through the course of the compelling narrative. Not only did I experience the alien lives of our ancestors and origins in Havah, but I also was subtly challenged to contemplate all manner of mysteries both great and small,* including:

The source of iron content in human blood.
The roots of Satan's "Lord of the Flies" monniker.
Death as an alternative control.
The miracle of self-awareness.
Insects as sin-amplifiers.
The concept of naive superintelligence.
The meaning of language.
The origin of dragon mythology.
The birth of idolatry.
The importance of (what we now call) incest.
The meaning of guilt.

And there is much more than that. There is blood in this book. Bad blood. Good blood. God's blood.

When Demon: A Memoir debuted in 2007, it became readily evident that a new, inventive and meaningful storyteller (in the deepest sense of that word) had burst upon the scene.

Demon: A Memoir and Havah: The Story of Eve are companion books, but this is unlikely to be apparent at first blush. Though a great span of time (from origin to present) separates their settings and all but two characters (both of whom are critical, but also almost never overtly "on stage") are entirely different, both stories make it clear that a new world (and worldview) of Providence and the fantastic has been birthed by a most capable midwife in Tosca Lee.

*One of my favorite qualities of Havah is that there is a subtle shift from romance languages (in the Garden) to grittier Anglo-Saxon vocabulary in exile. Lee is nothing if not a writer who builds in layers.

Havah: Why We Matter

If Joan Armatrading gets down to the DNA, I know an author who goes much, much deeper than that.

Tosca Lee takes on the very moment of human consciousness in Havah: The Story of Eve. Her sophomore effort brims with texture and flavor, character and real ideas. It also might stand a little too close and pin you against the wall until you give yourself over. And it won't necessarily make you a better person. At least, not at first.

The reader will enter the thoughts of Eve (the titular Havah) from her awakening, through a personal, familial and societal arc that doesn't just touch on important questions about origins, but delves deeply and puts muscle, skin and, crucially, teeth, to the oft-overlooked framework of what we think we know.

I've written in the past that Lee's first effort, Demon: A Memoir was likely the best novel written in the new century. Havah exceeds Demon in scope, character and detail, and, on those three merits, now wears the crown.

There's a great scene in the film Aliens where the good guys are bunkered safely inside a room and tracking the monsters progress against their location. One of the marines is using an infrared (I think) tracker to see where the beasts are, and is calling out their distance from the room. 9 meters, 8 meters, and so on, sort of a "wait until you see the whites of their eyes before shooting" moment.

When the marine says, "6 meters," Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) says, "They can't be. That's in the room."

And it dawns on them. The monsters are bigger, stronger, more numerous, and, most chillingly, smarter than they imagined.

That's Lee's latest effort for you. One of the best living voices, one of the most disarming and delving literary minds, is actually getting better.

God help us.

DNA Don't Fade Away

Few humans are as obsessively particular about cutting loose as Joan Armatrading.