The Geektastic Holiday Gift Guide

Continuing the tradition born back in my Dark Valentine days, I offer my very unofficial and totally personal gift guide for holiday gift giving. I've divided it up into categories this year and the first one is:  ETSY gifts.

I love Etsy. Now that the items on the site have expanded beyond the home-made and hand-crafted, I love it even more. You can find some of the same things on eBay but you have to go through the whole auction nonsense, and risk paying way over the money for something or losing out at the last minute to a buyer who swoops in and tops your final bid. So along with one-of-a-kind items and products made to order, you can also browse the best of vintage items in dozes of categories. And for those looking for three G gifts--Geek/Goth/Game of Thrones--Etsy is a one-stop shopping portal for everyone on your list.

Winter is coming...and that means Christmas is nearly here!

Are you Team Lannister or Team Stark?  Or are you rooting for Dani to sit on the Iron Throne?  Show your allegiance with one of the hadsome medallions created by Pieces of II. All the great houses of Westeros are represented.

There's actually a lot of GOT swag on offer at the Etsy site, as well as some whimsical items like a button that says, "The Lannisters send their regards" and another that says, "Not today." Both items are available from Quid Pro Quote.
 There is also a beautifully illustrated deck of cards with the sigils of the great houses dividing up the suits of cards and illustrations of the characters on the face cards. (GOT playing cards $25 a deck, available here.)
Phunky Junk Jewels has created some beautiful jewelry inspired by Game of Thrones. I am particularly fond of this "Fire and Blood" bracelet made with lava rock and Czech glass beads. It's just $12.75.
Dozens of people are offering t-shirts with GOT-inspired designs and graphics. The warning, "Winter is Coming" is a popular slogan. Adage Screen Printing offers a fabulous "Dire Wolf" graphic design shirt, for a bargain $15. Better be quick though, there's only one of

this shirt available.
There are some terrific George R. R. Martin goodies available as well. The most whimsical is probably this knitted GRRM doll from Socks Knit Palace. It's $30 but for a hard-core fan, it's priceless.
Anise Press, meanwhile, has produced a broadside with Neil Gaiman's immortal words, "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch."
Find it here, for $32.  and finally, Red Deer Grove gets points for the most inventive Game of Thrones tie-in, the Game of Thrones Perfume collection (Six bottles, $50.75), each scent named in honor of one of the series' female characters. (Not quite sure I want to smell like Arya, much as I love the character, but I love the idea.) The scents are available separately also.

Seriously Steampunk

"Steampunk" is one of those labels that has been over-used and over-exposed of late, but I still love the aesthetic. It's so much more than just slapping a bunch of gears and clock parts onto an object, though.  The artisans displaying their wares on Etsy have taken the term to its artistic limits and the results are often absolutely fabulous.

Pinterest and Me

I'm kind of a late comer to Pinterest. I signed up for it when it launched but never really played around with it until a few weeks ago when I found myself with time on my hands and no real inclination to do any work. The next thing I knew, I had more than 30 boards (divided into topics as diverse as "Machine Dreams" and "All Things Arthurian") and I had more than 1200 images pinned. So I guess you could say I'm hooked. In case you are too, you can see my boards here.

I am finding it really relaxing to look at what other people have collected on their boards and the content they're curating. There are a lot of people "into" mermaids and dinosaurs and women wearing red dresses.  (I'm following a couple of boards where the pinners post gorgeous images every day.) A lot of these images inspire stories. A lot of the images inspire connection.

I love social media. I never expected to be this engaged.

Word of the Day: Diegetic

I like words, the more obscure the better.
In fact, I have been accused of being a "word snoot."
Lately I've been running across a word I've never heard before: DIEGETIC. The first time I saw it in a piece of script coverage written by one of my subcontractors. Then I saw it in an actual script. The first place I looked it up was Wikipedia, where the definition was so obscure I felt like someone was trying (and not for the first time) to explain the meaning of "semiotics" to me. Then I found this, which explains that "diegetic sound" is sound made by something you can see or something you can assume is nearby. That's not a word I would ever have been able to puzzle out.

R.I.P J.J. Harris

Talent manager J.J. Harris has died. She was a class act in a crass town and she'll be missed. Nikki Finke has the story here.

Coming Soon: Destiny Knocks

There's a world I've been playing with for some time, a story about a mother and daughter I call Soul Searchers. The tagline is, "What if destiny knocked and the wrong person answered the door?" The idea came to me as I was watching a Witchblade episode. and I thought--why should hot young woman have all the fun? What if the "chosen one" turned out to be someone unexpected? Like, say, the call to destiny came for Alexis Bledel of Gilmore Girls but it was her mother, Lauren Graham, who ended up doing the ass-kicking, paranormal stuff?

It's been a really, really (REALLY) slow summer for freelance work so I spent some time re-packaging what had been a television pitch into a novella. The book will be out next month. The cover, as always, is by Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services.

Friday Foto...

Sometimes when I want to relax, I cruise Etsy to see what's new in their photo department. I almost always see something I want, even though my walls are already cluttered with art and photos and even framed ads I pulled out from vintage magazines. I saw this photo by someone who calls him/herself The Jaunty Goose. You can see it and Jaunty Goose's other work here.

A touch of flash--Fiction for Thursday--Dead Man's Son

Dead Man’s Son

By

Katherine Tomlinson

Peter hadn't much minded growing up without a father. His mother and grandmother doted on him and his mother's brother, Uncle Henry, was a huge presence in his life, teaching him how to pee standing up, and throw a curve ball and drive a stick shift car, which was way cooler than just being able to drive. Uncle Henry loved him, Peter knew, but sometimes he said things to him that Peter wished he hadn't, like when he told Peter his father was a piece of shit who would have ended up in prison if he hadn't been killed when he was.

"I'm sorry to say that Pete," Uncle Henry had said, "because you're a really good kid. But you've got bad genes."

Peter had thought his uncle was talking about blue jeans and that hadn't made any sense to him at all.

It had been Uncle Henry who'd told Peter how the doctor had extracted sperm from his dead dad and saved it for his mother and how three months after his father was cremated, she'd been injected with the sperm and he'd been conceived. Peter could have lived the rest of his life without knowing that.

But the information did explain a couple of things.

Like how it was that Peter could hear dead people talking whenever he wanted to. And sometimes, even when he didn't.