About

In my free time I love to read and write. And I read and write a variety of genres and about many different historical periods. For many years I tried to maintain a blog about these pursuits – part book reviews, part online home of my own writing.

For a brief moment, I entertained the idea of maintaining a series of blogs, each one for a different genre I loved. Or perhaps two blogs – one for my reading and one for my writing. However, dividing up my free time and creative energy was, and is, not very practical. So one blog it would be. However, I never liked the idea of having a blog where one post was focused on bronze-age Greece and the next one focused on a French soldier in the wilderness of New France. I just couldn’t see how I could put all my divergent interests together. So, I left a grave yard of neglected, half-started blogs to wither.

And then, some time much later, three words came to me: A Weird Miscellany. This was the sword that cut my Gordian Knot. A miscellany is “a mixture or collection of different things” especially a collection of writing. A perfect description of the diverse bits of writing I wanted to put together. Eventually you will find tales of blood-thirsty warriors fighting their way across a bronze-age Aegean filled with Chthonic horrors. And you will also find tales of a bookish and love-sick youth caught up in the very un-Romantic Napoleonic Wars. And then there is the word weird. I’m using it in a couple senses. The wide variety of genres you will find is weird (as in strange or odd), but I’m also referring to the genre Weird fiction. It is a genre populated by some of my favorite writers – Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, and Lovecraft to name a few. Of course, Weird Fiction flourished in pulp magazines that often serialized longer stories. So expect some serial fiction as well.

I hope you enjoy!