Advent, the season of waiting. This year, for some reason, my thoughts return to the Cotton Vitellius IV manuscript—though not to Beowulf. That would be my usual direction, but now I’m thinking of St. Christopher, for his legend passes down to us through that charred collection. The Anglo Saxon folks loved the story of this dog-headed giant, who carried... Continue Reading →
Much of my writing life is pretty boring. I labor on sentences, wonder about paragraphs, lose plot threads in a cool sounding idea that I explore for three hours, finding later that I can’t use it. Leaps take me forward; stumbles have me falling way back. Still, sometimes things happen that make all that trial and error... Continue Reading →
Used Up: A Halloween Tale.” M.J. Downing After thirty years of employment with National Reaping Machines, Charles, “Bud” Fabbro was sent home one fine fall day. Though still a powerful man, having spent three decades lifting heavy, steel flywheels from one line to the next, Bud found himself out of a job. “You don’t fit... Continue Reading →
The Fellowship of the Ring was the first thing I read by Tolkien. Mike Brewer, as per usual, introduced the story to me in the autumn of our nineteenth year. He told me that the story was unlike anything he’d ever read and that it induced in him a longing, a deep melancholy. I couldn’t... Continue Reading →
Tom Bombadil isn’t essential to the plot of getting the One Ring to the fire, or at least that’s a paraphrase of an idea that Jackson and his team of writers used to adapt The Lord of the Rings to the screen. In the extra material to the extended editions of those movies, Phillipa Boyens... Continue Reading →
When we grow to love something or someone with all our heart, we face great peril. When loving a person, we face the risk of not being loved in return or perhaps loved in a way with which we cannot live. Love can disappear or be taken away from us. Tragedies are made of such... Continue Reading →
The summer of 2019 reaching its unofficial close—although we’ll have the heat, now and then for a while yet—I pause to try and capture some of it, capture Summer, with a capital S, the proper noun, Summer. This summer marks one sixty-fifth of all my summers, so I suppose that I ought to be thankful... Continue Reading →
I had no business trying to read this book when I did, but one key scene stayed with me all the times after I read it at ten years of age. What I expected from the cover it once had—a boy in cut-offs, and old shirt, and a straw hat, fishing from a raft—was life... Continue Reading →
Howard’s Mind: A well of fantasy plots. According to the forward by Fritz Leiber in my 1978 printing of Marchers of Valhalla, this ambitious titular story of the collection shows the origins of “the Hyborean Age,” which later gave us the Conan stories. Mixing the dust of his native Texas with the dark soil of... Continue Reading →
“I write for my tribe,” Mike Brewer said to me one night around a fire. I can’t be sure, but I think that was a February night, about twenty degrees or so, and we were outside after midnight, leaning over a fire pit and bundled in heavy clothes that would smell like the aftermath of... Continue Reading →
MJ Downing’s Place 