Category: Ozblogging
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Ozblogging: The Scarecrow of Oz, Part 2
(Sorry for the delay: in retrospect I shouldn't have started this series right before a pair of back-to-back trips. Thanks for your patience.) The Ork doesn't like being stuck in any cave, even one with a couple of humans in it for company, so he insists on exploring the dark tunnel at the back of…
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Ozblogging: The Scarecrow of Oz, Part 1
Well, it has been more than six years since I blogged about one of the Oz books, so it's time to head down the Yellow Brick Road again and tackle a new one. This time we're looking at The Scarecrow of Oz, the eighth of the Oz novels written by L. Frank Baum. It was…
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Captain Opposite
I've noticed an interesting approach to writing genre characters, one which also applies to roleplaying games and other media as well: take an iconic character and make up someone who is as opposite to that character as possible. When Michael Moorcock wanted to write a "sword and sorcery" epic, he didn't make his main character…
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Convention Report: Albacon 2017
(". . . Featuring ME!") I drove west through sleet, rain, and fog — but no snow, which was a huge relief as I was in a car without snow tires — to Albany, which looks as if someone decided to drop the 1960s capital city of a large post-colonial nation into the middle of…
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Albacon 2017, Featuring ME!
On Friday and Saturday, March 31-April 1 I'll be a guest at Albacon 2017, the long-running convention in New York's capital city. There's a really impressive lineup of people attending: Charles E. Gannon, Stephen Hickman, Lawrence M. Schoen, Ken Altabef, Ken Burnside, Debra Doyle, Jim MacDonald, Chuck Rothman, Ryk E. Spoor, Ian Randall Strock, and…
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 8 (whew!)
Having finished the story several chapters earlier, Mr. Baum piles anticlimax on anticlimax by cutting away from the adventurers in the Nome Kingdom to the magical fairyland of Oz, where Ozma has been watching the whole thing on her Magic Picture. I have to say Ozma is a little uncomfortably voyeuristic here. It's one thing…
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 7
When last we left Our Heroes, the villainous Nome King had just transformed the Shaggy Man into a dove, transformed the Rose Princess Ozga into a fiddle (not that anyone really cares), chained up Quox the dragon, and was preparing to force Polychrome to marry him and stay in the underground kingdom forever! How will…
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 6
Queen Ann Soforth's invasion of the Nome Kingdom gets off to a rocky start. (Get it? Rocky? It's funny because the Nome King rules a kingdom of minerals. That's kind of like rocks, see? Laugh, damn you!) The Nome King tries to capture the Army of Oogaboo in a pit trap (Challenge Rating 1, according…
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 4
And now we meet the great arch-villain of the Oz books once again: Ruggedo the Nome King — alias Roquat, as he was originally known. I don't know why L. Frank Baum changed the Nome King's name; the in-story explanation is that Roquat forgo his original name upon drinking the memory-erasing Water of Oblivion in…
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 3
Chapter Seven begins with a nice bit of Baum's own particular fairy mythology. The Rain King gets too much water in his basin and it spills over, causing rain on Earth. Then the Rainbow arrives, and the Rainbow's Daughters dance on the bow, daring each other to touch the ground. And — as happens so…
The Cambias Digression 