The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 6

    Episode VI: The Long Slog Home In the movie, once the Wizard is off the scene, Glinda the Good drops down out of the fly gallery to send Dorothy home and wrap everything up in the last five minutes. In the book we still have six chapters to go. Dorothy and her three companions set…

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  • Are We Helping?

    I've lately been reading about the Inklings — C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and their buddies, who used to hang out together in Oxford to drink beer, eat ham, and talk about literature and religion. They functioned as a writers' workshop, not unlike the redoubtable CSFW which tolerates my presence. But lately…

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  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 5

    Episode V:  The Wild Wild Wizard After the Witch dies, L. Frank Baum kind of loses track of his story. I suspect he realized he was getting close to the ending, but was nowhere near the word count. So he did what all of us do in a situation like that: he started padding. How…

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  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 4

    Episode IV:  Ozpocalypse Now Having been given the mission to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, Colonel Willard — oops, I mean Dorothy — heads off into the wilds of Cambodia, or Winkie Country. There's no road, as the Wicked Witch has cut off her realm from the rest of Oz. Sadly, Dorothy doesn't…

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  • How I Did It #2: The Alien Abduction

    "The Alien Abduction" is a pretty simple story: a group of animal-rights activists free an alien from a lab at Cornell University and flee with him to a house in the country. Then things start to go wrong. The narrator, Brian, is a local boy and chose the hideout, and his brother George turns up…

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  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 3

    Episode III:  The Crawling Chaos of Oz Once past the poppies, our heroes finally reach the Emerald City. Despite the fact that Oz is a peaceful fairyland, the capital is a heavily-fortified walled city. It's not clear what the wall is supposed to keep out, as the Army of Oz consists of one soldier and…

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  • Tales From the Archive: Secret of the Swamp

    I wrote several Space: 1889 adventures for the late, great Challenge magazine during the 1990s. Since Challenge and Game Designers' Workshop are long out of business, I thought I'd reprint some of my old articles and adventures on this 'blog, as a service to anyone interested in one of the quirkiest, most amazing roleplaying games…

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  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 2

    Episode II:  Incidents of Travel in Oz Dorothy's journey to the Emerald City is about what you remember from the movie. Yellow brick road, finds Scarecrow, finds Tin Woodman, meets Cowardly Lion. Sure, the Wizard can help you, off we go. The Cowardly Lion is a really big lion, presumably born in the usual way…

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  • OzBlogging: The Wizard of Oz, part 1

    Ozblogging:  this is the first in an irregular series of posts about L. Frank Baum's Oz books. I think Baum is unjustly neglected as a fantasy writer — though I also recognize his considerable shortcomings. These little essays are not heavy literary criticism. I'm not going digging for complicated and unlikely interpretations of the books…

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  • How I Did It #1: A Diagram of Rapture

    "A Diagram of Rapture" is the first story I ever sold professionally. It appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in April of 2000, and began my regular run in that magazine. If you haven't read it, here's a brief summary:

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