fox-in-the-library

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HONEYEATER, a haunted subtropical tale (by me! also @girlfleeshouse), comes out September 2025 and can be preordered now.

PREORDERS are open now from your favourite bookstore or via the publishers: Tor (US), or Picador (Australia), or put in a request with your library!

A richly imagined dark fantasy that pulses with the beautiful destruction of a town reclaimed by the natural world.'An elegant cocktail of floodwater and gum trees and secrets that refuse to stay safely drowned.' - T. Kingfisher, author of Swordheart Subtropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, just as soon as he deals with his dead aunt's house. Then Grace arrives, desperate, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire - and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy. But peeling back the rumours and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbours and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be...

Also by me: Flyaway (Australian Gothic, won a British Fantasy Award); Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion; Kindling: Stories (shortlisted for Aurealis, Locus and World Fantasy Awards).

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i do think a lot of implausible medieval plot devices make more sense when considering the fact that these people simply did not have glasses

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Amateur (1994), dir. Hal Hartley

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Because I always think of Holmes and Watson as being quintessentially English, It somehow never occurred to me that Arthur Conan Doyle would sound so distinctively from Edinburgh.

When people tell me that they think it's out of character for Sherlock Holmes to have retired to keep bees in my game:

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She realized he had sat down on purpose near the door, and she knew, perhaps without quite understanding it, that if she ran away, it would mean he had to go back into the funeral again. She was his excuse for coming out of it, so she stayed.

A man who wants to craft himself a Janet, a girl who wants to make herself a hero, and the full three hours we spend working through the powerful fictions and terrible truths that result.

[NB: themes of grooming and child abuse are woven pretty inextricably through our conversation this episode. Also, it is Three Hours Long.] 

Transcript available here, and we'll be back next week for Howl's Moving Castle with another incredible guest! 

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“My mom painted this and said no one would like it. It’s her 2nd painting.”

“I painted somebody’s mom”

“Took a while and not perfect, but i painted the guy who painted the other guy’s mom”

“I painted the girl who painted the guy who painted the other guy’s mom who painted an egret”

“I painted the guy who painted the girl who painted the guy who painted the mom who painted a bird”

“When it sinks in that I stayed up most of the night to paint a meme for internet points…”

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Happy 10th birthday to the best tweet of all time.

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I didn't know Edward Gorey's house was a museum - thank you, Tumblr!

From their FAQ page:

I remember hearing in a video years ago that the most popular ride to work at in Disney World was the Tower of Terror, because it was the only place you didn't have to pretend to be happy all the time - gloominess was part of your character.

I am SO pleased to see that the staff at the Edward Gorey museum have embraced this. I would gladly go back to a minimum wage front desk position if I got to tell guests "I suppose I must let you in. Feel free to wander the first floor. The director might come downstairs and give a talk. He might not. Life is full of disappointments." A++, only made better by the many children running around underfoot trying to find various murder weapons in the gashlycrumb tinies scavenger hunt

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Concept: Baba Yaga house walking around on chicken legs, being followed by one of those plastic Fisher-Price play houses on baby chick legs

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Archeosky was having fun with this

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The Wild Swans and Others Stories

1922

Artist : Elenore Abbott

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AUSTENLAND (2013) dir. Jerusha Hess

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thinking about this idk what else do u want me to say

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porcelain wall-lights, royal porcelain manufactory, berlin c. 1765-68.

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i’m watching an art theft documentary and they’re interviewing this art history professor from new york who was asked to go with the fbi to authenticate a rubens that had been stolen but it was a sting operation so they had to pretend like they weren’t the fbi, that they were some private buyer about to pay $3.5 million for it, and the fbi was like “this is a VERY delicate operation because you never know how they will react to what you have to say so let the agent do all of the talking, don’t say a word to anyone just nod if it’s the rubens, the last operation we did the guy in your position got shot because things went wrong in a second” and then it cuts to the professor’s interview and he says “i wasn’t going to fly down to miami to be a part of an undercover fbi sting operation to handle what could be rubens’s aurora and just NOT say anything. i was gonna have to ad lib a little” and then he tells the interviewer that when he & the fbi agent got to the hotel while he was examining the painting he started lecturing the other people, first on how badly they had wrapped it, and then about like how it had been painted, the history of it, what the subject was and what she was doing, etc etc, and he was like “i hadn’t taught a class on rubens in 15 years, so for me it was like being back in the classroom except my students couldn’t leave”