This past year has rushed by like a Japanese bullet train, and my blog has been a Dickensian orphan: neglected, unloved, and underfed. So I’m belatedly creating posts about hiking adventures, conferences, and reading highlights in 2018. Bear with me, since there will be no attempt at chronology.

My last post was about bobcats, and this one features a badger, so let’s just start with WisCon, the feminist science fiction and fantasy convention held over Memorial Day weekend every year in Madison, Wisconsin.

I picked up my friend Sandy in Menomonie, where I got to see the World Fantasy Award statue that her husband, my dear friend Mike Levy, won posthumously for his book Children’s Fantasy Literature. Previous to this year, the World Fantasy Award statuettes all featured the face of H.P. Lovecraft, notorious racist, so the new Yggdrasil design is a great improvement. Mike’s gravestone is located at the edge of a forest on an island in Menomonie, where the leaves create soft, dappled shade, and it makes me happy to think that Sandy has an image of the great mythical tree to keep close.

Sandy and I enjoyed the conference, which included parties and readings and panel discussions, and everything you might expect from a science fiction convention. We dressed up for parties and banquets.

Also, there were badgers all over town.

Since my novel Arcanos Unraveled is set in Madison (and the Isle of Arran), I got a thrill revisiting some of the places described in the narrative—everything except for the steam tunnels. Arcanos Unraveled references a network of steam tunnels that runs beneath the University of Wisconsin-Madison–tunnels in which my protagonist Anya encounters a golem. But it’s illegal to enter the tunnels in real life, and though I may not be a better person than Anya is, I am more law-abiding.

Arcanos Unraveled is about knitters and coders, a magical university, punch cards, werewolves, and scheming academics. It’s currently finding an enthusiastic audience, and one reader compared it to Diana Wynne Jones’ beloved academic satire The Year of the Griffin, which made me very happy indeed. Sure, it’s fun to get royalty checks from Australia, Luxembourg, and wherever, but it’s a hundred times more rewarding to know that my story has found a home in the world.