the Newis Glad:

Summer is icumen in.

Well, sort of: even as the season out there wanes, and pumpkin spices ever so slightly begin to waft, we’re on the verge of launching the third season of the epic: Summer. —The first draft of no. 46 should be done this month, which means revisions and finalizations of no. 45 might begin this month, as well; I am confident if not certain that it will be released in October: the first novelette in vol. 5, The Greene Chapel; the beginning of, well, Summer.

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of forebears.

In the September 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, there is a review column written by the science fiction author, editor, and critic Algirdas Jonas “Algis” Budrys. Budrys offers a brief summary of the “tried and true elements” of urban fantasy:

the desuetudinous old rooming house and its counterculturish residents, the bit of old wilderness rising atop its mysterious hill in the midst of the city, and the strangely haunted, bookish protagonist who gradually realizes the horrible history of the place where he lives.

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of force.

Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes. The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.

Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly. We see their sword bury itself in the breast of a disarmed enemy who is in the very act of pleading at their knees. We see them triumph over a dying man by describing to him the outrages his corpse will endure. We see Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.

the most Recent installment:

the Fiendish little Basket-box– how Many planets, and how Large– her Geis– her Situation– “Yessir”–

A fiendish little basket-box, carved from a single chunk of dark red wood, sits on the desk by a loose stack papers, covered with rows of closely written figures, by manila folders with neat labels that say Riverkeep, Cassino, the Moretti, the Elkins. He sets the cut glass tumbler empty beside the box, under the blue-shaded banker’s lamp, and gingerly strokes the knurled and seamless faces of it, the pips carved into each, simple shapes, a stylized flame, a cloud, a raindrop, a quartered circle. He sighs. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he says, the words thick, and roughly ground.

Behind him in a chair by the door ajar Marfisa curled her feet up on the cushion arms about her knees. “What is that,” she says.

“A boon,” says Agravante.

“For the Guisarme?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He steps around the desk, smoked glass, thick metal frame.

“What was he doing here? Where’s Grandfather?”

“Asleep,” says Agravante, sitting in his chair, a woven contraption of black leather straps.

“Do you know what I’ve seen tonight, brother?”

“I did not even know that you were yet within the city, sister mine.”

Wrapped tightly in her sheepskin jacket she leans her forehead against her knees. On the floor by her chair a knapsack, stuffed full. “The Loathly Mór,” she says, “came with her people openly down the street, and they sang the aisling, and they stopped outside a house, and I swear, brother,” looking up at him then, “she did beg sanctuary there.”

“The Queen,” he says, picking up the empty tumbler, putting it down again, “has been set aside.”