I’ve made it back from the West Coast in one piece, and am now picking up the remnants of my life post-Tour.  I have a handful of major events left in the year, in addition to holidays, and I continue to build steam on the New Book.  No jet lag after our return from LA, at least none that I noticed; turns out that not getting any sleep the night before your flight really does help you get to sleep on the destination end.  I’m running out the door to Take Care of Business, but I wanted to let y’all know that I have a post live at the Fantasy Literature blog, on Gods in fantasy novels.  Here’s an excerpt:

Gods have a complicated relationship with storytelling. The first Western dramas emerged as a part of religious celebrations, and these plays tended to resolve with the emergence of a god to fix the human characters’ problems, or increase them unbearably. (Chick Tracts owe a lot to this old-school Greek dramatic structure, now that I think about it…) Deus ex machina is the name we’ve given to this sort of resolution, when a god of some sort steps in to end the story.

Storytelling, especially fantasy and science fiction storytelling, still uses gods and godlike beings aplenty, but writers and readers alike are wary of that deus ex machina ending, even as they thrill to the Force guiding Luke as he shoots proton torpedoes into the Death Star reactor shaft, or to Neo rising from the dead to defeat Agent Smith.

Drop on by Fantasy Literature to read the rest of the article and post your thoughts in the comments.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way – Aidan Moher at A Dribble of Ink posted an excellent overview of cool reviews of Three Parts Dead.  He’s much more on the ball than I’ve been about finding them; I definitely need to update my reviews page.