Black History Month

The vast majority of fantasy settings are vaguely historic-European. I rather fancy ones that aren't. If you look at what I've written, one of my favorite settings has a Middle Eastern flavor and another has some East Indian influence. Sometimes it happens in my stand-alone stories too; "Peaches from the Tree of Heaven" is contemporary urban fantasy Pagan fiction with a prevailing Chinese paradigm.

I love Gunn too, and Jasmine was fascinating. But wow, am I glad that I don't live in a universe designed by Joss Whedon.

As a writer, though, I greatly admire his ability to take an ordinary problem, add a speculative twist, and exaggerate it dramatically. Look at the episode where Buffy and Angel had sex, then he lost his soul (boyfriend turns obnoxious after sex) or "Our Ms. Reynolds" (the psycho ex). When I'm writing about writing, I like to use the term "Whedonize" for that process, because it's so characteristic of his style.

I'm also impressed by his grasp of dialogue. The characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel have a unique way of speaking, and in interviews with Whedon, you can hear similarities between how they speak and how he speaks. But the same is true of Firefly dialogue, and those characters sound almost nothing like the previous casts; only the dark tone and sardonic flavor of humor are the same.