The Map Shop

    Photo by cottonbro from Pexels   Hello travelers, If you are like you, you are stuck in the middle of quarantine. I recognize that this might mean different things for different people. Personally, I live in an area where everyone is supposed to be doing the bare minimum for health safety yet they are also pretty much back to normal life despite our spiking numbers (thanks Midwest America). I am an essential worker and have continued to work throughout the shut down in order to service my community with their library needs. I recognize i'm lucky to still be working though I do wish there were more restrictions and not such a big push to reopen given the current climate. When this quarantine started, a lot of people figured this was a great time to read all of those books that they never would normally get around to. I had a similar mindset. I couldn't go out. I was stuck at home all the time. Obviously this was the perfect time to put a huge dent in my TBR, right? A...

    Photo by george ketselashvili from Pexels   Greetings travelers! Writing is an amazing art form. You create people, worlds, histories, and whole systems of culture and government in your head, convey all of these things through a few symbols on a page, and suddenly this thing that has never existed and will never exist or can never exist is real and tangible and shared with hundreds of other people in the world. That is the beauty of writing. On the other hand, writing is a mind numbing, soul crushing, infuriating process where you struggle to get the words on the page in just the right order to convey just the right feeling or event or character trait so others will believe and enjoy your work. And by the time you finish a draft, you are so exhausted with this world and its characters that many writers, myself included, almost instantly go onto starting a new project without finishing the first one. If you want evidence of this, you should read my post about all ...

  Photo by  Lisa Fotios  from  Pexels   The Witcher is a series of books created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. His short stories, originally published in the science fiction and fantasy magazine Fantastyka, were later collected into two books, Sword of Destiny and Last Wish, which were published in 1992 and 1993. These stories introduce readers to the Witcher world, including Geralt of Rivera, the main protagonist of the series. In 1994, Sapkowski released the novel length saga, starting with Blood of Elves, that continues Geralt's story. There are seven novels in this saga and one stand alone novel as well as the short stories.  The Witcher has also been adapted into television shows, most recently by Netflix, and a successful series of video games.  This series is a mature fantasy with magic, monsters, and bloody sword fights as well as political drama and ideologies in regards to war and conflict. I was aware The Witcher was a series of v...