Mrs. Melchior: You want to follow a star? A star? Shouldn’t stars be faster than you – on foot? Mr. Melchior: We have camels. Mrs. Melchior: Oh, and they are faster than stars? Hardly. Mr Melchior: This goes beyond your understanding, woman! Mrs. Melchior: Whenever you can’t think of a reasonable answer, this suddenly goes beyond my understanding. Beyond my understanding my foot! Be reasonable! Stars wander all across the sky in one night. Can your camel do that? Mr. Melchior: You don’t know anything about camels either. Mrs. Melchior: You don’t say! I run this caravanserai here – while you only look at the stars at night and sleep during the day. Melchior’s caravanserai it is called! And who does all the work? I do! Mr. Melchior: Astronomy is essential. Something important is going to happen surely ! [exit Melchior] Mrs. Kaspar [enters]: Now who has come up with…

“What does Christmas mean?” asked Sven. “Father Christmas is coming” said the father without looking up from his cell phone. “No, Christ is born as a child,” Grandma said. “And which one of them is right, now?” asked Sven. “Then who is Santa?” Marie-Louise asked. She was only a little older than Sven but invariably thought she had to present her more detailed knowledge. “He’s called Satan,” corrected Grandma, whose view of the world was resolutely un-American. “He’s not called Satan at all!” “Santa and Satan are not the same, despite the anagram,” corrected Father and began to look up the definitions on Wikipedia. “I’ll show you right away.” His clumsy fingers slid over the smartphone and he frowned as if he had to thread a rope through the eye of a needle. “And what’s that about St. Nicolaus and his Krampus,” asked Maximilian-Alexander, who as a teenager felt too…

I should be ashamed of myself. You had to go far too long without a blog of mine. I tended to be much more diligent there. But I seem to  notice that the days are getting shorter. They used to be 24 hours long, but nowadays they seem to have gone down to some 17 hours per day. I’m lagging behind and eventually I shall find somebody else to blame. Anybody but me. I have so much to tell you: Right on time for last Halloween “BISSE” came out as an eBook at  Hockebooks http://www.hockebooks.de/ebook/bisse. That made me very happy, because many years ago, these short stories signified the beginning of my literary career. They are evil, little ditties, and it helps to have some well-established black humor when reading them. Without the black humour you will just have to be nicely scared. That will also work quite well.   …

A little more than a week ago, Andrea Diener came for a visit. When you reach my age, you can sometimes utter this dreaded sentence: “I already knew him/her when she they still went to school.” This is precisely and annoyingly true in Andrea’s case. I got to know Andrea shortly before her high school graduation. We were both active in the Irish culture and music scene in our favourite Irish pub, where I played music and she did Irish dancing. Well, quite some years have passed since then. Meanwhile, she is a journalist, writes great travel reports and maintains a regular podcast series, in which she interviews a wide variety of people. This time I was the lucky interviewee. We had a nice evening on my sofa, busy with questions and answers of which the questions were well versed and professional, while I pushed my answers through some nervous…

The finalists for the Deutscher Phantastik Preis (German Award for Speculative Literature = the German “Hugo”) have been posted. Indirectly, I am among the finalists: I wrote one of the stories in “Exotische Welten” (Susanne & Sean O’Connell [Hg] – O’Connell Press), an anthology of short stories. My story combines steampunk elements with classical poetry. “Im Bilde (=In the picture)” (Mr Jenkins inherits a house in London with a large painting in his study. Through this painting he finds an access to a fabulous kingdom. Against all reason he is seized by a strong desire to go exploring…). The story was inspired by the Coleridge poem “Kubla Khan”. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea …” If you liked “Exotische Welten”, please vote for the collection . The final ballot runs from…

“Schwingen aus Stein” (Wings of Stone), my last novel, won a SERAPH at the Leipzig Bookfair last spring. This was a great honour and brought me a whole number of readings at interesting places before interesting people last year. I should like to thank the organisers and the listeners! The book turned out to be a little tardy in gathering attention otherwise: a few more reviews would be nice. I am paging the ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere here who do such an excellent – and usually unpaid – job of reviewing those books that do not come with the advertising budget of the mainstream bestseller list. So now we venture forth into this year with a new group reading of the book starting January 16. I shall take part in the event and I would be delighted if a great many people would join this. Those of you…

What is a troll? No, I’m not talking about the naked giants from the Hobbit movie. I am talking about the people who annoy us online with their malevolent, disparaging opinions based on cluelessness, spiteful frustration and zero relevance. Those we call trolls. There are trolls to be found in online (book) reviews. They are some few people who basically only ever write bad reviews, and who do not stop at disparaging the medium (book, film, etc.), but also launch massive personal attacks on the authors and media makers and on all those who have the audacity to like what they dislike. It is perfectly all right not to like a book or a movie. We cannot all like the same things. We also do not necessarily all have to like Tolkien. And it is equally acceptable to say so and state the reason for your dislike. Massive attacks on…

Since I have joined Lovelybooks (the German equivalent of Goodreads), my books may be nominated for the Lovelybooks award. If you liked “Die Quellen der Malicorn” or “Schwingen aus Stein”, then I would be happy if you could nominate the book. This is where you have to go. Thank you!