Poppets!

It's been a whole month since my last post. I've been busy, but hopefully things are settling down a bit now. I've started my new course, the Master of Information Studies (Librarianship) at Charles Sturt University, and work's been taking off as we get prepared for first semester. I'm off work next week, though, because I'm getting my wisdom teeth extracted (eek!). If I'm not too doped out on pain killers, and can string a few coherent sentences together, I'll write and post a review of Gene Wolfe's latest novel, Home Fires, which I have just finished reading. For now, I just thought I'd post some photos of the two beautiful Poppets that my lovely wife bought me for Valentines Day.

Saturday Afternoon Reading Poppet and Classic Little Red Poppet

Poppets are the creation of Lisa Snellings-Clark and are sold through her Etsy store, Strange Studios. She has made many different kinds of Poppet and has featured the Classic Little Red Poppet in numerous paintings. Her work has been featured in chapbook collaborations with Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Charles DeLint, John Shirley, and Peter Beagle. I absolutely adore the Wolfe chapbook, Strange Birds (DreamHaven, 2006), with its beautiful cover art and two original stories, "On a Vacant Face a Bruise" and "Sob in the Silence." Copies are still available, and the small book is a must-have for Wolfe fans (the two stories it contains cannot currently be found elsewhere).