Okay, our Internet connection is back, and I'm back from a quick visit to see my dad this weekend. While away, I re-read Terri Windling's excellent fantasy novel The Wood Wife. It's so good that it makes me very irritated that the author spends all her time editing fantasy collections. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, which she edits along with Ellen Datlow, is quite good, but I do wish Windling would give herself more time for original writing. Like Charles de Lint, she writes what they call mythic fiction, which has always been my very favorite genre. Unfortunately not many authors have mastered, or even been interested in, this genre, so I snap up anything I can find. The Wood Wife is the story of a poet turned journalist who inherits her hero's house and land in Arizona, as well as his unpublished writings and the unsolved mystery of his death. Maggie Black finds herself in a completely alien landscape and way of life, which becomes curiouser and curiouser when her eyes are opened to the spirit world and she is drawn deep into it.