One of the things I wanted to explore in the Northern Arcadia books was the notion of a uniquely American fantasy setting. I love me a good castle, and I was raised on the Arthurian legends and Tolkein’s stuff, but there’s plenty of the fantastic on these shores. The mound city of Cahokia, the Roanoke Dare stones, the ruins in the Pueblo Canyon and the traces of large urban structures in the Amazon all served to inspire various threads and strands of Northern Arcadian lore. As a new feature, and to help break the monotony of me announcing the receipt of new rejection letters, I thought I’d share links to New World stuff I think is fantastic and inspirational, both.

The narrator for the History channel show “America Unearthed” is, like so many of his fellow travelers, a little breathless for my taste. But a recent episode on the American Stonehenge was provocative. When I was a kid, I left school with the impression the New World, prior to the arrival of Europeans, was empty of everything except wildlife and a few scattered tribes of Native Americans. This episode is a nice reminder of the extent to which that particular narrative is wrong.