Review: Serving Time by Nadine Ducca
For this review, another thank you is in order to the LibraryThing giveaways program, and of course Nadine Ducca herself for offering the first volume of her Timekeepers trilogy. I’m a winner once again! Although I was often confused over what was going on, the original mythological background of Serving Time was strong from the beginning. The author has clearly spent time developing this mythology and shows it by demonstrating her characters’ familiarity with its workings. I...
Read MoreHappy National Novel Writing Month!
For several hundred thousand writers, the great challenge of the year has just launched: for the next 30 days, they will be scrambling to maintain a semi-functional life while also producing 1,667 words per day, to end with a 50,000 word story on December 1st. I wish them luck. While I can’t deny the glories of a creative adrenaline surge, I have never managed to get more than 35,000 words in November, and have several times had to step back and let the challenge go before I had a...
Read MoreReview: Heaven’s Needle by Liane Merciel
You know how I said The White-Luck Warrior became horror a few pages in? The White-Luck Warrior would take one look at one page of Heaven’s Needle and run away crying. Which is why, despite it being marketed as high fantasy, Heaven’s Needle is my review of choice for Hallow’s Eve this year. (That’s a warning, by the way, that the following review will contain disturbing imagery and if you aren’t up for that, especially if you’re currently eating tasty food,...
Read MoreReturn from the 18th Century
It may say something about how much I’ve traveled this year that I have not purchased a single bottle of conditioner, instead relying on the cute little bottles they give you in hotel bathrooms. I’d have the same record for soap but this weekend at Colonial Williamsburg their scented and fun-shaped “soap balls” were too much fun to resist. I got peppermint scented and “Castille,” which is actually not the name of the scent (it’s vaguely floral) but the...
Read MoreReview: The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott Bakker
The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott BakkerFifty pages in, I realized I had come to approach this as a horror story rather than epic fantasy, as if I was reading Stephen King or the Lovecraft Unbound anthology. I read horror in a much more defensive mode, trying not to get invested in any character’s survival, and nodding my head whenever a particularly disturbing (I would say, dryly, “quite effective”) scene occurred, making terror an aesthetic observation in hopes of...
Read MoreUseful Things of the Week
I don’t know if I’m actually going to make this a weekly post, but I suppose it depends on how much cool and useful stuff I find over the course of the week. An excellent quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Airman’s Odyssey comes to mind as I revise another article: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Deleting excess words, trimming a piece down to its...
Read MorePersonal Organization with “The Ultimate List”
From GetYeDone to scribbles on post it notes, I think it’s pretty clear that I love to-do lists. They give at least the illusion of control over a busy writer’s life, allowing me to organize tasks verbally and spatially, and most of all there’s something very satisfying about striking through my latest conquest. Only recently, though, have I seriously considered the motivational effect a well-organized to do list can have, above and beyond the momentary glow of...
Read MoreReview: Finding Nina by Stephen Hazlett
Another win from the LibraryThing giveaway program, which I highly recommend if you ever find yourself short of books to review ; ) . Finding Nina is the concluding volume to Stephen Hazlett’s City Different trilogy (“The City Different,” an in-story Jeopardy question informs me, is a nickname for Santa Fe). It’s been described variously as a mystery, a thriller, and an “edgy romance”. It’s more a thriller than either of the others–a high-stakes,...
Read MoreWIP Name And Shame
A writer’s blog is nothing if not a way to hold myself accountable. Here’s the progress I’ve made on my main writing projects, as of October 1st, 2013. Starter Guide for Professional Writers–I’m just past halfway through the second draft, which is already 20,000 words longer than the first. In hindsight the first draft was just a very detailed outline. I’ve fleshed it out with more examples, explanation, and a few new ideas or good old ideas that I’d...
Read MoreBook Review: Liane Merciel’s The River King’s Road
This is exactly the kind of fantasy I love: a potentially epic setting but with “low fantasy” focus on the actual people within it. Peasants have the chance to determine fate for a change. Like Saladin Ahmed, I also want “fewer kings and starship captains, more coach drivers and space waitresses” in my spec fic. Beyond class diversity, the spec fic genre also needs progress in racial diversity. It’s something I try to do in my own writing and also something...
Read MoreAbout Therese
Therese Arkenberg's first short story was accepted for publication on January 2, 2008, and her second acceptance came a few hours later. Since then they haven't always been in such a rush, yet her work appears in places like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Sword & Sorceress XXIV. Aqua Vitae, her science fiction novella, was released by WolfSinger Publications in December 2011.
She works as a freelance editor and writer in Wisconsin, where she returned after a brief but unforgettable time in Washington, D.C. When she isn't reading, writing, or editing (it's true!) she serves on the board of the Plowshare Center of Waukesha, which works for social, economic, and environmental justice.