Over the years, I’ve shared many resources with my friends and editing clients, as well as learning from them myself. Here’s an ever-growing list of the books and articles I’ve found most helpful. I deliberately list them in no particular order. Some are more about writing a first draft; some more about editing or marketing….
Category: Book Reviews
Before Editing: A Recommended Reading List
Part of being an editor is noticing patterns—the motion of a character arc, the raveling of a resolution, or the fact that the past five paragraphs have all started with the same word. Here’s another pattern: I’ve been recommending certain articles and books to almost every client I work with, year after year. So why not…
Welcome 2018! (What I read in 2017 and where you can find me this year)
During the fresh, can-do spirit of the beginning of a new year, it seems like a good time to have another swing at writing for this blog! As I expected last year, blogging hasn’t been my biggest priority, though I’m glad I was able to get some book reviews and publication announcements in last year….
Book Review: The Unholy Consult by R. Scott Bakker
The final book in any great series has a certain weight. Often literally. When I unwrapped my review copy of The Unholy Consult (many thanks to Overlook Press), it was as substantial as I could wish. Yet a lot of that weight is appendices–including two short stories, maps, and a glossary more than 100 pages long. The…
Book Review: The Great Ordeal by R. Scott Bakker
The Great Ordeal–penultimate volume of the Aspect Emperor No-Longer-A-Trilogy, the conclusion of which, The Unholy Consult, was released yesterday–is not only a compelling novel but also very useful as a physical object. A nine-inch by six-inch by three-inch rectangle with the words THE GREAT ORDEAL across the front in an emphatic font is basically the world’s best…
Book Reviews: Hear No Evil, Citizen Science, and The Grey Star
A sort of rapid-fire round of book reviews this week, thanks to Christmas reading!1. Be the Change: Saving the World Through Citizen Science by Chanda Clarke Though short (33 PDF pages), this was very readable and informative–it’s designed to teach the principles of citizen science/crowdsourced science to people who have never heard of it before. Now,…
Review: “Collegium Sorcerorum: Thaddeus of Beewicke” by Louis Sauvain
Another prize from the LibraryThing giveaways program, this one even came with a courteous letter from the author himself. I’m always one to be impressed by presentation, and the presentation of this book was fine indeed: I was especially impressed by the dozen or so illustrations by Sean Bodley scattered throughout the text. The back…
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…
Review: 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…
Review: 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,…