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…
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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,…
Useful 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…
Personal 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,…
Review: 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…
WIP 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…
Book 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….
Book Review: “Blood of Kings” by Billy Wong
I received a free ebook copy through a LibraryThing giveaway in exchange for an honest review. I signed up for the giveaway because I’ve followed Wong’s short fiction casually for years (not least because we’ve frequently wound up in the same places, such as Firefly in Amber etc etc). While his style is fine for…
Book Review: Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker (Aspect-Emperor trilogy)
I mentioned this one in my review of The Skybound Sea–where I hoped for the sake of Aeon’s Gate fans Skyes goes on to write a sequel trilogy like this. I cannot remember enjoying a sequel so much in years! Although the worldbuilding behind what Bakker is now calling The Second Apocalypse is beyond complex, and…
WisCon Rapidfire Book Reviews #4: Aeon’s Gate: The Skybound Sea by Sam Sykes
I have a confession to make: I already took one review copy (Edge of Oblivion), but I couldn’t resist snagging this one, too. I picked it up and meant to page through it to pass the time before the auction, but then I could not put it down. The opening lines beat out a hypnotic rhythm….