I have made my third sale! I found out late in the evening, two nights ago, and now have a signed contract so I am happy to report that my first non-flash fiction piece entitled “Stars End” will appear in Abyss & Apex magazine in Spring of next year. I am beyond excited and am really looking forward to sharing this story with you all. It had been quite a dry spell and I was…
A lot can happen in a year. This is a magical book. It says so right at the beginning, where the now-adult author and narrator of the book talks about the magic of childhood, and how important it is to hang on to that magic–not to let it go. The book chronicles a year in the life of Corey, a 12-year-old boy growing up in a small town in rural Alabama in 1964. The first…
I have been very busy for the last 10 days and haven’t had a chance to blog this book that I finished about a week ago. This was an interesting read. I didn’t know the gender of the main POV character until about half-way through the book. It didn’t matter, and I think that was a choice by the author. I also liked how the tech is described in just enough detail that you know…
I wanted to read outside my normal genre and this is one of my wife’s favorite books. She found her old copy and I brought it on a flight. It has been a LONG time since I read a book in one siting, but I read the book from start to finish between Phoenix and Boston. Even if I hadn’t been trapped on a plane, I would have had a hard time putting this one…
After struggling so much with my last read, I rewarded myself with a book that I knew I was going to like, and wow, did this one deliver for me. Interestingly, one of my complaints about The Two Body Problem was the diverse cast of characters and the complex plot structure. Yet, in Ancillary Justice, there is a sentient starship who divides herself into multiple “ancillaries” to run the ship, a complex plot involving a…
I really struggled reading this book. It was extremely slow paced for the first 60-70% and I had a difficult time differentiating the characters from each other. Unlike other reviewers I read about online, I didn’t have a hard time with the fact that the book jumped around in time. But I wanted to expose myself to something outside my comfort zone. I am a little bit familiar with the big picture of “Eastern Literary…
This was a year of firsts. First sale. First publication. Second sale. Second publication. I had 36 rejections (including one yesterday) which means I probably subbed 36 short/flash stories. I had a novel coach review my finished novel and I have started the process of editing it (I don’t know what I’m doing). I read, according to storygraph (a great app, by the way), 17 books, totaling 6602 pages, and I am about 1/3 of…
This book has been on my TBR pile for a long time and I finally picked it up for my birthday (which I share, one year different, with GLP!) this year. This story begins with two brothers arguing because both are in love with the same woman, and she had feelings for both as well. Before they can reconcile, the older brother gets transported through a mysterious arch that appears randomly in the tube station…
My story is out in the world! Thank you to OnSpec for publishing it. And, thank you to R. Graeme Cameron at Amazing Stories for reviewing it! My review is about 1/3 of the way down, but the gist of it is this: “this fictional example is vivid and … cynically amusing. Old-fashioned science fiction, perhpas, but a classic of its kind. Memorable. … I’m very fond of it.” That makes my week, everybody. 🙂
I don’t remember when I first heard about this book but I remember hearing very good things about it and I was not disappointed. Two time agents are at war. Red and Blue, a technical future and a natural future, incomparable with each other. They are the best at what they do, but when Red finds a letter on a bloody battlefield that read “Burn before reading,” we learn that there is more going on…