science fiction author
When the first scene of a novel involves a starship captain covered with scratches crawling along the passageways of her ship to disentangle psychic space cats from the wiring, it seems pretty clear what you’re going to be in for, and I don’t think the first chapter mis-sells the product. This is space opera, with no effort or attempt at hard SF. Ships travel FTL through portals left behind by an ancient race, and that…
My goal was to write a short story every day in November. I wrote from Nov 1 to Nov 12, averaging approximately 1000 words a day. And then boom, that was it. I wrote three more times for a total of 15, so I wrote half the days, and I got a total word count of just over 19k words. I’m going to count that as a success. I didn’t write 15 short stories, but…
I have been meaning to do NaNo for 9 years and just have never given it a try. On Oct 31, in a fit, all of a sudden I decided to do it. Jump in with both feet. I didn’t have a novel ready to work on (I know I need to work on my plot before I am ready to start writing otherwise it will be a disaster) so i decided to try to…
I read this novella on a short weekend getaway in the desert near Mono Lake. I had no idea what to expect, having read nothing about this book, but I saw the author speak at the Dream Foundry con earlier this year and I figured I would like her writing based on what I heard there. This is a space exploration story which is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about the future of the human race,…
I bought this book earlier in the summer because I specifically wanted to broaden my horizons and read books by Black authors. Later, this book was nominated for several awards and it kept appearing on lists. It is a novella, so at the end of a busy and stressful couple of days I decided to sit down and read it yesterday. I read it in two bursts, and I’ll be honest, this is not my…
I only learned of this author this past summer as I began more deeply (broadly) exploring the world of speculative fiction after attending the virtual con. Actually, I first discovered Gareth because someone I followed on Twitter shared his space art and I really loved it. Then his name started popping up more and more frequently on lists of space opera authors and I figured I had to give this book a try. I was…
Well, I finished the series. This book, like the one before it, was a collection of related novellas that worked independently as well as telling a whole story. I really am impressed at his ability to pull that off. The series ended well, in my opinion. Not everything was tied up in a neat bow, but the major antagonist was handled and the future is uncertain. Not a cliffhanger, but certainly a way back in…
I joined a discord server back this summer after the Flights of Foundry con I attended. It has been refreshing to hear from other writers (most of them being actual writers and not aspiring like myself) but I have critiqued and received critiques from several members of the group, which was the main thing I wanted to get out of the con. Well I was recently invited to join a small “local” writing group that…
I was really going to read a different author but I’ve also really wanted to finish the Old Man’s War sextet so I went ahead and read this instead. I loved it. Which is really no surprise. I really like Scalzi’s writing style, sense of humor, and the OMW universe. I started reading this book about 6 weeks ago and got hammered by work and only finished it this past weekend while on a short…
I read this book about 3 weeks ago while backpacking in the Eastern Sierra. I enjoyed it. It was the tale of “The Lost Colony” from Zoe’s perspective, and after reading the afterward, I felt like I understood the difficulty of writing such a piece. Scalzi says there that writing a story that fit between the cracks of another story was way more difficult than he thought it was going to be. I can see…
