Jaye Patrick (Free subscription) | yesterday
In honour of all those who laboured through the month, I thought I'd put a few of the tag lines used for inspiration: Editing your manuscript is the revenge your characters get on you for thinking you’re running their lives. “This is going to be the worst day of your life. I'm bringing nunchuks." H. Freeman “The ability to speak does not make you intelligent." - Qui-Gon...
SoCal Sports Observed (Free subscription) | 27/11/2009
LA Observed contributors Veronique de Turenne, Jenny Price and Denise Hamilton will be heading to Guadalajara in coming days (or are already there) for the big book fair, which has...
Jungle Trader (Free subscription) | 27/11/2009
People frequently ask me questions. Here are eight of the questions with answers. 1. What is your nationality? U.S. citizen. The majority of my ancestors who emigrated from Europe to the New World arrived in the 1600s or in the early 1700s. None arrived after 1842. 2. Are you a Democrat or a Republican? I am a libertarian Republican. 3. What is America's biggest problem? Public schools. Most teachers...
Tote Bags 'n' Blogs (Free subscription) | 23/11/2009
My guy and I were out on a walk this weekend when we passed a woman wearing sunglasses asleep in her car with the motor running. “Mom, waiting to pick up her child,” was my first thought. Mike, however, said, “Maybe she’s an investigator on a stake-out.” I looked at Mike admiringly. “I like the way you think.” I started to wonder, why I hadn’t had the...
Diplomatic Blogoir (Free subscription) | 22/11/2009
What makes writing good or bad? Not always easy to tell. But if the writer is known to be a Great Writer, does it matter? Try this gripping sentence: The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the...
Fantasy Book Critic (Free subscription) | 20/11/2009
Behold the birth (and the death) of sporepunk . If Jeff VanderMeer´s FINCH could be summated in but one word (it can´t, mind you, but let´s pretend, just for argument´s sake), it could be this one: sporepunk . Naturally, the suffix punk is more than overrated, and the story doesn´t have anything to do with old cyberpunk or steampunk stories. It is, however, a good, old-fashioned...
Bookgasm (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
Raymond Chandler fans, you finally have a gift book of your very own! For DAYLIGHT NOIR: RAYMOND CHANDLER’S IMAGINED CITY, Catherine Corman (daughter of Roger) shot photos of Los Angeles buildings mentioned in the author’s classic hard-boiled prose. Corman’s stark black-and-whites — most taken from a low, neck-craning angle that careens toward the sky, giving [...]
Bookwitch (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
I’m beginning to feel I can’t stand the man. I can’t tell you who, really, because he has no name. He tried pretending to be Raymond Chandler in this new book by Bateman (I know I said I’d only ever call him Colin…), but he’s not. What he is, is an insufferable bookshop owner (there [...]
Thrilling Days of Yesteryear (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
I have returned from a shopping excursion to Publix’s (I know Mumsy and I usually do this on Fridays, but The Singular Case of The Decrepit Water Heater sort of postponed that trip) and since the groceries have been put away, I thought I’d catch up with a few noteworthy TV-on-DVD announcements right after we hear from my sponsor, First Generation Radio Archives (now with the special ingredient…Nostalgia...
Malcolm Redfellow revivus (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009
There's only one rule: expediency . It's better than flea-ridden beds : But first: Two mentions in a few days: is Malcolm becoming a cyber-stalker? Anne Marie Hourihane in the Irish Times on Monday was recounting her: main memory of our 24-hour stay in the Berlin of November 1989 is of looking for people to interview, then interviewing them until their ears bled... East Berlin itself looked very much...
Slog (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
There's a conflict-of-interest-y type reading I have to get out of the way first: Tonight is the Literary Death Match at Re-Bar. Authors, including brand-new Stranger Genius Stacey Levine, will compete in front of judges, including Jonathan Evison and myself. The audience will get drunk and probably turn mean before the night is through. I hope you'll join me. Besides that, you have some great choices...
Rough Edges (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009
I done run outta words. Seriously, I know where the current book is going, but I don't know how to get there. I have no idea what happens in the next three chapters that I need to write in order to finish off this section. Was it Raymond Chandler who said that when you don't know what to do next, have a man with a gun come into the room? Well, what do you do when you've already done that? (Since this...
BLOGGING MY LIFE - PAST - PRESENT AND MAYBE THE FUTURE! (Free subscription) | 09/11/2009
Cover of The Big Sleep Image via Wikipedia This week's pub quiz in the local Sunday paper had a round in it entitled 'Sleepy Heads' - either the question or the answer is connected to 'sleep' so that's quite helpful in this round. Question 6 was 'In which 1946 film did Humphrey Bogart play private eye Philip Marlowe?' The answer is of course 'The Big Sleep'. The Big Sleep was a Warner movie from 1946...
westerblog (Free subscription) | 07/11/2009
Just got back from a wonderful mini-tour in Canada. Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, and I had a great time, and Keith Thompson enjoyed a warm welcome into the world of bookstore appearances. I think he will do more! But now I am SLEEPY. So I’m cheating and pulling another old writing advice out of the e-drawer. [...]
Justine Larbalestier (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
One of the most frequent complaints I’m hearing from those down the NaNoWriMo word mines is that they keep getting stuck. As it happens I have already written a post on how to get unstuck. It is rather lengthy, however, so here’s a quick and dirty version of what you should do when you get [...]
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