I have noticed from time to time that people will post about how badly written a best-seller is. This is particularly true for the Twilight series, but also for pretty much any popular fiction. In some cases it's that the writing is weak, and in others it's merely that it's not "literary" enough for some tastes or that it's in a specific genre ( Read more... )

 I used to write on a laptop that wasn't connected to the internet. It was a great way to ensure productivity, but it was more cumbersome when I had to do any research because I had to boot up a different machine. Now that we have WiFi at home, I have compressed to one laptop, which is connected to the web. It's easier on some ways. In my current ( Read more... )

I must be getting old. Or maybe I have been writing for so long, it's hard to read for pure enjoyment. I just finished an excellent historical mystery. The characters were well drawn and historically accurate. The setting was well researched and well described. The mystery itself was intricate, and the writer played fair in giving enough ( Read more... )

This past month saw saw some epic developments in the world of book publishing. In some ways, I think it was a bit like the earthquake that rocked Japan; the question is, will a tsunami follow it ( Read more... )

One of the things most writers got wrong about the future was computers. If you read some of the classic science fiction of the 1960's for example, you will see that writers then envisioned powerful computers that took up whole rooms or even buildings. The idea that a computer could be 1,000 times more powerful than something like the early ENIAC ( Read more... )

Next came the story. Someone strung a bunch of words together to relate what had happened. That was nonfiction. Then someone got the idea not to be limited to what had already happened but to relate a story that could happen. That was fiction. I don't consider early mythology to be speculative fiction because my definition of spec fic is, the ( Read more... )

I have a weakness for British mysteries. I like mysteries the same way I like crosswords, as puzzles to solve, and I'm something of an Anglophile, so the two in combination are hard for me to resist. Yesterday I bought a mystery by an author I had never read. The book was marked down to $2.99 but I still got the free sample first, because three ( Read more... )

I saw a fair amount of tweets about “Growing Up Distracted,” an article in the New York Times. I'm not entirely sure I buy that this generation is really any different from previous generations, at least at a fundamental level. I think the specific nature of the distractions changes, but young people have always had things that distract them from ( Read more... )

I recently blogged about the mix of ingredients that Diana Gabaldon chose to include in her novel Outlander, noting that while there was a romance-like feel to the story, there were also elements that contradicted the traditional romance recipe. Basically, Gabaldon's book has ingredients from fantasy, romance, and historical fiction, and thus can ( Read more... )

I am currently reading Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I got it free from the Kindle store because it's being offered as a promotion. The book came out in 1991 and is the first of a series, so in that way it's typical of a lot of promotional (i.e., free or temporarily free) ebooks ( Read more... )