( Read more... )

I've been very lucky to get put on the press list for Jim Hines's Magic Ex Libris series, and it's been great that Black Gate has run the reviews. Last August, I reviewed Libriomancer, and a couple of weeks ago I submitted a review for the newest book in the set, Codex Born. Here's the beginning -- and you can click through the link to read to the ( Read more... )

I (and the art-reward backers) have gotten two images of Lindsay Archer's progress on the novel cover, and I'm getting very excited about where she's headed. It's going to be a fantastic conclusion to the trilogy ( Read more... )

It's been busy here at Casa Abbott as a long-term project management project I've been working on is quickly coming to its conclusion. Hopefully that will mean more regular posting from me in the future, and certainly more interesting things to talk about ( Read more... )

Just a couple of links today. PW blogger Peter Brantley wrote up what I think is an excellent entry about the problem with leaving libraries out of the e-book revolution. Brantley's assessment is that by making e-books unavailable through libraries, a whole class of Americans is denied access to those resources. If the market does shift so that ( Read more... )

I don't watch a lot of TV. We don't actually have television service, and I watch my current TV shows from my computer screen. We do have a Roku for our Netflix service and find it incredibly useful, and we've rented movies from Amazon that way as well. Recently, I gave HuluPlus a look, but since it carries only one of the three television shows I' ( Read more... )

I like obituaries. This is not out of any sense of the morbid (although people have accused me of that). What I think is neat is how a person's life can be summed up in two hundred, eight hundred, or two thousand words, and you get this snap shot image of who they were. I used to clip the obituaries from the old copies of the Branford Review as ( Read more... )

I got a surprise package in the mail today from DAW. Last year, DAW sent me a copy of Red Hood's Revenge by jimhines that I reviewed for Flames Rising. Apparently, I am still on their reviewers list, because today, a good month before it'll hit store shelves, I got a copy of Snow Queen's Shadow! Woo! I do reviews for several places now, and I'm just ( Read more... )

I am apparently not terribly inspired with thoughty* words lately, but other people are saying interesting things, and you should read them.

• I'm pretty sure I've raved about jeff_duntemann's work here before -- I've certainly done so other places -- which falls all over SFF land (mostly SF, but at least one in the F side of the equation). Some of his favorite ( Read more... )

Not long ago I got into a discussion on the Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards judges mailing list about what it means to be mythopoeic. One of the judges, Alma Hromic, wrote a very insightful answer back to me about what she felt the difference was between spinning a fairy tale trope and creating something that taps into the spirit of myth. I discovered ( Read more... )