When a novel begins with the total destruction of Earth and everyone on it ... where do you go from there?

In God's Bolt, Ron Forsythe goes to the only survivor: scientist Helen Southcote. Alone on a United Nations sponsored space station, she has to witness the asteroid impact that destroys the world, and live with the knowledge that she's the ( Read more... )

We got a new review of "Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving At All"!

Spoiler alert: They liked it. (If they hadn't, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it.)

Anyway, you can see the review on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RT3XQRTQIT7ML/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1533120625

Or on Goodreads:

https ( Read more... )

 Let me just get this out of the way: I, a humor writer, will never be as funny as Terry Pratchett.

But I don't feel so bad about that, because neither will you. Or him. Or her. Or almost anyone, with the possible exception of Douglas Adams. So why worry? Am I jealous? Yes. Yes, I am.


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 Some books just shout out for me to read them. In this case, my main attraction to Putting Out Old Flames was the number of parallels between it and my own first novel, Storm Chaser. Both have male protagonists named Chance who are also firefighters (although mine is a volunteer); both have characters who, like me, are emergency dispatchers; ( Read more... )

  Arnold Pratt is ... well ... lazy. By night he's a security guard, keeping watch while building owners are gone. His big nightly decision is usually whether to fit in a short nap before, or after coffee. His clients are ... peculiar. But that's okay with Arnold, a homebody by day who's basically sleeping his way through  life.

Ah, but Arnold ( Read more... )

This one is a bit odd for me, considering The Flying Girl was published all the way back in 1911. Still, it came highly recommended, and I found it easier to read than a lot of other writing at the time was.

It's also far more feminist than you'd imagine, at least for its time. The Flying Girl tells the story of Orissa Kane, a 17-year-old in ( Read more... )

Some novels dive right into the action; some try to get you interested in the characters and their world first; and the best ones try to accomplish both right from the get-go.

Scavenger Hunt, by Dani Lamia, is a slow burn, so slow I was convinced I was reading a literary novel at first. (Literary novel definition: No plot, no fun, and everyone ( Read more... )

You want a great book to give this holiday season?
Okay, yeah, my books, but this one isn't about self-promotion. I'm talking about a book Emily got me, one of my favorite gifts: The Annotated Wizard of Oz.


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I was going to make this short: I can't say much about the plot or characters, because that would spoil the first two books of this trilogy. But there's so much going on, and so much to talk about, and so many, many pages, that I'm not sure "short" counts for anything here.

The City of Mirrors is the finish of a thousand year story begun in The ( Read more... )

I planned to take a break from long works after reading The Passage, which I described as "War and Peace and More War". But my wife wanted to forge ahead into the sequel, and it's hard to say no considering how good the original was.

The Passage covered an entire century, starting with an ill-advised government experiment (aren't they all?) and ( Read more... )