Book Review: City of Ember
City of Ember is a delight. Though much of the narrative is filled with tension it has a homey quality to it that makes the story curiously gentle in the telling.
Books
Everybody Needs a Hero
Every good story has a hero. Those heroes are not perfect, but they are quite often more noble than many of us. And that’s a good thing. Because a literary hero quite often becomes a friend, at least for the time that we read the story and perhaps long after. And friends can pull us …
Why a Table of Contents?
Chapter titles and tables of contents: do we really need them? I recently had an exchange online with another writer who was convinced they were completely unnecessary. She rattled off a list of books which I hadn’t heard of. None of them contained tables of contents. So I poked around on my book shelf …
Wednesday’s Word: Dystopia
Welcome to a new feature for the site- “Wednesday’s Word”. This represents something new for me, something a little more “practical” to allow me to post things here more regularly when there are not book-related updates. Since my site is available as a subscription on Amazon I thought it might be good to actually give people …
Primavera Giveaway
So far spring has been a season for editing for me with a little time off woven in as well so I haven’t updated the site in a while. But I just wanted to throw out a quick announcement about the free promotion currently running for Into the Vast. The book is getting a lot of …
In Defense of Tears
I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil. – Gandalf, The Return of the King Books can be emotional affairs and rightly so. I wrote in one of my other updates how my short story The Artificer’s Apprentice really touched me when I read it out loud to my …
Would You Follow This Man?
For some reason you’ve awoken in the desert. You’re weak. Your memory is fuzzy, even about the things you think you know. And then this man steps out of the shadows. He claims to have the answers you’re looking for, but there’s a catch. He needs you to do something, only you’re not sure exactly …
Story and Song
I’ve written before about how much I enjoy writing to music and how the songs I listen to often become the unofficial soundtrack to the words I am putting down, but in the case of my short story, Spirit of Caledonia, music played an even more integral role. The story, if you haven’t read it, was released …
