Submitted!
Late last night, I clicked “send” on the manuscript for Book 2 in the SPARK series: Fire. It’s now in the publisher’s inbox waiting to be assigned to one of the two developmental editors Inklings has hired recently. I have mixed feelings about it. I was so confident about the first book, that I was…Read More
Book Review: Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams
It’s the far distant future. Unfortunately, it takes a while to figure that out. Williams plunges you mid-adventure into the life of Astride, a scholar cum adventurer, whose alleged goal is to study the ecology of implied spaces. What’s an implied space? They are often unintentional. The legs of a chair create an implied space…Read More
Promise the story you are going to end
I recently finished Orson Scott Card’s Mithermage series – good stuff. At the back of Book 2, The Gate Thief, he writes an afterward (always read the epilogues and afterwards) explaining why the book was six months late. It wasn’t that he was busy binging Battlestar Gallactica, it was that he got the structure of…Read More
Final Meet the Pod: DreadBot and Myranda
DreadBot – Dread to her Pod companions – was born and grew to a teenager in SCAZ. I can’t say “raised” because there was very little thought given to her beyond keeping her clean and fed. She was loved, but after watching enough TV, realized that there might be a better world available to her….Read More
Book Review: The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
Not my usual fare for this blog as it’s historical non-fiction, but this book made me reexamine my thinking vis-à-vis our conduct of the air war in Europe and Japan during WWII. Between The War to End all Wars (WWI) and our second global conflagration, a group of pilots tried to reimagine war. The wholesale…Read More
Meet the Pod: Hunter and Mellow
I like Hunter and named him after a guy I know. Hunter 319 is a nerd’s nerd. Even in the Pod, his nerdiness stands out. Before he was orphaned by Omicron Death, he lived with his parents and had schematics of the Millennium Falcon on the walls of his bedroom. He not only knows the…Read More
Book Review: Pighearted by Alex Perry
It was pure serendipity. Slogging through my first draft of Book 1 (which I was convinced was a masterwork but later learned was crap), I found the Houston Writers Guild and joined a critique group. As I read through the work of the other four authors, I smugly thought: Okay, I’m better. Yep, better. Is this…Read More
New Year, New Mug, New Socks, New Motivation
I’m delighted to bid farewell to 2021. Our family had a particularly bad end of the year. The darkest moment was the passing of our granddaughter, Claire Elizabeth. As much as I want 2022 to be better, I said the same thing in 2021 and it turned out to be much worse that 2020, so…Read More
Book 2: Fire – first draft complete!
During the 12 Days of Page Turners online event, the host, Aimee Ravichandran (@aimeeravichandran) of Abundantly Social, asked me how long it took to write SPARK. I told her that I thought it took about a year to finish the first draft. There were eight drafts before it was done. So, having just finished my…Read More
Book Review: Uncaged by John Sandford & Michele Cook
Years ago, before eReaders and free video entertainment on airplanes, I travelled every week for work. Usually by air, so I spent lots of time in airports and didn’t yet have a Kindle or iPad. I was wed to actual, physical books. I still prefer to read that way, but there is a downside to…Read More