On Writing: Wonder and Beauty

I’ve had to dump a surprising number of Kindle samples in the past year-plus due to pure ugliness. I find this more than a bit bewildering. Yet sample after sample I’ve run across, if they’re not in first person present tense (argh), riddled with typos in the first few pages (why), or have a main character whose only acquaintance with morals would have been the dictionary, if they’d ever read a dictionary….

Book Review: The Withdrawing Room

The Withdrawing Room, by Charlotte MacLeod (1980). I’m giving this five out of five as one of my long-time comfort cozy mystery reads; most of the author’s books are in Kindle version, but if you can find an old paperback, more power to you – it’s a nice little book.

It’s actually the second in the series; The Family Vault was first.

Crossover Ficbit – Cold Light

A/N: Sentinel belongs to UPN and Pet Fly, Godzilla: The Series to Toho and Tristar. Story set in the “Urban Legends” universe, an offshoot of Gryph’s “Deep Water” setting. Due credit to Ellen Brand for her “Personality Conflicts” Physics and Color theories, as applied to magic and psychic ability.

On Writing: Character Voice

Stories are about people. Maybe you have a fantastic world, maybe you have a really cool SF what-if (colonizing the rings of Jupiter!), maybe your characters are an alien and a sentient AI probe from Earth. Still. Stories are about people. And one of the ways to make characters come across as real, breathing individuals on the page, is to give them their own voices.

Worldbuilding: Hunting Relics

If you’ve seen the show Relic Hunter, you already know it’s campy, a bit pulpy, and plays rather fast and loose with actual history. (*Cough cough understatement cough.*)

Even so, there’s a particularly interesting alternate-history aspect in the show that deserves a second look. That’s the ongoing presence through their history of tombs, traps, and riddles that all work to the present day.

On Writing: Characters and Responsibility

Warning, cranky.

I’m going to open with a blanket statement: if I start a Kindle sample and a character has an older dog, I dump the book.

Worldbuilding: Who Claims Priority?

Everything your characters want to do will need some kind of resources to do it. Who controls those resources, and why?

On Writing: The Heist

I love a good heist story. I love a group of competent (or even not) characters getting together, going over, here’s the target. Here’s why it’s impossible. Here’s what’s in there that we have to get hold of, so we’re going to do it anyway.

Book Review: K.A.T. Antiques

K.A.T. Antiques, by Pam Uphoff. I’d give this one a 4.5 out of 5 stars; it’s shorter than I’d like, I could have read the hijinks, house fixes, and attempted murders for quite some more time, but OTOH it doesn’t drag or dawdle. A very good take-you-out-of-your-own-head story!

The Ultimate Hardback of Ultimate Destiny

Sometimes you just run across a typo that gives you pause. I’d watched a Skallagrim vid on armor and how effective it sometimes isn’t against swords. Short version, even in full plate impact damage can still take you down and the spine of some swords can deliver a lot of it. Afterward I went down to check the comments, to see if there were any more interesting facts. Where I stumbled across a bit about, “only a few dozen armed novels fell on the field, the rest were taken as hostages.”