Search results

Tanith Lee was mentioned earlier, but in my opinion anything in her Secret Books of Paradys series might perhaps qualify as her weirdest and strangest (and she wrote a lot of weird and strange stories!).* *She wrote all kinds of stories, from children's books to sword and sorcery to vampire...

I seem to be in the minority here, since I like Weirdstone, Moon of Gomrath, and Owl Service pretty much equally. They are not among my very favorite books, but I have read all three multiple times, and may well read each of them again at some point, so I do think highly of them all. As for...

I read it many years ago. I found it an unusual and fascinating book, but also hard-going at times.

It's quite possible that Waite influenced Williams on the importance of the Minor Arcana; certainly Waite put more emphasis on them in designing the Rider Waite deck with Pamela Coleman than had been traditional. However, Williams aligned the four elements and the four suits somewhat...

Since Charles Williams recently came up in conversation here, I decided it was time to revisit one of my favorites among his books, The Greater Trumps. My original plan was to write up a brief description of the book and post it in this thread, but as seems to be the case with all the books I...

This was another case of revisiting a book I have read before, and more than once. It is hard, even after multiple readings, to categorize The Greater Trumps. Much of this author’s work has been labelled “supernatural thrillers.” I am not sure that is a good description of this particular...

Just write the story in the best way you know how, in the manner that the plot and characters seem to require, and leave worrying about the query letter for when you actually have a finished manuscript. Planning ahead is all very well, but sometimes you have to leave some room for serendipity...

But the article is dated April 1, so if it is a prank then not a day late.

I read that one a few years ago, and I enjoyed it, too. Will be interested in your review.

I think of selling books as a way to help support my writing (and reading) habit.

I'm with the rest and think that any change that is going to have an impact on the way the rest of the story goes should definitely be made sooner rather than later. Minor changes can usually wait. If you keep going back and changing every little tiny thing you can lose your momentum, and...

I learned this a long time ago when something I said years before on a private dial-up forum started being quoted here and there across the web whenever a particular topic came up—despite the fact that at that point the original forum had been defunct for years. Fortunately, my statement wasn't...

This is quite true. I once had to give up a modest career as a mid-list writer for a couple of years when my family was in a financial hole and I was between book contracts, and I did take up a minimum wage job instead. And I discovered that, meager as the funds that job provided were, as an...

I’ve just finished reading The Green Knight, by Vera Chapman. Being still in the mood to revisit some of the Arthurian retellings/reimaginings which brought me delight in years gone by, I chose this time to reread Vera Chapman’s YA fantasy-romance, based on the famous medieval poem by an...

The Green Knight, by Vera Chapman The novel is, as you might guess, a prose retelling of the medieval verse romance “Gawain and the Green Knight.” In this re-imagining, the main characters here are still in their teens: Vivian the granddaughter of Merlin and Nimue, raised in a convent as a...

There are writers who do write stories they don't like to write ( or have stopped liking to write) but they keep on because the money is good--but those I've heard of end up as angry and bitter people. Which leads me to believe that it wasn't worth it in the end. Myself, I've never even tried...

I have to say that I have often been disappointed by Dunsany's short fiction, but very much enjoyed and admired two of his novels, The King of Elfland's Daughter (which I read many, many years ago and at least once since, and based on which I kept on seeking out his work in spite of the short...

I haven't been inside a movie theater in years. And our DVD player has been broken for a while. Unless indicated otherwise, if I watch a movie it is streaming.

There are so many successful authors now who have gone hybrid—some of their continuing series still coming out from the big publishers, and more recent works being self-published—that I wonder if readers always know whether books they are reading are trad or self-published. Or to what extent...

The thing is, I've been hearing people bring up Sturgeon's law for something like fifty years. Sometimes they get the percentage wrong. And they never seem to explain—or even, in many cases, know—the context. When did he say it, what did he mean by it, what point was he trying to make? How...