Category: Books

Frozen Dreams Working Draft Process, Day One: 1 Chapter / 1,901 words.

I’m doing this as part of the ‘motivate me to actually turn 50K words into a no-fooling novel” process.  Because writing the stuff is sometimes the easiest part.  Hopefully, the process will accelerate as I go on, but today I have a baronial newsletter to write so I can’t spend the afternoon processing three or four chapters.

Anyway: the working draft of Chapter 1 is in Scrivener.  Or ‘first draft.’ Or ‘rough draft;’ I don’t actually know the terminology all that well.  :brightly: That’s why they call this a learning experience!

Continue reading Frozen Dreams Working Draft Process, Day One: 1 Chapter / 1,901 words.

Book of the Week: Empire of Man (March Upcountry Omnibus 1).

David Weber and John Ringo’s* Empire of Man military science fiction series was great fun: if you’ve never read it, Empire of Man (Books 1 & 2) and Throne of Stars (Books 3 & 4) have been collected for your amusement.  Worth your time to peruse, if you haven’t.  Although I imagine that Weber / Ringo fans are not exactly under-represented among my own readers…

*I originally wrote that as ‘David Ringo.’  Which is not a slam, I swear.

Tweet thread of the Day, That Wasn’t C.S. Lewis’s Point, Dagnabbit edition.

@KatinOxford has had it with simplistic complaints about Susan Pevensie and The Last Battle.  Absolutely had it.  So she brought the thunder.

She brought it so hard that almost nobody’s dared to argue back.  Not that they should, because her argument is so self-evidently correct it’d almost be silly to try.

Book of the Week: The Masked City.

The Masked City is Genevieve Cogman’s second book in her Invsible Library fantasy series (involving functionally immortal agents of a powerful Library who have access to the source language of the universe*).  I should have put this one a while back, but I got distracted and am only now taking up the series again.  It’s quite fun!  And I like Genevieve.  People should buy her books when they come out, and say nice things to her at conventions. Continue reading Book of the Week: The Masked City.

Quote of the Day, Translation: “And So, Tolkien Wins After All” edition.

From the publicity stuff for Season Eight of Game of Thrones:

“It’s about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death. It’s an incredibly emotional haunting bittersweet final season and I think it honors very much what [author George R.R. Martin] set out to do — which is flipping this kind of story on its head.”

Continue reading Quote of the Day, Translation: “And So, Tolkien Wins After All” edition.

In the (E-)Mail: Robin D. Laws’s ‘The Missing and the Lost.’

You’d have to have done the Yellow King RPG Kickstarter to have gotten the link today to Robin D. Laws’s The Missing and the Lost.  If you have, then you should download that book; it’s rather good.  If you haven’t, well, keep track of it until it comes available; again, it’s rather good.

Basic conceit is that it’s an alternate history Hastur Mythos novel where Hildred Castaigne (the protagonist of Robert Chambers’s “The Repairer of Reputations”) actually succeeded in creating a Imperial dynasty that ended up ruling the United States for a century, all for the benefit of the King in Yellow and his Yellow Sign. And then there was a revolution, and the Emperor has fled, and people are trying to rebuild and not think about all that literally insane magical stuff that had been going on. Only they can’t…

I’m about sixty percent in, and it’s good stuff. Get it, when you can.