A while ago I was muttering about how I wanted somebody I *knew* to have test-run a relatively new distribution opportunity for self-published writers, and one of my friends said, “Er, Catie, you’re the one who does that. You go charging off the cutting edge and we all wait to see how it works out and then follow, having learned from you.” I said “!” because I didn’t know that was a thing I was perceived as doing, but since it apparently is, I’m gonna talk about my experiences with…
A children’s book writer and artist, Chris Judge, lives down the street from my parents. Last year, or the year before, he gave them two of his (quite charming) books for Young Indiana, who is very fond of them. (My parents gave them fudge. When Dad arrived at their house with it, Herself answered the door and said, “Oh! Thank you! We were just discussing what to have for dinner.” :)) I saw on Friday that Chris’s new book, THE SNOW BEAST, had just come out, and I told Indy…
I’m starting a new Old Races short story project, so during our Great Internet Hiatus, I re-read the two story collections I’ve done. I almost never re-read an entire book I’ve written. I read URBAN SHAMAN when it was published, and I’ve read THE CARDINAL RULE twice just for fun, but generally I just flip through a book looking for a detail if I need to look something up, so it was kind of fascinating to actually sit down and read two books in a row written by me. I…
I’ve had Barbara Hamilton (Hambly)’s Abigail Adams books on my TBR shelf for quite a while, based on my love for her Benjamin January books. I didn’t like the Adams books as much as the January books, which kind of surprised me. It was partly, I recognize, the Puritanism in the books, which made me…impatient. I don’t have a lot of use for religious fundamentalists in real life, much less in my fiction, and the fact that Abigail Adams herself apparently struggled with her (literally) Puritanical faith did not help…
I confess that I would not have made it past page ten or so of THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS had it not been written by a friend of mine. It’s not that it wasn’t well written: it was. It’s that it’s a zombie novel, and I’m not much of a horror fan. (Re: at all.) But I’ve known MR Carey for years now and he’s a wonderful human being, so I was inclined to try working my way past the subject material and going for broke. I’m glad…