So after reading Juliet E McKenna’s quite terrific blog post about women in SF/F, I became curious as to the percentages of books I read by each gender (only because this guy is trying to balance his own gender parity in reading). Since I’ve been keeping an annual reading list since 1998, I could offer up a very thorough look at fifteen years of my reading proclivities. I haven’t got the time right now to do a 15 year retrospective (if somebody else wants to, have at!), but it was…
I just finished reading Carol Berg’s THE DAEMON PRISM (which, like nearly everything Carol writes, is on my list of Favorite Books), and it got me to thinking about what makes epic work and what makes it work on a huge, international bestseller level. Carol’s epic fantasy usually focuses on a handful of people, rather than a cast of thousands, like (for example) GRRM. They’re very different storytelling styles and obviously bring different things to the table, both of which I find appealing in different ways. I wonder if one…
LET IT BLEED is book 3.5 of the WVMP RADIO urban fantasy series by my friend Jeri Smith-Ready, and is what happens when the publisher decides they want four books instead of five and the author turns the salient events of book four into a novella to offer her readers for free so she can wrap up the series in a way she feels is satisfying. This is in every way awesome. And the novella is, in and of itself, fine. My problem is with a decision Jeri’s made for…
I dreamed that Paul Cornell, Oisin McGann, myself, and three other authors were part of a La Femme Nikita-style black ops team. “Oh, I’m worried,” said Ted when I told him this, but Oisin murdered and fridged one of the other team members for ordering an unauthorized steak dinner, so apparently we were not to be messed with. O.O “Your real memories are surfacing again,” Paul said, and Oisin said, “I’m hurt that you think I could fridge a team member, Catie.” I do love my friends. (My brain, I’m…
This particular picture is a lesson in why one should not delete all the files one is unimpressed with right away. I was totally not impressed with this picture immediately after taking it and checking it on my computer. A few years later I went back and found it again and wondered what the hell I’d been thinking, that I hadn’t been initially pleased. So I’ve learned not to necessarily trust my first judgement and to keep anything I think *might* turn out to have potential later. :) This photo…