boringest life ever.

I seem to be suffering from the boringest life ever, in terms of blogging. We have finally all recovered from jet lag (Ted actually suffered the longest, I think, because he has to get up at 5:30 and the Springsteen concert really messed him up). Poor guy. I’ve been writing some and reading quite a lot and doing a terrible job of keeping up on blogging my recent reads. This week I’ve read – the 2nd and 3rd WVMP RADIO series by Jeri Smith-Ready, and I just bought the, er,…

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Guest Blog: DB Jackson’s THIEFTAKER!

I have in the past mentioned that one of the perks of my job is getting to read early manuscripts for upcoming books. Last year my friend and fellow Magical Words blogger DB Jackson asked if I might read his novel THIEFTAKER, which turned out to be a Revolutionary War era urban fantasy novel. I don’t *normally* send people emails while I’m reading their books, but I sent David at least two or three during the course of reading THIEFTAKER, saying things like “ACK YOU DID WHAT HOLY *CRAP* DUDE!”…

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Holiday Blog, Part II

I have read TWO BOOKS already. Granted, one was Ursula’s DRAGONBREATH, which is short and has a lot of pictures, but one takes victories where one can. The other is Alethea Kontis’s ENCHANTED. Now, Alethea is this person I met at WFC in Austin several years back. She and Ed Schubert and some others for some reason took pity on me as I was sitting there, pathetic and alone, on the bus to the convention hotel, or maybe at breakfast, or something. I don’t really remember the details, mostly because…

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Oh, hell.

One of my favorite authors, Ann (AC) Crispin, has announced she’s been fighting cancer. The chemo appears to be working, which is fantastic, but the chemo has been going on for months already and is expected to continue through the summer. This means her Starbridge book sales are basically her only income this year. I’ve mentioned STARBRIDGE before on this blog. I vividly remember reading the first book, mostly because I’d seen it several times in the bookstore and never bought it, because I didn’t like the cover very much…

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some things make a post

The e-book pricing conversation showed a fair amount of support for “mass market paperback price minus 10-20%”, which is pretty interesting. Thank you all for the contributions–coming from a position where I’m looking at doing a bit of self-publishing, it’s really terrific to get that feedback from, well, potential customers, to be blunt about it. :) In other news, I’m teaching a writing course (with an emphasis on fantasy fiction, of course, but equally of course I think any writing course can be generally applied if anything sensible is said…

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