Two claims / discussions in #BookTwitter converged in my mind recently. 1. ‘Copyright has to be truncated so authors are forced to create more work, instead of resting on their past achievements.’ 2. ‘If authors (commercial or self-published) want go get ahead or even get noticed, they must write quickly and to-trend.’ First, on author-copyright.…
Read More Trends or Treadmills?Content warning: guns and mutilation. When I was nine years old, Mom opened a cooler in the car, hauled a pork shoulder joint onto a meat hook and a chain, then hung it from a tree out in the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico. I was already enrolled in the local NRA gun safety classes. We were…
Read More More dead kidsIn ‘Vows of Empire’, Emily Skrutskie delivers a wrenchingly good and mostly unpredictable end (for now) to her YA space opera M/M romance ‘Bloodright Trilogy’. This review contains spoilers and reader deductions. I will reference characters and events from the first two books. For spoiler-free review, TL;dr….read the other books first, grab this one, &…
Read More Review: Emily Skrutskie, ‘Vows of Honor’I just learned of fantasy author Patricia A McKillip’s passing last week. She was a poet, wordsmith, and major inspiration of mine since 1977. That was the year I discovered a paperback copy of ‘The Riddlemaster of Hed’ in my junior high school library. It changed my life. The high fantasy of Tolkien, but with…
Read More In memoriam: Patricia A. McKillip