Here’s Max Booth III’s Isaac, the main character in the book The Nightly Disease, to tell us. “This is my take on it. Hotels are the kind of places you don’t mind bringing your family to—you can expect good service, a nice breakfast. Motels, on the other hand, are where people take cheap dates for […]
Category: Writing
Eileen – Book Review
Eileen is a well-written and strange little book, that is hard to recommend. But stay with me. It’s slow. Fully three fourths of the book are just a few days in the life of Eileen, a rather odd young woman with no ambition and a social recluse by choice. She just goes to work at […]
Just a Bit of Great Writing
The following is a short excerpt from Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway that should be enough to either convince to buy the book right away because wow! The book tells the story of a group of teenagers that are trying to adapt to life after living in portal worlds (like the Narnia kids or Dorothy […]
Toni Morrison on Finding Time to Write
I saw the following on Toni Morrison’s Facebook page. She’s explaining where she finds time to write. “Very, very early in the morning, before they got up. I’m not very good at night. I don’t generate much. But I’m a very early riser, so I did that, and I did it on weekends. In the […]
The Best Writing of the Week – Tender is the Night
Do you ever read books simply for the prose? In an attempt to improve my writing I do this a fair bit and am now reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. It was there I came across the following description that, as it happens, is also the best written thing I’ve read all […]
The Paper Menagerie – Book review
You should have read one of Ken Liu’s stories by now. You really should. Ken Liu is one of the brightest new stars of the science fiction and fantasy fields. He’s won all the awards and had stories in all the main magazines, often reprinted in “Best of” anthologies. So yeah, you should really have […]
Windowsill Cowboy – Short Story
Here’s a short story I wrote in about 15 minutes at a drink-and-write event that Willona Sloan held at last year’s Reykjavik Literature Festival. This is what 7 years of writing practice gets you. Enjoy. Windowsill Cowboy Thomas sat on his favorite windowsill in the living room and looked out at the sun set over the […]
Thoughts after reading Miéville’s This Census-Taker
China Miéville is at the forefront of the “new weird”, but This Census-Taker, while weird, seems like a departure from his other books. This Census-Taker is a book I liked but find hard to really recommend to others. The most interesting thing about it is the subtle hints to the larger world of his Bas-Lag […]
A Story of Success and Failure
“You’ve been writing a bit, haven’t you?” This is a question I get more and more and my answer is always a shy and slightly embarrassed “Yeah, a bit,” while thinking that it’s a tiny amount that won’t impress anyone. In answering the question I always worry the other person will listen and then say “What, […]
3 Awesome Recent Short Stories
While I thought that widespread Kindle ownership would lead to more people reading short stories I’m not sure it has. Do you, for example, (if you own a Kindle that is) read more short stories? Whether you do or not, here are three recent short stories that are simple excellent and I highly recommend. (They […]
