“I also love the fact that these books are less well known. I want to highlight fantastic literature that you don’t necessarily know about, not just the ones you already do. It is often just a single person raving about an individual book and if someone is getting excited about something then I think it is worth risking a little bit of money instead of letting a wonderful book slip further into obscurity.”
—My New Year’s Resolution #1: Buy More Books – Farm Lane Books Blog
January 2011
72 posts
“I read a lot of short stories — indeed, I’ve written some stories — where the opening of the story creates a mystery about just who these characters are, and what they’re doing, and why they’re so concerned about this mystery they’re investigating. Sometimes it’s more exciting to start with action, and let your reader figure out along the way what’s going on, before getting plunged into the mystery. But sometimes, making your reader figure out what’s going on with your characters is just one mystery too many, amongst a bunch of others.”
—5 situations where it’s better to tell than show in your fiction
December 2010
185 posts
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“The effect of most of this apparatus is to highlight the fictionality of the story. We are being asked at every turn to remember that this is make-believe, a game being played between author and reader. This idea is, of course, a hallmark of the Golden Age, and Ellery Queen was not the first to articulate or espouse it. He/they is simply the first one to make it explicit in the text, with the device of the Challenge.”
—Packaging the Detective, Part 1 | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts
“Today I trawled the internet for information about 19th-century industrial-capacity pressure cookers, and how long it takes to dissolve a corpse in lye (respectively). God help me if I’m ever suspected of murder. I’ll be tried and convicted on my browser history alone.”
—December 29, 2010 : Cherie Priest
I think this is the least interested in Christmas I’ve ever been in my whole life, although it’s not near a Grinch sort of level. BUT! My parents gave me flannel pajamas with polar bears on them! And some fancy notecards with birds on them! Also I’m up like $400 from extended family’s presents, which means I can a) splurge a bit on books (I’ve bought four already) and b) have some extra padding in my savings account. Huzzah!
And thus my Christmas is much improved. How’s yours going?
