I’ve mentioned that Untreed Reads has not beein publishing sf & f, and that my editors are starting a new line of that for them. They’ve just announced the name, and that will be Novus Mundi Publishing. https://novusmundibooks.com/products/all I expect 11,000 Years will be there soon, during June.

A long time ago, a comic strip ended: Bloom County. A lot of us were unhappy, but I also thought that there could have been a better ending… so I wrote one. Star Date 93350.09 Captain’s Log of the Starchair Enterpoop, Helmsman and now commanding officer Binkley recording. It seems that our long mission has… Continue reading For something different: a Bloom County end

Well, as I never heard from Baen since mid-Nov, and I know a few folks got contracts with them almost a month ago, I went with option two, and I’ve just signed a contract with Untreed Reads for ->TWO<- books. This will see 11,000 Years back in print*, and after that, they’ll be publishing the… Continue reading The Big News: a signed contract for TWO books

I don’t know how many folks have read Dos Passos USA trilogy, written in the 1930s. The other day, I read(?) heard(?) someone comment in it, saying that it wasn’t really a novel, that it was a bunch of snippets. That says, to me, that she didn’t understand it in any way. It covers multiple… Continue reading Literary style, and Dos Passos

On a blog I hang out on, we’ve been discussing what the chatbots are really for – they’re getting a lot of interest, and venture capital… but so did crypto, which is now in the process of melting down. Charlie Stross thinks it’s the dead cat on the table, to distract from the crypto collapse.… Continue reading What the chatbots are really about

For many years, the standard commentary, from academia to the media, is that Hamlet is so troubled by the death of his father that he’s gone mad. Character Analysis of Hamlet: Psychological Disorders | Transmedial Shakespeare https://transmedialshakespeare.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/character-analysis-of-hamlet-psychological-disorders/All of which is bullshit analysis by people deeply embedded in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century. They… Continue reading And now for something completely different: a defense of Hamlet

Continuing the last post, and just to make sure we’re all speaking about the same thing, let’s use this https://jerichowriters.com/character-driven-vs-plot-driven-stories/ to define our terms. Now… what bothers me about “character-driven” stories: that’s what most “lit-fic” has come to be. In the recent writing course I took, the instructor made a comment about “plot-driven stories were… Continue reading Character-driven, plot-driven, why not both?

I’m asking, because I’m coming to the realization that one reason I’ve nothing in print just now in short fiction is what I’m writing. I had three stories in the Grantville Gazette, shuttered since Eric Flint’s death. All the stories were, well, just that – stories of things happening to people, and how they handled… Continue reading What kind of stories do you want to read?

So, some of you have heard and seen me ranting over the years about movies made of books, and that they make real changes to the story. Here’s a news story about critics in Germany panning the new movie of All Quiet on the Western Front. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/27/oscar-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-germany-critics I don’t see anybody arguing that they shouldn’t,… Continue reading Criticizing movies

Well, now that it’s past the end of Dec, I can say that I was accepted into a writing class from Odyssey, a high-profile organization, just under, say, Clarion. Accepted, because you had to include 1000 words of your writing (and I included the beginning of the next novel in the Terran Confederation universe… and… Continue reading The New Year