I have an unsurprising admission of failure for you: I haven’t been writing. Not for a few months at least. It’s why Writing Life was so sporadic over the summer — there just hasn’t been any writing to have a life about. It’s ok, months (years?) like that crop up; but as a writer, how can we combat them? Read on for more: Continue reading »
Recent Reviews
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“This looks like a good book. Maybe I’ll just read it to get some good stuff out of it, and skip writing a review, because I have so much to do.”
Oh wait.
Busyness is so prevalent and so accepted that our standard response to “How are you?” is a simple, “Oh, you know, pretty busy.” If my day isn’t full, perfectly executing a ten-point todo list in stunning fashion, then maybe I’m doing something wrong! These are a few of the reasons why DeYoung has written his book Crazy Busy. It’s a (mercifully) short book about busyness, and DeYoung manages to pack a great deal into it. Continue reading » -
When I sit outside, and feel the wind lick at my face, hear the thunder as the seat beneath me shakes, and watch the lightning skate across the cracks in the gray mass of clouds overhead, there is little room for worry. We love to be reminded of our own smallness. Continue reading »
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Robert Heinlein’s Friday is a mixed bag of sci-fi tropes, missed opportunities, and casual vulgarity all sprinkled into a neat dystopian landscape filled with backstabbing, wars, and secrets. It’s a book that’s deeply conflicting: on the one hand, Heinlein has constructed a great, immersive world and asked some great questions of well-developed characters. On the other hand, there’s a lot that’s not worth reading and Heinlein often doesn’t answer his own questions. Friday is a circuitous book that winds around before finally resolving, and at the end of it all, I still can’t say if it was worth my time. Read on for more: Continue reading »
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every breath a torch of flame as i look up and see the blue above i want to fly away but no he says and holds my wrist behind me crying blurs the sky Continue reading »
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What’s a writing life with no writing?
What do you do when your writing life doesn’t include much writing? It’s a guarantee that at some point you’ll hit a wall with your story, or you’ll get busy at work, or you’ll lose the initial spark that inspired you, or you’ll pick up a new hobby and writing will get pushed to the side. What’s a writer to do in a time when their own writing is dormant?
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The Shadow of the Wind is Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s first adult novel, telling the story of Daniel, a young man tasked with finding out the terrible secrets behind the Spanish writer Julián Carax. In a similar vein to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco, Zafón has produced an immense Gothic novel. Filled with suspense, horror, and surprising wonder, The Shadow of the Wind is a phenomenal piece of writing that fully immerses you in its world Continue reading »
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Last week we talked about keeping a deep and varied reading list as a great way to get inspiration for a story. Today, we’re going to drill into a specific type of inspiration: the ancient classics. Suzanne Collins is great, but have you read your Aristophanes lately? Continue reading »
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There aren’t too many names in sci-fi bigger than Frank Herbert. Dune is his 1965 classic, a landmark in science fiction, and a ground-breaker for many novels to come. I may be fifty years late to the party, but even so, I enjoyed Herbert’s masterpiece, and found Dune a compelling story of humanity, loss, and prophecy that makes for the best sci-fi I’ve ever read. Read on for more: Continue reading »
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There are those who say that television rots our brains. Neil Postman would disagree. Rather than rotting our brains, he would say, it removes the necessity to use them. Now, this isn’t some old crank arguing about kids not playing outside anymore, or that the violence on TV will make us murderous. No, Postman argues that the way television presents information is erasing our need to think. Books, he writes, are the solution. As a writer on a book review website, just allow me to adjust my monocle and I’ll tell you why.
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