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As I was reading Harris’ Conclave, and enjoying it as much as I did all his other novels, it occurred to me that this particular one lends itself perfectly to the study of thriller structure and pacing. This may be because the book’s composition is so beautifully simple, almost Aristotelian it the way it adheres to the classical rules of drama
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Timbuktu is the place you go when you die. Or so it is in the world of a Willy G Christmas and Mr. Bones.
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I’ve just finished reading a curious book. On the surface, it feels like a rather incongruous volume: on one hand a collection of memories and reportages, on the other hand, a digest or a précis of Herodotus’ Histories. But there is a reason behind this design
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I’ve been thinking about maps lately, about how they change over time and what kind of reality they portray. In a way, they mirror the mapmaker’s knowledge and their worldview. But as much as showing that, what is known, a map also shows what is unknown.
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Let me begin by getting out of the way some of the issues that I had with this book
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Returning to the theme of positive-spirited entertainment, I’d like to recommend another book by Barbara Kingslover: Pigs in Heaven. It was a real pleasure to read a story about fundamentally decent people
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It’s the golden age of TV. Yes, yes, I agree. Some amazing shows out there lately, to be sure. But why do they all have to be so bloody dark?
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It’s a book that doesn’t make it easy for the reader. You think you know what’s right and wrong? You’ve got your values straight? Well, The Slap might make you rethink things.
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A troop of actors travel the post-apocalyptic world, performing Shakespeare to the lone survivors of a flu that ended the world as we know it — how cool is this idea? And their motto? Painted on the side of their caravan a line from a Star Trek episode
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I’ve been reading some books on writing, classics in the field, and I want to share a couple of ideas gleaned from the masters:
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Enthusiastically recommended, albeit with the caveat that you have to enjoy Shriver’s loquacious style, because there is just no way around it. If you do like it, or at least don’t mind it, you’re in for a treat.
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Margaret Atwood has written dystopian speculative fiction before and with great success. The totalitarian theocracy of The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as the near-future apocalypse of the Oryx and Crake trilogy are both provocative and unnerving in their plausibility.
Sadly it’s not the case with Atwood’s last dystopia, The Heart Goes Last.
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Incest, filicide, mariticide, and all other sorts of parricide and scheming — and yet this novel is the opposite of riveting. To be honest, I’m not sure if I, Claudius can rightly be called a novel at all. It’s a bare bones rendering of events, dry as a 19th century history textbook.
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I am partial to books (and films, and tv series) about writers but this is only one of the many reasons why I loved The Lacuna.
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Dreamsongs by George R. R. Martin is a collection of short stories and novellas presented with an extensive commentary by the author. The stories are arranged in a general chronological order and together with their introductions they add up to a sort of autobiography. It’s a brilliant formula
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I have a confession to make: I haven’t read anything over the last week, I haven’t watched anything, and hence I find myself without a subject for this week’s post.
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To start on a positive note, a couple of things that I liked about The Scar:
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Time travel stories are often disappointing. No matter how often this subject is engaged, its inherent paradoxes invariably obstruct the plausibility of the story, even the suspended-disbelief kind.
The Arrival is not exactly a time travel story.
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In the previous post I mentioned that I prefer paper books to ebooks. I do. But I recently saw a trailer for the new enhanced edition of The Song of Ice and Fire saga offered by iBooks. I think the covers of this edition are beautiful, with this minimalist watercolor style and suggestive images that still leave plenty for the reader’s imagination.
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It’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and boy am I glad I finally did. And now I just want to get my hands on other novels by Lionel Shriver. She herself says that her “other books are good too”.
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It’s a mystery how come I haven’t chanced upon this book before, but maybe some things are meant to be. Had I read it earlier, I might have dismissed it as spiritual mumbo jumbo. Today it speaks to me. It gives me hope.
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I recently read a review of Google Home in which the writer suggested that this and similar devices, such as Amazon’s Echo, or Apple’s Siri, are our reality now because generations grew up watching Star Trek. The argument was
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I dislike genres. Not the so called ‘genre fiction’ but the idea behind and the practice of classifying stories as belonging to particular genres.* I’m not even sure how or why the genres came to be. I suspect it’s a conspiracy of booksellers and librarians, a conspiracy to make their lives easier when it comes to choosing bookshelves.
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I hate this question. Not because there is something inherently wrong with it, like there is with “Where are you from” one (What does it matter, where someone is from? It’s a purely incidental thing that will tell you nothing about a person, unless you choose to steep down to your prejudices. Why not ask “where are you going to” instead? This at least will give you some idea about your interlocutor, right?). No, I hate the “What do you do” question because I don’t have a good answer for it.
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I like epic books, I like gritty realism, and I like characters that break conventions. The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell had it all. I read the 500 pages in something like three days and the book has impressed in my mind an image of a muddy, hungry, war-torn land where religions clash, and ethnic groups clash, and private interests clash too — and all that often results in loss of limbs, eyes, virginity, possessions and/or life.
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I have recently discovered Dan Carlin’s podcast and to anyone who doesn’t know it, I want to say: go, listen to Hardcore History. If you find Dan’s informal style off-putting, persevere. You’ll get used to it soon enough and the show is well worth it.
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I started off rather liking A Clergyman’s Daughter with all the wicked Dickensian characters, so bad as to be funny: the self-centered rector who feels way above all of his parishioners, the old scandalmonger Mrs Semprill, and even the main protagonist
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No point in asking if you’ve ever done anything that in hindsight seemed like a folly and left you wondering — why the hell? Everyone has at one point or another.
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A perfect choice of narrator. Tiro, Cicero’s slave secretary, is the fly on the wall, the record-keeper, occasionally an actor in the events. He tells us Cicero’s story in a brisk pace, sometimes skipping whole years,
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Imagine a desolate, arid plane, relentless sun overhead, and a dirt road stretching on to the horizon. Wherever you look, it’s just dry shrubs and dust. No movement anywhere. No warthogs. Not even a zombie.
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An abbey on top of a mountain, hooded monks singing psalms in the dim, flickering light of candles, and ancient scrolls hidden in the library labyrinth. Reader’s imagination will do the rest, prompted now and then with a detail of this wondrous world.
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Ever since I became serious about writing, I’ve made an effort to read more critically, paying attention to what works and what doesn’t. This blog, in part, was to be my way of organizing these lessons. But looking through my previous posts I realized that, unintentionally, I’ve been focusing on the negative
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Entry 83
I was floating near the surface, feeding and daydreaming, when I had this funny thought: is the opposite reaction possible? I mean, there I was, synthesizing nutrients — some carbon, some water, sunlight — a simple chemical reaction. But could I do the opposite? Could I emit light instead?
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Every now and again I read short stories and come to the conclusion that I don’t really like them. Yet I keep coming back because I hope to learn from them. Short stories are supposed to be the essence of the writing craft
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If you have a nine-to-five job you might think that being a writer is awesome: no routine, no boss to boss you around, long lunch breaks every day of the week… Well, let me tell you something: too much freedom can be a slippery slope.
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Speculative fiction is the term that Margaret Atwood chooses to describe her Madaddam trilogy and her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Speculative is my favorite kind of fiction and Atwood accomplishes it with admirable discipline.
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Have you noticed the bumper crop of The Girl… books over the last years?
Back in 1999, when Tracy Chevalier published the Girl With a Pearl Earring it was an original title.
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A writer does not need an amazing idea to write a good story. The trick is to write a good story based on any old idea. A good writer is like an alchemist — he can turn any metal into gold.
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It often starts with a single idea, maybe a scene, an image, a ‘what if’? And then you let your imagination run free, you create, you play god. Is there a writer that doesn’t like the worldbuilding?
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A while back, when the idea of publishing my stories moved from the realm of fantasy to that of speculative fiction, I begun researching publishing options and I stumbled across
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Do you know that feeling when you’re reading a book that you really enjoy and you want to write something in a similar style? I got it when I started reading Good Omens,
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This short story (very short story, a little snippet of a tale really) is one of the first stories I’ve written. It was fun to write and it was finished in less time than it usually takes me to plot a story.
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Ok, so I don’t know if you’re one of the people who think The Heart of the Matter is among the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century — I’m not.
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If you’re an aspiring writer, you’ll probably recognize this quote:
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