Listed as Teen/YA romance and mystery, this is a book in a genre I wouldn’t normally read. However, I was approached by the author for a review, read the blurb, and decided to give it a chance. I’d actually classify it as fantasy romance, but that’s a personal judgment based on how I view the …
Continue reading Can’t Buy Forever, by Susan Laffoon, Reviewed.
Book 2 of the Generation Mars series now stands at 93454 words in first draft form. That’s an increase of 11,793 on last week’s figure, so advancement continues to go well, in spite of certain personal impediments to progress. Last week, I thought I’d have the first draft completed by this time. However, along with …
Continue reading Progress on the WIP: #SciFi in the Making.
Humour with vampires: those who love the genre will really get their teeth into this. (Sorry, unforgivable bloody pun! – And again!) This is a well-constructed short that manages to pack in the conventions of the vampire world. I love the idea of the psychologist treating vampires for their problems. This story is told from …
Continue reading Until Death Do Us Part, by Lynda Hilburn, Reviewed.
Mike Dickenson’s ‘IQ84’ is a timely satire on American values and culture. Written in the style of a humorous pulp thriller, it captures the banality, self-obsession, materialism and superficiality that characterise the USA for so many of us who live in the rest of the world. The recent populist backlash against the establishment that has …
Continue reading IQ84, by Mike Dickenson, Reviewed.
Continuing to go well, the follow-up to Blood Red Dust now stands at 74,558 words, which is an increase of 11,460 for the week. New ideas are coming through the creative process and I’m reaching the denouement now; tension ramped and pace increasing. It’s great fun writing like this. Those of you who’ve read Blood …
Continue reading Progress on the WIP: #SciFi in the Making.
Still going well, the follow-up to Blood Red Dust now stands at 63,098 words, an additional 8289 since last week’ update. Another slight change in direction occurred to me during a walk in the forest and this has ramped up the tension significantly. Those characters know how to have fun with me as writer. It’s …
Continue reading Progress on the WIP: #SciFi in the Making.
The Strange Life; it says a lot about the book, this title. Intriguing? Yes. Compelling? Yes. You can sense the ‘but’, I suspect. This is a strange book. It follows the life of a young boy of military parents as he grows into adulthood after those parents mysteriously disappear following an accident for which his father …
Continue reading The Strange Life of Brandon Chambers, by Scott Spotson, Reviewed.
A series offering writers help to make their work more accessible, interesting, varied, accurate and effective by exploring similar and dissimilar words. It also gives language learners insights into some peculiarities of English. A good thesaurus provides substitutes for the idea of a word, but not all suggestions are true synonyms. Context is vital. Placing …
Continue reading Looking for the Best Word? Tip #24
The new book is progressing well. More research done, and another 9,000+ words added to bring it to 27,273 today. I think the book is probably about a third done in first draft at present. Of course, unforeseen changes may occur before the end to make it either longer or shorter, but my current prediction …
Continue reading Progress on the WIP: #SciFi in the Making.
A short progress report. The week has gone well, with some new research done (there’s a lot happening regarding Mars at the moment!). I’ve added 13,345 words to last week’s start, making the total word count 18,145 to date. The story continues to flow and the characters are developing. I wake up at night sometimes …
Continue reading Progress on the WIP: #SciFi in the Making.
This fantasy short introduces readers to a new series, The Majat Code, which, on the basis of the writing here, I may very well explore further. For a short piece, this book develops the characters well and presents an imagined world in surprising detail, without boring the reader with unnecessarily lengthy descriptions. The story involves …
Continue reading The Majat Testing, by Anna Kashina Reviewed.
April Taylor has her soprano sleuth, Georgia Pattison embroiled in another murder mystery. A shorter work, this one, it packs in all the emotion, action and mystery of her longer works. Great light detective fiction that concentrates on character as a means of solving the crime. We have a new police detective here to deal …
Continue reading The Midnight Clear, by April Taylor, Reviewed.
A fun story, this. The writer’s dilemma: freedom of expression and the associated poverty of writing what you want, or fame and the shackles the publisher will attach to your imagination? Required to write a formulaic tale to a strict deadline, the hapless author finds life gets in the way of creativity as family vies …
Continue reading Silent Plight, by Jill Province, Reviewed.
Young adult fantasy, with the emphasis on the ‘young’. This is a sort of fairy tale told at length. Action-packed, fast moving and sometimes mysterious, this story is also convoluted and occasionally poetic. It is also surprisingly engaging. Surprising because there are structural, grammatical and even vocabulary errors that some serious editing would have corrected. …
Continue reading Chronicles of Drenyon: The Golden Sword, by NLJ, Reviewed.
What's this? A children's book reviewed here? Not what you'd expect, I know, but it's the season that's mostly about children, and this book was recommended to me, so I thought, 'Why not?'. As an author, it's good to step outside your usual zone of activity from time to to time and experience a different …
Continue reading Felicity – A Sparrow’s Tale, by Loralee Evans, Reviewed.
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Antidote to the Novel
Stuart Aken 