Just finished reading Ryan Williamson's book The Widow's Son, and it's a pretty solid pulp western with some nice dark fantasy elements and even some cool steampunk bits. It's a fun, exciting book with some minor negatives that are worth dissecting a bit.
This one gets my recommendation as long as you enjoy that kind of setting. If you're not in the mood for that kind of story, though, you may want to give it a pass.
I gotta say, I'm really proud of the most recent episode of the Wordy Pair Podcast. It's hilarious and it breaks down this really awful post about context cues, of all things. Somebody took a really basic, grade-school English topic and turned it into a confusing mess.
Halfway through, we started thinking it might be an AI article, and by the end, we decided AI would probably be clearer and make fewer mistakes!
If you want something fun and funny about writing to listen to, check it out!
You can find the whole series here. Whether you're a reader or a writer or even a movie watcher, you'll find something fun!
 |
| Image of Crookes tube in operation, from D-Kuru, CC BY-SA 2.0 AT, via Wikimedia Commons |
I didn't know until yesterday that August 20th was H. P. Lovecraft's birthday! It seemed like a worthy time to go through a couple of his stories, so I read two of them last night: Under the Pyramids (written with Harry Houdini, of all people), and The Shunned House.
I always forget to mention this, but a friend of mine (who is also a writer) and I have a weekly podcast about writing, reading, and media. We're "The Wordy Pair!" (See, it's a pun off of the old Japanese sci-fi novels/TV show "The Dirty Pair")
The most recent episode had a bunch of really funny moments, as well as a really solid discussion of many of the really common things that slow down a writer.
Come for the comedy, stay for the advice.
I recently went through and put a few of the best selling books in "Hard Science Fiction" on my list of books to read, partly for market research and partly just to read some new books.
The first one I chose to read is The Object: Hard Science Fiction by Joshua T. Calvert.
Unfortunately, I didn't find it too engaging, but it did have a few good points.
I tried out making a video review on YouTube:
I'll also put up a text version of my notes here, in case you want to read them.
I realize it's a very mixed review, but if you still want to check out the book, you can find it here.
And if you instead get an urge to read or re-read Rendezvous with Rama, you can find that here.
Thanks for watching!
 |
| Photo courtesy Patrick Tomasso, via Unsplash |
I just finished reading a relatively new science fiction story and I'm working on a review. The story I read is supposedly a very highly rated, very strong-selling example of "hard science fiction," and, spoiler alert, I was pretty disappointed by it. More on that later.
However, for the time being...
