On the heels of my last book review of "The Book Thief", with Death as the narrator comes this review of Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job, which has death as the main character ( Read more... )

Yes, you. If you're reading this, I'm asking for some help. This is brainstorming, so please indulge me and post at least one idea in response.

It doesn't have to be good, just an idea. Ideas trigger other ideas, and right now that's what I need.

The other day I asked for comments on my new freelance editor website, Plot to Punctuation. Those ( Read more... )

Having been open for business since late July last year, my publishing house (Long Tale Press) finally has our first "real" book for sale. That is, it was written by somebody who isn't me or one of my partners (although our stuff is good too), and it's actually available in both eBook and dead-tree editions.



( Read more... )

Some of you may know this, some may not. But, because the economy is in the crapper, my company has a lot of people on part time, including me. Right now I'm working 3 days a week, which is better than zero, but not exactly enough to pay the bills. It doesn't look like I'm going to get back up to full-time (or even 4 days a week) any time soon, ( Read more... )

Last night I finished Markus Zusak's The Book ThiefWierd sort of rollercoaster of expectations in this book ( Read more... )

Ok, so what I said a few days ago turns out to be wrong. Wouldn't you know, the very next book I read after "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" has a longer title ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I did a book review, but probably that's because it has been a while since I finished a book.

Such is the state of my life.

Anyway, I recently finished the book with the longest title of any book I'm likely to read for the next several years: Sherman Alexie's debut work The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven[Caveat ( Read more... )

It's amazing what a little free publicity will do.

My new venture, Long Tale Press, has been chugging along for a couple of months now, slowly but steadily gaining new members.  We'd gotten up to 93 users, which I felt pretty good about.

Then something happened.  We've had 44 new users show up in the past three days, and 15 new book submissions to go ( Read more... )

Just how should one capitalize "two-fer" anyway?

So I read a couple of ostensibly realistic YA sci-fi novels recently, to help get mentally ready for this year's NaNoWriMo.  These were nominated by the staff at the Redmond Public Library as good pics for "realistic" + YA + Sci-fi.

The first was Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer.  The second ( Read more... )

Although I recall having read both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn many years ago, I just finished re-reading them again.  I did so because I wanted to get an ear full of the language of the mid 1800s, from a well respected writer who was there to hear it, so I can do a more credible job of portraying that time in the dialogue in Wiry Fellows.

For ( Read more... )