I once was at a talk given by S.E. Hinton in which she said that she wrote her fifth novel, Taming the Star Runner, deliberately in such a way that no one would be tempted to try to make a movie out of it. As all four of her previous novels had been adapted to
I must have repressed the memory of this stage of writing Ryswyck; in fact I know I did, because I blithely assured myself it wouldn’t take so long to write the second book in this ‘verse now that the ‘verse itself was properly realized. And that’s true so far as it goes. But I forgot
Well, that’s fair. And not nearly as bad as I feared. To be honest this was my baseline expectation as far as outcomes for this contest. Though I’ve seen readers of Ryswyck use the word “fantasy” in describing it, it really doesn’t have any of the classic features of fantasy: no magic; no talking animals;
I’ve been neglecting my blog — it’s one of the hazards of blog-keeping, but I have been preoccupied with a lot of quotidiana lately, and all you who are signed up to Morning Lights have been getting small bulletins on how writing is going. I’m tempted to say that the short version is “Not great,
It is very cold and a very fine snow is misting down, and that is just as it should be. Some notes from the home front: While my tea is steeping, I’ve taken to picking up the camera and practicing shots on whatever I find marginally interesting in my flat. It is not yet light
Without getting into that whole death-of-the-author thing, there’s no denying that once a book is out there in the world, the die is irrevocably cast in many ways. The author can’t really take it back, nor trail around after their readership explaining what they really meant, nor prescribe how people read the book when they
After an annoying spate of illness and a negative COVID test, I find myself with a small backlog of ideas for posts. But I think I won’t do an omnibus post for them, so here is the first topic: nonviolence. The first thing everyone has to do when they raise the topic of nonviolence is
It’s Book Day! To celebrate the launch of Household Lights, I’m running a special at the Smashwords outlet via their July Summer/Winter sale. For the month of July, Ryswyck will be available FREE in .mobi (Kindle), EPUB, and other formats. That’s right, if you’ve been hesitating, you can get the whole backstory for zero moneys
I’m going to talk about this one today because just now I’m finding it hard. For those of you following the home team, I’ve been blogging from time to time in response to Robert Alter’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age, a book which is 30 years old but which still offers a
Yesterday it snowed more, and I worked from the home office in the wintry hush. Solstice is approaching: and the Great O Antiphons are here. The last seven days before Christmas Eve are celebrated with these antiphons — refrains preceding the Magnificat at Evensong — that invoke Our Lord with names and honorifics, gathering up