We Write!
It's a genre that waxes and wanes in popularity, although dramatizations of kings and queens seems to be very popular at the moment. Historical fiction goes back to the first time someone tried to imagine what it must have been like when . . . In a way, the Illiad is historical fiction, because the... Continue Reading →
Alma T. C. Boykin I confess, I no longer read thrillers. I used to read Frederick Foresyth, (Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File), Alistair Maclean* (Goodby California, The Satan Bug, The Guns of Navarone) and novels like The Wild Geese, Hunt for Red October, and so on. At some point, I either lost my... Continue Reading →
Alma T. C. Boykin So, having failed to learn my lesson, today's topic is romance as a genre. That is, keeping in mind that genre is about marketing. Romance as a term goes back to before romance as a genre, and romances used to be adventure stories that might or might not include a romantic-love... Continue Reading →
Alma T. C. Boykin In the beginning, there was fiction and nonfiction. Mostly. Ish. Sort of. If you didn't look too hard. And all was good, and all authors lived in harmony with their publishers, and it was Very Good. But then a marketing agent sidled up to Eve and said, "Psssssst, wanna get more... Continue Reading →
We love to write. Editing, not so much. Revising what came before is, at best, a pain. For some of us who cycle - who start the writing session by going back 500 or 1000 words and reading ourselves back into the story, doing light touches of smoothing word flow as we go, it's not... Continue Reading →
Alma T. C. Boykin No, not the year 2022, although I've got mixed emotions about seeing it leave. It wasn't the best of years for me personally, but it was much, much better than several that come to mind. I was thinking about the ten years since I released my first fiction book, A Cat... Continue Reading →
My run up to Christmas (which, as Barbs and I are on Ambo call, is going to be a low-profile day.) has been a quiet one. I am way behind on mince-pies. My kids are elsewhere for Christmas, and I'd rather the day was enjoyed to the full by those who are surrounded by family... Continue Reading →
As I'm probably the least musical person you can think of - despite numerous attempts to learn to play different instruments, the most fun of which was ukulele and weirdest was balalaika - I'm obviously not talking about accelerating a piece of music here. No, it's the publishing I'm talking about. I'm attempting to see... Continue Reading →
I'd finally got progress on The Chapter of Stuckage (it went a lot faster once I sat down, and said "who is with whom this chapter? Ah, and what issues are there that they'd need to resolve between them, while they're out of the way of Main Plot Movement?") Before I could finish it, though,... Continue Reading →
If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. I've been doing a fair amount of experimentation recently, and it's come time to look at those, and see what the results are. I didn't really approach these scientifically, to be fair. I didn't do a formal hypothesis, and heaven knows I'm not going to calculate... Continue Reading →
Mad Genius Club 