What’s In a Genre: Urban Fantasy

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 →

Revision

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 →

My, How Time has Flown!

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 →

Georgina

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 →

Up Tempo

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 →

Building Better Blurbs

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 →

Experiments

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 →

The more things change. . .

The more they stay the same. Which is another way of saying always read the fine print, be prepared to zig when you really want to zag, and always do your research. In other words, today's post is going to be a bit of a hodge-podge of topics that I came across last night and... Continue Reading →

Books as a propaganda medium

I recently came across a series of tweets by Sergej Sumlenny, discussing how Russia had used books, as well as other entertainment media, to prepare its citizens for war in general, prior to its invasion of Ukraine.  Here's an excerpt from Threadreader's aggregation of the tweets. Let's start a long thread about how Russian book... Continue Reading →

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