Category: Excerpts

Excerpts from longer works, such as novels.

Another Change of Scene(ry)

~ James Viscosi ~ 6 Comments

So not long ago, I mentioned that I had decided to rework my morning schedule (doesn’t everyone have a morning schedule?) to do writing stuff on the weekends and blogging stuff on the weekdays. That kinda sorta worked, in that I did get some (though not enough) writing done on weekends, and I did manage to (almost) keep up with the blog posting and with the visiting; but overall, it wasn’t really working out all that well, at least for the writing part. What I really needed was for the day to be a little longer. And so I built this device to slow down the Earth’s rotation and … Oh, wait, I’m being told the device is not ready yet. Scratch that. What I actually did was start getting up a half-hour earlier. More coffee, anyone?

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Teaser Tuesday: “Redemption Ark” (Still!)

~ James Viscosi ~ Leave a comment

So this week I’ve had a couple of other (non-work-, non-writing-, non-cat-, and non-dog-related) projects keeping me a little busy, so once again it’s back-to-back Teaser Tuesdays! And it’s also still Redemption Ark, by Alastair Reynolds, on account of this is a pretty long book, although not nearly as long as some others I’ve read.

“The Ark!!!”
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Teaser Tuesday: “The Poppy War”

~ James Viscosi ~ Leave a comment

So this week I was reading The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang, which I would characterize as Big Trouble in Little China meets Harry Potter meets Mulan, although insofar as I have never actually seen Mulan (any version) I’m kind of just guessing on that last one*.

Smoke gets in your eyes.
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Wrong Turn, Clyde

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t plan my books out in advance, except for that one time, and that one time the book didn’t come out anything like how I planned it. This tends to end up working out well for me, but it also means that, sometimes, I end up going in a direction that doesn’t work out. In the case of Dragon Stones, that entailed the wholesale excision of a character’s point of view scenes*; but in the case of the book I’m currently working on, Blue Roses, I’ve decided that the direction it was going with three of the main characters (four if you count the squirrel**) just wasn’t working out, and so I’ve axed the last 20,000 words or so, pruning the story back to where it branched in the direction that proved unproductive***. Because sometimes you’ve gotta be ruthless.

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