Recently having decided to switch, at least for a while, from my previous habit of picking a random book to read, and instead reading them in roughly the order in which they got them, I have lately been picking up* books that I acquired way back in the halcyon days of 2015. The one I’m reading this week is The Branches of Time, by Luca Rossi.
So on July 4th, Netflix released the third season of their show Stranger Things:
So this week I decided to reach into my giant stack of rejection letters. As usual, I went to random.org to decide which section of the file to pull from, and it told me that this week, it would be the letter O. Despite its ubiquity as a vowel, my file folder for the letter O turned out to be virtually empty. (O, The Oprah Magazine wasn’t in operation when I was submitting a lot of short stories places. Not that I would have submitted anything there anyway, since that wasn’t exactly my target market.) However, I did find something a little unusual: Submission guidelines to an ancient fanzine called Oh Boy.
Continue reading “Random Thing From My Files: “Oh Boy” Magazine”
So this week I’m reading That Risen Snow, by Rob E. Boley, which answers a question no one ever thought to ask: What if, after being kissed by the Prince, Snow White awakened as a ravenous zombie?
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 6/25/2019: “That Risen Snow””
Last week I finally finished the last round of paper editing on Father’s Books. This was supposed to be just to find and fix typos, but turned into yet another round of “let’s move this sentence over there” and “I can cut this paragraph” sorts of edits. Which is not to say there weren’t typos too. Most times there’s nothing much interesting about typos, but every once in a while they’re cute.
So this week I’m continuing my recent spree of reading translated works* with The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (or Liu Cixin, depending). As you may be able to guess by the author’s name, this is a Chinese science fiction novel.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 6/11/2019: “The Three-Body Problem””
So this week I’m still reading The Night Watch Collection, by Sergie Lukyanenko. At this point I’m well into the last book of the trilogy, Twilight Watch, which so far is my favorite of the three.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 6/4/2019: “The Night Watch Collection””
So this week I reached into the giant stack of old schoolwork and other papers that my parents sent me several years ago. This time I pulled out a contribution to that great American literary genre, the epistolary road trip memoir:
Over the past several years, after Dennis the Vizsla Dog became a little old man dog, he got in the habit of being noisy in the evenings, loudly complaining via barks and whines that he wanted everyone to stop watching television and go to bed at, oh, 8pm* or so. To an extent, this could be managed with things like the Treat & Train or simply by the occasional tossing of treats (which Hipster Chaplin thought was wonderful, because he was faster than Dennis at that point, with a better nose). Another way this was managed: Putting on subtitles for everything we watched. Because if you can’t listen, you can always read.
So this week I’m reading the Night Watch collection, the international best-selling dark fantasy series by Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko. The collection gathers the first three books in the series — Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch — into a single volume. Being that this volume is around 2,000 pages long, I’ll probably be reading it for roughly as long as it takes to resolve a land war in Asia.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 5/14/19: The “Night Watch” Collection”
Viscosity 