Teaser Tuesday 9/9/2014: “The Sable City”

So this week’s teaser comes from The Sable City by M. Edward McNally, which I’m not very far into but looks like it’s going to involve dwarves, samurai, magic, and blunderbusses. Oh, and a tribal mask, apparently. If that sounds steampunkish to you, you’re not alone.

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Teaser Tuesday 8/26/14: We’re Still On “Hallowed Ground”

So this week I’m about halfway through Hallowed Ground, and at this point authors Steven Savile and David Niall Wilson have sufficiently muddied the waters that I’m not entirely sure who the bad guys are.  Is it The Deacon and his band of revival/freak show misfits?  Is it the mysterious traveling snake oil purveyor Balthazar?  Is it both?  Hmm, I bet it’s both.  Oh, and there seem to be people around who can turn into crows.

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Random Contract: Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium, “The Short Route”

So this week I reached into my big folder full of rejections (and the occasional acceptance) and pulled out something new: A contract! Arriving as it did in November of 1997, this was, if I remember correctly, my first-ever contract, for a story called “The Short Route” (AKA “My Cousin Susan’s Favorite Story Of Mine Ever”), in which a tenderfoot from Back East discovers that there’s more than just cattle on his first cattle drive. The story appeared in “Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium” a tiny regional magazine published in Syracuse that ran from 1997 to 2001.

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Teaser Tuesday 7/1/2014: “Once Upon A Curse”

So at the moment I’m reading (unusually for me) a couple of books: And Another Thing by Douglas Adams Eoin Colfer, which is book six in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” trilogy, and Once Upon A Curse, a short story collection that contains retellings of various famous fairy tale scenarios, including back to back revisions of “Sleeping Beauty”, from different points of view than the originals (no Maleficent so far though). I picked it up over a year ago because it was on sale for $0.99, plus it has a Peter S. Beagle story in it. You may have heard of him.

last_unicorn
Not to be confused with “My Little Pony”

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Four Questions And A Few Coincidences

So this week we interrupt our usual parade of “Teaser Tuesday”, “Random Rejection”, and “Let’s Try To Figure Out If My Wife Is Actually Paying Attention To Battlestar Galactica Or Not”* posts to answer a few quick questions posed to me by Donna over at Donna and the Dogs. Like me, Donna is a writer, but the parallels do not stop there!

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Teaser Tuesday 5/13/2014: “The God King”

This week’s teaser comes from The God King by James A. West. The God King and The Golden Queen are no relation, despite having similar names.

"Shire? ... Baggins?"
“Shire? … Baggins?”

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Teaser Tuesday 5/6/2014: “The Golden Queen”

So this week I’m reading The Golden Queen by Dave Wolverton, which starts out looking like a whimsical Irish fantasy novel before turning into a galaxy-spanning science fiction epic in which several adventurers and a talking bear (because why not?) with a name like a vacuum cleaner attempt to drive the conquering alien insectoid race known as the Dronon out of human space.

"This isn't the Hundred Acre Wood."
“This isn’t the Hundred Acre Wood …”

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Teaser Tuesday 4/22/2014: “Bad Radio”

So this week I’m reading Bad Radio by Michael Langlois, in which an eternally-youthful former Army Ranger and the granddaughter of one of his old World War II army buddies have to stop a necromancer who is apparently plotting to set up a transmitter, call in an Eldritch Abomination, and destroy the world. Or something like that. At this point all I know is that the “bad radio” in question seems to be a metal ring with eight spikes on it, and it is apparently powered by sticking the spikes into the eye sockets of four people. Ouch.

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Broken Bad: The Search for Another Show

So I previously mentioned that, having finished “Breaking Bad“, I have now been charged with finding a new show that can catch and hold my wife’s attention. Although there’s been no shortage of suggestions on shows that might fit the bill, those who are familiar with my movie rating system (“This movie put my wife to sleep in X minutes”) will not be surprised to hear that the search is not going well. WARNING: Minor spoilers below!

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Teaser Tuesday 4/8/2014: “Legon Awakening: Book One in the Legon Series”

This week’s Teaser comes from a book called Legon Awakening by Nicholas Taylor. The first in a series, I started this book and then put it down, for various reasons, most of which were enumerated in a rather amusing fashion by a reviewer named Meg over at Goodreads. (Unlike me, Meg appears to have actually finished the book.) I did enjoy the book’s prologue, sort of, in that I thought the obviously-odious “Iumenta” kind of sounded like the Melniboneans of “Elric” fame.

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