Tag: shards

Teaser Tuesday 11/12/2013: “Subpoena Colada”

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

Lately I’ve been treating the free books I’ve accumulated from the BookBub mailing list sort of like streaming Netflix movies — that is, as disposable. After a chapter or two, if they haven’t grabbed me, I’m deleting them and moving on. Actually, that’s not really what I do with Netflix movies; I’ll pretty much watch any movie through to the end, even August Rush, which I infamously panned a few years back, earning me the ire of all six people who thought it was a good film. Although we did recently press “Eject” on Across the Universe after one too many mangled Beatles songs. Fiona Apple covering “Across the Universe” for the Pleasantville soundtrack, this was not.


Watch this instead of the movie “Across the Universe”.
It’s two hours shorter and has better music.

But I digress.

Anyway, I just started reading a new free book, a crime/mystery/comic thriller called Subpoena Colada, by Mark Dawson, which sort of sounds like a title that Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard might have come up with. Hmm, am I setting my expectations too high again? Uh oh.

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Teaser Tuesday 10/29/2013: “Desolate: The Complete Trilogy”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So this week I’m reading a book called Desolate: The Complete Trilogy, by Robert Brumm, in which Earth is terrorized by the double whammy of a highly contagious hemorrhagic flu-like illness and giant carnivorous bad-tempered crawdads. Or something like that. Every time the space-lobsters show up I think of the Prawns from “District 9”.

Christopher Johnson would like to know if you have any spare cat food.
Christopher Johnson would like to know if you have any spare cat food.

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Teaser Tuesday 10/22/2013: “Sunglasses After Dark”

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

This week I’m reading the vampire genre classic Sunglasses After Dark by Nancy Collins, which has been edited, reformatted and quasi-updated in a Kindle edition. Why “quasi-updated”? Well there are sporadic references to modern trifles like cell phones (and even an iPhone reference was dropped in), but nobody has a computer and I don’t remember anyone doing a Google search so far in their efforts to locate missing heiress Denise Thorne (who is now the vampiric vampire hunter Sonja Blue), which betrays the book’s late 1980s/early 1990s roots. I’m not complaining (though a number of Amazon reviewers are), since I did something similar with my vampire novel Long Before Dawn, updating it just enough to hand-wave away the fact that if everyone just had their cell phones turned on, the whole vampire hunting thing would have gone a lot more smoothly. But then, if vampire-hunting goes smoothly, what fun is that?

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Teaser Tuesday 10/1/2013: “The Shadow of Black Wings”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

This week I’m still reading The Shadow of Black Wings by James Calbraith, from the BookBub mailing list.  I’m going to bend the rules a little bit this time in that this teaser quote from the book is not from the page I’m actually on, but it was simply too good not to use.  Here goes:

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Teaser Tuesday: “The Shadow of Black Wings”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

This week I’m reading The Shadow of Black Wings by James Calbraith, another book I got free from the BookBub mailing list. This one is sort of an alternate Victorian history/steampunk/fantasy mashup. Oh, and there are dragons. (T’Sian would, I think, eat them for lunch, but still, anything’s better with dragons right?) And now, on to the two-sentence quote!

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Teaser Tuesday 9/10/2013: “Deadland”

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

This week’s free book is Deadland: Untold Stories of Alice in Deadland, by Mainak Dhar, in which, apparently, Alice follows an undead rabbit (or something like that) down a hole and becomes a zombie-slaying machine. If this reminds you of American McGee’s “Alice”, you’re not alone.

American_McGee_Alice_cover
Alice and the Cheshire Cat would like a word with you.

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Teaser Tuesday 8/13/13: “Starliner”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

This week’s book, from the Baen free library, is Starliner, by David Drake. This is about an interstellar passenger ship (the “starliner” of the title, natch) that gets dragged into a war between two planets along its route. At least, I assume it’s going to get dragged into the war. Otherwise there’s not going to be much going on, is there?

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Tuesday Edit: Before And After

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

The first one or two times I make editing passes on a book, scenes tend to get longer. This is because I’ve found that if I keep going back and fleshing out earlier scenes as I think of more stuff, the book never gets finished. Here is an example, from a scene that introduces a character new to the story in part two of Shards:  Brennendah, a scientifically-minded Rittandic whose job is to study the Æther, also known as the void, which is gradually consuming the region where the Rittandics live.  (This loss of territory, known as the Unraveling, is what gives the territory—the Ravels—its name.)  Here is the original paragraph, followed by the revised version:

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Teaser Tuesday 7/30/2013: “Reversion: The Inevitable Horror”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

This week I’m reading Reversion: The Inevitable Horror, by one J. Thorn, which purports to be for fans of Clive Barker, Stephen King’s story “The Langoliers”, or a previous Teaser Tuesday entry, Hugh Howey’s Wool.  I can sort of see the comparison to “The Langoliers” in that Reversion also takes place in a world (possibly a pocket dimension) that is in the process of disintegrating, but (so far, anyway) it is nothing like Wool or anything I’ve read by Clive Barker.  In fact I wouldn’t even categorize it as horror, despite the presence of hordes of zombies, who mostly stand around in large groups attempting to prevent Our Heroes from moving.  In that, they are not unlike all the drivers who clog the freeways around Southern California.  Hmm, perhaps it’s a horror novel after all …

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Teaser Tuesday 7/16/2013: “The Sirens of Titan”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

Still reading The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut’s classic from 1959, this week. We’ve just gotten to the point of meeting the members of a new religion whose members handicap themselves by carrying heavy weights, dressing in ugly clothes, wearing bad makeup, etc.  Shades of “Harrison Bergeron“!  And by “shades” I do not mean “dark glasses worn to impair your eyesight and eliminate any advantage you may enjoy due to your superior vision.”

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