Mosaics 2 now available!

I announced my acceptance into Mosaics 2: a Collection of Independent Women back in February, and the time has finally come. It's here, it's here!

The Kindle date still appears to be May 1, but if you want to order the paperback, you could have it by Wednesday! Isn't it lovely, sometimes, to be living in The World of Tomorrow?

My included story is "The Lion and the Dragonslayer": when the village of Orford asked for help with a dragon, they didn't expect the king to send a woman, no matter how big her sword is.

(I was particularly pleased with my little story blurb there; I typically struggle quite a lot with producing an interesting summary of literally anything, much less what I've written.)

In conjunction with this publication, I've created a Goodreads author profile . I hope to see titles of other anthologies, and my own books, attached to it pretty soon!

Obviously, I encourage you to get the Kindle or paperback of Mosaics 2 (or get it from your local library! And request that your library orders it; mine is, as volume 1, anyway, was available through the book distributor Ingram) and I also encourage (entreat?) you to review it on Goodreads and/or Amazon. Every time you review a book, an author gets its wings. Or something.

Book Review: The Big Rewind, by Libby Cudmore

I'm one of those people who hopes to always have a tape deck. I have mixtapes I made through the years, things on cassette I have access to in no other medium, that kind of thing. And when I heard the premise of Libby Cudmore's The Big Rewind, and saw the cover, I knew I had to read it.

(Disclaimer: I also know Libby; she's one of my few in person Writer Friends)

(Cover image linked from the Harper Collins site)

Book Review: Winter Soon, by David Michael Martin

I guess I should preface this by mentioning the author of Winter Soon is my maternal grandfather. That little fact had an interesting effect on my reading, to say in the least.

It's always interesting to read something written by somebody you know. For everything you know about a person, or have talked about with a person, there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Maybe some of that is pulled back, with all of our microinstantblogging social network extravaggrandizement (I might trademark that phrase, be warned), maybe not. We have our public face and our private face, and our family face.

 (cover art by Marina Ermakova-Martin, linked from Amazon)

Book Review: Up, by Patricia Ellis Herr

Up: a Mother and Daughter's Peakbagging Adventure might seem like an odd book for me to have chosen. Really, it kind of is. I don't have little kids. There aren't dogs in it. I'm not from New Hampshire. I'm not into hiking up mountains. I mean, I'm not against hiking up mountains, it just isn't a burning passion for me.

The book happened into my hands at the library, as books so frequently will. You see, when we get new books, they come to use from what is essentially our book warehouse, and then they go upstairs to the offices to be processed and barcoded. Then they come down on a delightful little cart and a piece of paper gets slapped on there that says "new books!" and the staff get to look at them before sending them to their waiting patrons, or putting them on the shelf. Up did not have any waiting patrons, and it had a compelling, easy to read style, and a good hook at the beginning. I took it home and devoured it.

Up is about Herr and her daughter, Alex, and their hiking. Or "peakbagging", as they apparently call taking a trail to the peak of a mountain. The general plan was doing "four thousand footers", which is apparently doable, round trip, in a day. Even with a five year old. Yup, that's right. Herr's daughter, Alex, was five and a half when they started their peakbagging shenanigans.

Alex is a smart and dynamic little girl. She and her little sister, Sage, are home schooled by Herr (she doesn't go into the reasoning, but before having children, she was  PhD candidate, and apparently her husband works at MIT, so it's not like they don't have the chops), and encouraged to be inquisitive and active and make their own decisions. Which extended to this level of hiking.

The book was a brief and digestible pleasure to read. The environments they spend their time in are beautiful and sometimes less than forgiving, but no real tragedies befall them. Herr is in fact a smart woman, and a smart mom, and there are no times at which I was smacking my forehead and yelling "Don't go in there!" at the book. Her husband sort of takes a backseat in the book, but he's obviously a good man, and has significant influence on their daughters. The girls are...well...little kids. But also smart and lovely. I'm sure they're going to grow into fantastic adults.

Book Review: The Glass Demon, by Helen Grant

I see a lot of books at the library. Some good, some bad, some really bad. Fortunately (or not?) I'm getting pretty good at spotting the really bad ones, regardless of their position on the NY Times Best Seller list. Some, I truly never heard of until a patron requested them from another library and they passed through my hands. 

Sometimes, those "accidental" books are really good. The Glass Demon, by Helen Grant, is one of those for me.

Book Review: The Millennium Trilogy, by Stieg Larsson

In the past week or so, I've read the three books in Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy" (called so because of Millennium Magazine, which features prominently in the narrative, not because it has anything to do with Lance Henriksen, but maybe he's Swedish as well?) I'd actually tried, years ago, to read the first book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, with no success. I was bored out of my skull on page 20, and that's far beyond where I normally cut off my precious attention. But, so many people of all stripes are reading the books, there are the Swedish movies, and now the first American remake has come out...so I tried again.

Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury: a book review

Reading Ray Bradbury always seems like a treat.

The ideas that he puts together, and the resolutions that his stories frequently have, all come together in such a pleasurable way that I'm happy to read them again and recommend them often. So when I found that he'd written a book on writing, I snapped that right up and brought it home.

Book Review: No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty

National Novel Writing Month is only a week away!

30 days, 50,000 words. If you're not in the habit of writing, it sounds rather imposing. If you are, it sounds like cake, doesn't it? But is it, really? A novel from start to finish, the length of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Of Mice and Men?

Maybe it's easy. Maybe it isn't. But Christ Baty, National Novel Writing Month's founder, wrote a book to help you out.

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott: a book review

I read a lot of books. Really, it was kind of a herculean effort to wait this long before putting a review up.

I go through phases where I read a lot of books on writing, or a lot of books on a particular research topic (Chernobyl, South Africa, and mercenaries, to name a few), or a lot of books on dogs. I actually didn't used to read much nonfiction, it was novels and short stories all the way, with a smattering of poetry. But, well, things change.

So, Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, is a book on writing. Actual writing, not publication, not marketing, writing. And trying to get it right.