Category: Books

Saturday Special from the Vaults: Orson Scott Card

I wrote two author biographies for Enslow Publishers’ Authors Teen Love series. One was on J.R.R. Tolkien, and the other on noted SF/fantasy writer Orson Scott Card. The former was easy because he was long dead and had been written about a great deal, the latter harder because he’s very much alive and hasn’t been …

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Some reviews of The Helix War

The Helix War is a first for me, being an omnibus of two previously published books, Marseguro and Terra Insegura. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect in the way of reviews, except I figured there wouldn’t be quite as many of them. And, so far, that’s certainly been the case. But there have been …

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Saturday…oh, all right, Tuesday…Special from the Vaults: Introduction to Historic Walks of Regina and Moose Jaw

My 2007 book Historic Walks of Regina and Moose Jaw, published by Red Deer Press, is just what it says: a collection of 10 walking tours (eight in Regina, two in Moose Jaw) that take you past a number of homes and commercial buildings of historical or architectural interest, with a brief description of each. …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults: The City Must Die

Chapter One of a YA novel I hope to finish someday…The City Must Die (that’;s an entirely fictitious cover). Why is it unfinished? Well, because I sold Masks instead, I guess. But reading this over again for the first time in months, I realized I really want to write this one. There’s actually a different …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults: Andy Warhol: Everyone Will Be Famous for 15 Minutes

For this week’s Saturday Special, another opening to another biography written for Enslow Publishers, this one about artist Andy Warhol. Like my biographies of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, it was for the series American Rebels. I actually studied a bit of art history and minored in art at university, and we make a point …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults: Janis Joplin: Take Another Little Piece of My Heart

Another Enslow book, Janis Joplin: Take Another Little Piece of My Heart tells the story of another ’60s rock star who died at age 27–within just a few weeks of Jimi Hendrix’s death. Since I also wrote biographies of Johnny Cash and Andy Warhol for Enslow, I spent several months kind of stuck in the …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults: The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie

One of the more interesting projects I undertook for Enslow Publishers was a history of the famous Mutiny on the Bounty, comparing the real-life events to the way they were portrayed in the movie starring Anthony Hopkins as William Bligh and Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian that came out in the 1980s. I’ve always enjoyed …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults (a bit late): Chapter 1 of The Chosen

This week’s Saturday-special-I’m-actually-posting-on-Monday is the first chapter of the YA science fiction novel (dystopian before dystopian YA SF was cool!) I just epublished last week: The Chosen. The original version of this book was only the second novel I wrote out of university, but I rewrote it sometime in the last few years. It never …

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Ebooks! Get your red-hot ebooks! Spirit Singer! Andy Nebula! and The Chosen!

                                      I was an early adopter when it came to ebooks in more ways than one. I owned a very early dedicated ebook reader, the HieBook, and read a ton of stuff on it. But I was …

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A new venture: audiobook of Matthew Hughes’s The Other, narrated by me, now on sale

A while back I auditioned for Iambik Audiobooks to be one of their book narrators, and landed my first gig: Matthew Hughes’s science fiction novel The Other, published by Underland Press. I had a great time reading and narrating the book, and now that it’s actually out and on sale, I’m rather trepidatiously awaiting the …

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Saturday Special From the Vaults: Introduction to Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky

For several years I wrote numerous non-fiction books for Enslow Publishers, ranging from science books to biographies. Among the biographies were four for a series called American Rebels, for which I wrote books on Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol…and Jimi Hendrix. For this week’s Saturday special, the introduction (complete with footnotes!) to Jimi Hendrix: …

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Magebane shortlisted for Saskatchewan Book Award

Magebane has been shortlisted for the Regina Book Award in this year’s Saskatchewan Book Awards. The Regina Book Award is described this way: “In recognition of the vitality of the literary community in Regina, this award is presented to a Regina author (or pair of authors) for the best book, judged on the quality of …

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