I’ve posted the openings to my Enslow biographies of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix–guess it’s time to give Johnny Cash his due. I enjoyed writing about Johnny Cash because a) he was a really interesting guy and b) I grew up listening to him. My folks liked country music, and Cash was one of their …
I’m conducting a workshop this afternoon on writing science fiction and fantasy, in my role as writer-in-residence (for just one more month!) at the Regina Public Library. Now, it’s easy to just talk for an hour and a half about writing, but I want people to actually do some writing: and to that end, I’m …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/04/The-SpeechJammer.mp3[/podcast] As a writer, freedom of speech is near and dear to my heart. It’s one of the basic principles of the democratic form of government. And yet it seems to be constantly under attack, for one simple reason: it’s easy to say you believe in free speech when people are saying what you agree …
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 …
This is another really early story; in fact, I’d completely forgotten about it until I found the file on my hard drive. I must have written it when I was 21 or 22. I was pleasantly surprised it holds up as well as it does. It was never published, though I think I submitted it …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/04/The-QWERTY-effect.mp3[/podcast]I took to typing like…well, like a writer to a keyboard. In high school I was always the fastest typist in typing class. Possibly it was genetic: my mother, who worked as a secretary, was a very fast typist. Possibly it was because I was highly motivated: my handwriting was (and is) atrocious. Anyone who …
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 …
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 …
Week before last Ford graciously provided me with the opportunity to drive a brand-new Ford Focus for a few days…which I found amusing for reasons that had nothing to do with the car. See, in my YA fantasy Song of the Sword, set here in Regina, one of the villains, who tries to abduct my …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/03/Popcorn-Nutrition.mp3[/podcast] There’s nothing quite like the smell of popcorn. It makes you think of movie theatres, the circus, the midway. It makes you long for a handful. Or two. Or better yet, a whole bucket. And best of all, just this week some research results were released that indicate popcorn is also a very healthy …
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 …
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 …
