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 …
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 …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/03/Salt-Tolerant-Wheat.mp3[/podcast] Having grown up on the prairies, first in Texas, then in Saskatchewan, I’ve seen, my whole life, the patches of white where nothing grows, out in the middle of the fields. And like most other prairie folk, I’ve tended to call them “alkali.” Fact is, though, that most of them, at least in Saskatchewan, …
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: …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/03/Plate-Tectonics.mp3[/podcast] Our planet may look like a solid ball of rock, but if you could crack it like an egg (not actually something I’d recommend, although it would make for a fun scene in a science fiction novel or movie) you’d find it’s quite fluid inside. And, in fact, the Earth’s solid shell, called the …
