Disappointing news from my agent yesterday: DAW has decided it doesn’t want a third book in the Marseguro series, thereby making a liar out of the Science Fiction Book Club, which announced Marseguro as the first book “in a gripping new trilogy“! Fortunately, Terra Insegura does not end with the kind of obvious sequel tag …
windScript, the magazine of writing by Saskatchewan high school writers that I edited for the Saskatchewan Writers Guild this year, is now online in PDF format. Check out the whole thing, but here’s what I wrote as the introduction: Writing is an act of courage. It takes courage to try to turn your thoughts and …
In movies and TV shows, people fall in love and into bed (or the other way around) with amazing speed. In musicals, it’s even worse: all it takes is a single song. In real life, though, although one hears of whirlwind romances and sudden marriages (often followed by whirlwind separations and sudden divorces) courtship is …
…is in today’s LeaderPost. It begins: In the dictionary, “eclectic” has two definitions: “Selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles,” and “composed of elements drawn from various sources.” They could have added a third: “the music of the True Jive Pluckers.” Ranging from jazz to blues to Klezmer to classical, …
I’ve been enjoying Andrew Breitbart’s new BigHollywood group blog very much, and liked this quote, from John Nolte’s commentary on the Alfred Hitchcock film Notorious, in which he takes issue with those who think its ending is “hokey”: “Hokey” isn’t the result of a story point, “hokey” is the result of the execution of the …
Robert J. Sawyer, Canada’s best-known science fiction writer, has written a series of blog posts discussing people and things he believes are deserving of nominations for the Aurora and Hugo Awards, which will be presented at the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal this August. In the last of the series, he recommends work by …
I note that the product description has appeared on Amazon for Terra Insegura. Here’s how the publisher has described it (slight spoiler alert if you haven’t read Marseguro!): From the author of Marseguro—The BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL returns to earthMarseguro, a water world far from Earth, is home to a colony of humans and the Selkies, …
You’d think, after all these years, that there’d be nothing new to say about dragons (just like there is very little new to say about vampires), but Robin McKinley proves that wrong with Dragonhaven, originally published in hardcover by G.P. Putnam but now out in paperback from Ace. This was one of the books included …
My preview of the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming Pops concert with the True Jive Pluckers is in today’s LeaderPost. An excerpt: Everything the True Jive Pluckers play is based on swing music of the late 1930s — but everything they play isn’t 1930s swing music. For the Regina Symphony Orchestra pops concert Saturday, violinist Eduard …
Some people think I have good time management skills because I work at home and yet manage to crank out a lot of words of one sort or another. Some people don’t know what they’re talking about. The fact is, my usual working pattern is procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate, panic panic panic!, rinse and repeat. I, …
I’m tickled pink with the announcement that Robert J. Sawyer, a friend of mine and Canada’s most acclaimed science fiction writer, will be writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon this June and July. If you’re an aspiring writer, book a time to talk to Rob. I twice took part in his classes on …
Hard on the heels of the announcement that Aurora Award nominations are open comes the announcement that the nominating period for the Hugo Awards has begun. (Why, yes, Marseguro is eligible to be nominated. Thank you for thinking of it!) The Hugos work differently than the Auroras, though. In order to nominate you must be …
