Blog – Page 21

Mar

2015

Derivative Hollywood

Author T. Ellery Hodges has written a great blog post about the difficulties facing cross-genre fiction in Hollywood. He’s active on kboards, a message board for readers and authors I frequent, and started a great conversation on the topic there – this blog post is the result. He mentions Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom in his list of examples towards the end – in the blog post, we came up with “Urban Science Fiction” and “Comedic Thriller” as descriptive genres for the book, genres that don’t actually exist as supported categories on Amazon or any other vendor site. That makes it a little more difficult for books like mine (or those of the other authors he mentions) to gain visibility. Anyway, he says it better than I can – take a look!

Why Is Hollywood So Derivative? What Can We Do About It?

Mar

2015

Getting drafty

The first draft of Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time, the fourth and final book in the series The Future Next Door, is done! It was a very satisfying feeling, typing the last line of the last chapter, but also a strange one – I’ve been living with these characters for almost three years now, it’s going to be strange to say good-bye to them.

But I’m not quite done with them yet! Finishing the first draft is just the first (big) step towards publication. There’s a second and third draft to go, then a round of edits from my wonderful beta readers, then one last edit for notes and final changes, then a couple of reads for typos and general proofing. Still, the hardest and most time-consuming (and most fun) part is done, and the book should be on its way to you…fingers crossed…sometime in May. I’ll keep you posted!

Feb

2015

Apartment 3-G…sort of…

About eight years ago I was unemployed and consequently had a lot of time on my hands. I became obsessed with the comic strip Apartment 3-G, thanks mostly to the brilliant Comics Curmudgeon. For my old LiveJournal blog (Remember LiveJournal? We were so innocent once!) I stayed up many a night taking ten weeks worth of 3-G strips, whiting out the lettering, and creating my own ongoing saga. I thought it might be fun to show a slightly different path my writing once took me down, so here are all of those strips, plus, for all you original readers, a bonus strip at the very end that I never posted. Enjoy them now, before I get the cease and desist letter!

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Feb

2015

Alan Lennox on Pinterest

I’ve made a Pinterest board for Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom, with some pictures of the real world locations for some of the places in the book, plus the inspirations for Mark and Dakota. Check it out!

Feb

2015

Love Doctor

Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of the holiday, I’m taking a look at that cosmic Casanova, the Lothario of space-time, the Don Juan of the vortex. For someone so often portrayed as either apart from, confused by, or simply uninterested in human romance, the Doctor sure does get a lot of play. Let’s celebrate love with the Time Lord by going backwards through the many, many, many loves of Doctor Who…

Missy kissy.

The Master

Let’s start with what is possibly the most significant relationship in the Doctor’s life – his love/hate affair with his eternal nemesis. The Master may have waited for a gender-swap regeneration to finally plant one hell of a smacker on her arch-enemy, but come on. This was building between them for a long, long time. Just take a look at that death scene in Last of the Time Lords – the Master cradled in the Doctor’s arms, the Doctor weeping, begging him to stay, promising they’ll spend eternity together, just the two of them…now that’s a love scene. (Should it worry me that I find a scene that ends with suicide-by-spite romantic?) Producer Steven Moffat clearly considers the Master to be the Doctor’s One True Pairing – way back in 1999’s charity comedy spoof Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death he had Jonathan Pryce’s Master walk off into the sunset with Joanna Lumley’s Doctor. (But more on that story later…) It’s a fine line between love and hate, they say, and the Doctor and the Master have been straddling that line for a long, long time.

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