Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Download Paris Pastry App
Sign up to get 52 stories by 7 of France's top authors!
From Le French Book site: sign up to receive (free) a daily or weekly email featuring 52 short stories written (in collaboration) by seven French authors.The stories are in English, so even if one of your New Year's Resolutions was that 2013 would be the year you learned French, you can ease yourself into it gradually.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Book Review Maps of the Edge by Ian Creasey
One of the writers I discovered during the 365 Day Challenge was Ian Creasey. Maps of the Edge is a collection of spec
fic stories by Creasey published in 2011. (His novella, The Strawberry Thief, was published last
October. I can't wait to read it.) Creasey identifies as a science fiction writer, but pigeonholing him
into one genre really doesn't seem fair, especially after reading through this
collection, which is a small sample of the more than 50-odd stories he's sold
to magazines and anthologies.
The stories
range over a wide spectrum of emotions. "Reality 2.0" is a hilarious
riff on a new product from Microsoft, a re-imagination of math called
"WonderNumbers" that takes all the hard work out of math, much to the
dismay of mathematicians. "Now you can divide by zero" is the
product's sales pitch for the software, which does away with a lot of
inconvenient math concepts and formulae. "This is How it Feels" is a
haunting story about loss and grief that describes the feeling as "a
compost heap where rats endlessly gnaw over the scraps of your heart."
"Cut
Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone" is a story about a mother and a
daughter that also touches on one of the core concepts and conceits of the
collection, the persistence of personality in an electronic afterlife. Many of
the stories are surrounded and shaped by conspiracy theories and there are
references throughout to a Conspiracy Channel--the people who work there and
some of the shows that appear. And who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory?
Creasey is
not just a storyteller, he's an actual wordsmith--a term that's thrown around
much too easily. (In the opening story, "Erosion," he describes
clouds as looking like "celestial loft insulation" and the phrase is
just perfect.)
You don't
have to like science fiction to like Creasey's stories but if you do, you will
love them.
After Christmas Sale!
12 Nights of Christmas, my collection of dark takes on the traditional holiday song, is now available FREE on Smashwords. And coming soon--free on Amazon as well. Now that the holidays are over and it's a new year, why not pick up some free reading?
Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Piers Morgan has a point
I'm not a big fan of Piers Morgan but this ridiculous call for his deportation in the wake of his statements about gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings makes me want to deport myself to somewhere where people can talk about the subject without going non-linear. Read his piece on the subject on the Daily Mail site.
Not everything is online.
Every day of last year, I went looking for a new short story to post on the 365 Short Story a Day challenge. I had decided that I would only post one story per writer and that I would not post a story that another participant had posted. Two of us posted Evan Hunter's "The Last Spin" and I think there was an overlap on one of Thomas Pluck's stories, but the only time I broke my self-imposed rule on purpose was the day Ray Bradbury died. I had already posted his "Small Assassin" story but on that day I posted "A Sound of Thunder," which is one of my all-time favorite time travel stories. Jimmy Callaway's "Night Train to Mondo Fine," is probably second on the list, with Brian Trent's "Down Memory Line" third.But I digress.
One of the stories that was posted early on was Lord Dunsany's "Two Bottles of Relish" and visitors to the 365 site were consistently lured there by the story post. I've been looking at those posts for a year and saying to myself, "I must read that story."
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