How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix So I’ve grown to love Grady Hendrix and his books. He just seems to have a knack for combining grody horror and nuttiness. Like Stephen King if he was fabulously gay. This book is like his other ones — My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. It starts out tongue-in-cheek to help you bond with the characters, then migrates to horror, then terror. In How to Sell a Haunted House, there really isn’t much “selling”. But there is plenty of conflict between a brother and sister whose parents just died. The sister (main character) is smart,…
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The Books I Read: September – October 2017
This is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp In a word, melodramatic. In many other words… The tone of this story skews so heavily feminine it’s distracting. I’m not saying femininity is a bad thing, but an event like this is going to have a lot of different reactions from different people. It’s supposed to be about a real school shooting, but it’s so cheesy it doesn’t feel real. The narrative is split into the perspectives of four victims in four different situations. One is the ex-girlfriend of the shooter, another is the sister of the shooter, another is that sister’s lesbian girlfriend, and last is the trouble-making brother of…
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The Books I Read: November – December 2015
My Little Brony by K.M. Hayes I found this book at the library and only grabbed it on a whim. I used to be into My Little Pony:FiM (until Lauren Faust left, but that’s another entry). I didn’t expect much of it. The idea reeked of self-publication and the fan art cover didn’t help. I was expecting sappy, amateur Dawson’s Creek drama with a cheap gimmick to draw in readers. But it turned out to be a great little novel. The teens speak realistically. They have plausible problems, not bulimia/my gay mother/sexually confused/vegetarian/alcoholism/pregnancy scare stuff you see in other teen drama books. Adults play a part — they’re not absent…
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Responsibility As an Author
The last of my panels in NerdCon: Stories was “But It’s Just a Story: The Moral Responsibility of the Storyteller”. As aforementioned, I didn’t intend to attend, but I’m glad I did. It brought up a lot of issues that I hadn’t considered. Patrick Rothfuss started the panel with an anecdote about reading The Hobbit to his son. It starts quite dully with Gandalf and Bilbo having a conversation. Then the dwarves arrive, one by one, and more discussions and negotiations ensue. Nothing magical happens — except for one thing, Bilbo and Gandalf sit outside blowing smoke rings, competing with each other. And so, as impressionable young ones are want…
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NerdCon: Stories (Minneapolis Oct 9-10 2015)
So here’s my write-up on attending NerdCon: Stories. To summarize, I’m not sure how much I learned, but I was definitely entertained. There wasn’t anything about the publishing industry or how to get an agent, but that was all right. That wasn’t what I was expecting. This con was focused on the fundamentals behind the story: why they matter, what effect they can have. The medium didn’t matter. Novel, movie, or song. Horror, erotica, or adventure. Stories are what makes us human. Let’s go to the rundown. Unlike Convergence, there was a lot more “everybody goes to this” events scheduled. The only thing scheduled in the morning was mainstage entertainment.…
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I’m Going to NerdCon: Stories
This Friday, Hank Green announced NerdCon: Stories, a convention for storytellers of many mediums, would be coming to Minneapolis in October. This Saturday, I registered for it. I’ve been feeling that now is the time to go to a new convention. We all know Convergence didn’t work out, but I think that’s because it was an all-encompassing sci-fi crowd. Diverse interests with subject matter plus an established history means its something that needs to be enjoyed with friends. And young people have friends — friends who aren’t married or have kids, friends who can drop life for a weekend, friends with plenty of disposable income (and time). I’d been thinking…
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The Books I Read: January 2015 – February 2015
Joss Whedon: The Biography by Amy Pascale I’d been looking for a book about Joss Whedon since December. There had been a few biographies, but then I saw this one was about to come out. It looked the most official — even having a foreword by Nathan Fillion — so I waited. It becomes little more than an IMDB page after a while. I don’t read many biographies, so maybe this is what they’re like. I wanted to know more about his family life or his writing life, I didn’t need to know what happened with Firefly or The Avengers. I already follow the guy. I already knew that. Except…
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The Books I Read: May – June 2014
vN by Madeline Ashby In the first chapter, a five-year-old child robot eats her estranged grandmother, python-style, and goes from kindergartner to adult in an instant from the additional biomass. Good opening, and there are some interesting WTF circumstances (like robots were created to fill out the Earth after the rapture) but the rest stagnates. Once again, it’s a book where the robots don’t act like robots. They act like people. The only difference is they know they were artificially created. But other than that, they eat, they fall in love, they procreate. You can’t tell the difference. The interesting things are just background — they don’t come into play…
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The Books I Read: July – August 2013
The She-Hulk Diaries by Marta Acosta I had high expectations for this book — a novel about a superheroine who usually doesn’t make it past the comic books. I was hoping that, since Jennifer Walters is a lawyer, the book would be about some courtroom drama, a la John Grisham, but with the added complication of superheroes. Despite it being The She-Hulk Diaries, She-Hulk is barely in it. It’s more about Jennifer Walters, her human form, and her “girl problems”. The crux of the story is Jennifer tooling around, talking to her friend, and trying to get a job. She spends way too much time obsessing over boyfriends — past,…
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How Do You Get a Guy Like Me to Pay?
One of John Green’s recent vlogs talked about how to monetize without using advertising. Because advertising sucks, and its awful, and it doesn’t work. It works based on the most views, not the best views. So it’s better to cater to the lowest common denominator than make anything for a special audience. And of course, this concept runs counter to the “New Wave” of video entertainment. YouTube is all about splitting viewership into tinier segments, short durations, and view-when-you-want. And most of it’s made without the need of advertising. Of course, people would like to get money for their work, so the question is, how do you get people to…
