Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree Well, it delivers what it promises–it’s a cozy story with little danger or tension. It’s just about a female orc who builds a coffee shop from scratch. People are skeptical at first, as anyone would be when a giantess wants to start a small business instead of eat babies. But everyone loves it. She encounters troubles but they’re all minor–a complaining customer here, a gang boss who wants a cut there. But everyone falls in love with her and wins them over. Like a DCOM but without attempts at funny. It doesn’t go into much detail around the world-building–it seems very based on World…
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Authors I Would Like to Have Dinner With, Vol. 2
Peter David – I want to talk to this guy to figure out how to get his career going. He’s one of the funnest writers I’ve ever read, but he’s stuck doing Star Trek tie-ins and occasional comic book. He’s a kitty in a burlap sack named obscurity, and he needs to paw his way out. Besides that, he’s one of the few people whose writing style really strikes me. I find that comic book graphic novel writers make great novelists — Neal Stephenson, Richard Kadrey, this guy. If I can find out what he does and incorporate that into my writing style, I can develop my voice more. I…
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Return of the Ficlets: Ficly
Guess what I found out? Ficlets lives! Yeah, I was listening to Radio Free Burrito today, and The Wil Wheaton mentioned one of his stories from Ficlets (a story that I wrote an addendum to and he particularly liked, I might add). He then went on to berate AOL for growing and then killing one of it’s great ideas (and rightly so), like someone writing at the end of Charlotte’s Web “But after the spider died, the messages stopped appearing, so the farmer chopped Wilbur’s head off and sold him at $1.99 a pound”. But then he said the developer of Ficlets when onto to make his own independent site…
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Mr. Wheaton and Mr. Critters
One thing I forgot to mention last time is the Ficlets experience I had last week. I logged in one night and found that the mighty Wil Wheaton had the featured story, his first one. Naturally, I couldn’t miss this opportunity to pay homage to one of my favorite bloggers and all-around good guy. So I wrote a prequel, wondering if he would see it, and scared that he would.The next day, I idly checked back, and found about nine comments, one of this was this: How awesome is this?! Wow, praise from Caesar. Actual communication with a celebrity writer, albeit with many layers of separation. I know he commented…