Johann Thorsson
I just finished Greg Buchanan's Sixteen Horses. It's a fantastic book, but I was a little misled at first. You see, I thought it was a thriller. In fact the phrase "...highly suspenseful thriller..." is in a blurb on the back cover. My friends, Sixteen Horses is not a highly suspenseful thriller. What it is… Continue reading SIXTEEN HORSES – Book Review
The time is upon us! The stars have aligned and the altar is ready. Place upon it your copy of Chuck Wendig's THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS and together we shall collapse this wretched existence into the darkness from whence it came! Ahem. The Book of Accidents is a tome. It is at once the future… Continue reading Book Review – THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS by Chuck Wendig
Some short stories you just remember. Maybe it's an image you remember, maybe an emotion or maybe the entire story. When it comes to Calcutta, Lord of Nerves, it's a passage for me. A single passage that made me go "Ugh, what the.... are you allowed to write that?" I read the story in John… Continue reading Short Story of the Week – Poppy Z. Brite’s Calcutta, Lord of Nerves
This is the story of how I turned a flash fiction story written in an hour for a Flash Fiction thing on Chuck Wendig's blog into a week-long writing residency in Exeter in the U.K. Chuck Wendig is the author of numerous books (buy Wonderers and thank me later) but I first encountered him as… Continue reading This is How a Flash Fiction Contest on Chuck Wendig’s Website Got Me a Playwriting Gig and Then a Writing Residency in England.
I got to spend a week in Exeter this summer, as the International Writer-in-Residence at the Quay Words literary festival. Part of the deal was to give a talk on Icelandic crime writing and at the end of that talk (which I may post here later) I told the audience about the books that most… Continue reading 5 Rather Excellent Noir Crime Books
FINCH is one of my favorite books. I can't understand why it hasn't been made into a series, or why there aren't more people running through the streets, thrusting a copy of FINCH upon random strangers exclaiming "You need to read this!" Ok. That last one was maybe a bit much. It's about a detective,… Continue reading The Sublime Weirdness of Jeff Vandermeer’s FINCH
I was thumbing through my copy of Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a book on Douglas Adams written by Neil Gaiman!) and came across a great passage. It certainly made me feel a little better about my glacial writing pace. This is Douglas describing how the Restaurant at the… Continue reading How Douglas Adams wrote The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
These days I'm re-reading Raymond Chandler's masterpiece, The Long Good-bye. I do this as I'm nearing the completion of my own book; I don't avoid fiction as some writer's do to avoid being overly influenced but knowingly read books I want to be influenced by. In this case it's mostly four books I read and… Continue reading Now That’s a Simile
Us writers can obsess endlessly over the optimal amount of daily writing time. Should it be measured in words written? Pages? Hours spent ass-in-chair? I try to get up at around 5:30 to get some writing done before going to work. It doesn't always happen, but I've learned that the best time is from 6:00… Continue reading Take a Look at Joe Lansdale’s Writing Schedule
Dan Simmons is a writer you might know, and he once said something about writing and reading that has stuck with me ever since. His best-know books are The Terror, Summer of Night, Drood (personal favorite) and Carrion Comfort. The Terror was recently made into a fantastic, if somewhat slow, TV-series, and the book is… Continue reading The 76 Authors You Need to Read to Become a Writer According to Dan Simmons
On Books and Writing 