Tracy Falbe's Blog, page 81

Thriving web fiction scene promotes interaction among readers and authors

By Tracy Falbe

Anyone worried that text messages and tweets are destroying literacy will be heartened to learn that people are reading whole novels online. Web fiction in the form of web novels and online serials has been quietly connecting with an audience for years. Readers can easily leave a comment, ask a question, and sometimes even influence the story.

Fiona Gregory, now an editor at the Web Fiction Guide, started reading online fiction in 2001 when a search for free science fiction stori...

New free ebook added to the Fantasy Tavern

Catherine M. Wilson, author of the When Women Were Warriors trilogy published by the Shield Maiden Press, is offering the first book in the trilogy The Warrior's Path for free from her website. She has a Kindle compatible format, pdf, and epub to download.

These books are not an exact fit for the fantasy genre. Set during the Bronze Age in the British Isles, I will label them as prehistoric fiction. I tend to like prehistoric settings. They inspire me to think about humanity in a more primiti...

Book review: The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Carnegie Mellon University professor, Richard Florida provides an astute and extensively researched explanation of the massive cultural shifts in U.S. society over the last 30 years that have caused an entirely new social class to develop: the Creative Class. Numbering close to 40 million people, the creative class consists of workers whose intellectua...

New fantasy book review added to Goodreads

The Weaving by Gerald Costlow


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The fantasy novel The Weaving marks the debut of short story writer Gerald Costlow as a novelist. Published by the Pill Hill Press, The Weaving is a clever, charming, and playful fantasy that injects fresh creativity into clichés like the witch and the black cat and the trickster coyote.

The adventure opens with Rose, the famous and powerful Witch of the Woods, deciding that her loneliness has become unendurable. A witch always lives the si...

Movie review: The Other Boleyn Girl

The 2008 film adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl, a novel by Phillipa Gregory, presents a lavish historical spectacle without skimping on character development. Set in the England of King Henry VIII, the story includes both Boleyn sisters, Anne and Mary, and portrays how their family dangled them in front of the King to win influence. Henry is considered ripe for seducing with a young woman because his aging Queen, Catherine of Aragon, has failed to produce a male heir.

Anne Boleyn's father ...

My fantasy novel was mentioned on the Wattpad blog

Watt's up: The official Wattpad blog was kind enough to post about my fantasy novel Union of Renegades: The Rys Chronicles Book I today after I recently added it to the Wattpad ebook community.

With a focus on serving ebooks to mobile devices, Wattpad is a popular site for reading and publishing.

Thanks for the link love Wattpad!

See the post: Wattpad recommends Tracy Falbe

Fantasy novel listed at Web Fiction Guide

Now that I am almost done creating the fantasy web novel version of Union of Renegades: The Rys Chronicles Book I, I got it listed at the Web Fiction Guide. This site is a community-run listing of online fiction. With the exclusion of fanfic and erotica, the Web Fiction Guide catalogs, reviews, and votes on original fiction that is available to read for free online. The Web Fiction Guide seeks to sort out the good stories being produced as web serials and blog novels.

To view the listing for...

11 things I love about the fantasy genre

I read many types of books, both fiction and nonfiction, but the fantasy genre always stays at the top of my reading pile. Many of the elements of fantasy that perpetually attract me are:

1. Sword fights - Some critics might label them juvenile, but the thought of defending myself from death and dismemberment is undeniably exciting. Swinging the blade along with a hero or heroine sweetly satisfies because it lets the civilized mind explore the properly forbidden realm of violence. As a reader,...

Book review of Buyology about neuromarketing

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy and the New Science of Desire by Martin Lindstrom


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was very interested in the neuromarketing that this book was about. Neuromarketing is a new method of market research in which people are asked questions or shown images or other stimuli while they are scanned by an MRI machine. This allows scientists to see which areas of the brain are being activated. Through this technique, clues about what people are really experiencing, es...

Discovered interesting Ezine for Pagan people

I should say that Nature's Child eZine discovered me. I occasionally publish mini-sites about topics I find interesting, and one is Natural Beliefs about pagan and wiccan views.

Nature's Child selected one of my articles for its quarterly publication that just went out to its 11,000+ subscribers. It was a basic informational article about common reasons people cite for choosing paganism as a religion.

I just got done reading the Summer 2010 issue of Nature's Child, which is divided into three ...