Brett Michael Orr's Blog, page 5
February 20, 2016
Movie Review – Brooklyn
I’m going to be honest – period romance dramas are not my usual type of movie. Going into the theater, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Brooklyn, the film adaptation of the 2009 book by Colm Tóibín. A 1950s-set movie about a young Irish woman who leaves her family behind in Ireland to journey [...]
February 16, 2016
Top Ten Songs That I Wish Were Books
It’s been a little while since my last Top Ten Tuesday, but the idea of combining books and music seemed too much to pass up! This week, Broke and Bookish have set out ‘Ten Songs That I Wish Were Books’ – all of the choices here come from music I have on my phone, and [...]
February 3, 2016
The Three Stages of Editing
Let’s be honest – your book is going to spend far longer in the ‘editing’ stage than the ‘drafting’ stage. The blank page might be daunting, and spending hours deliberating over outlines or character sheets might feel like the most agonizing part of crafting a manuscript, but the sheer reality is that editing, in all [...]
January 29, 2016
5 Lies Writers Tell Themselves
Let’s be honest – writing is hard. Sometimes just summoning the energy to sit down and write even a few hundred words feels like the hardest thing in the world – half the battle is fought between the fridge and the desk (but seriously, chocolate is definitely what I needed to conquer this blog post). [...]
January 21, 2016
Advance Review: Glass Sword
This is not the review I had hoped to write. Red Queen was, and still is, one of my favorite books of 2015 – an exciting cross-over genre of dystopian fantasy, drawing on the roots of typical fantasy but adding gentle touches of Science Fiction. The original earned a coveted place in my Best of [...]
January 19, 2016
THE BUREAU OF TIME Giveaway!
Have you been waiting to read my debut novel, The Bureau of Time? It could be your lucky day – you can now enter my Rafflecopter competition to win one of three copies of THE BUREAU OF TIME for your digital device. It’s a fun and free-to-enter raffle, and you can earn extra votes by [...]
January 16, 2016
Three Simple Questions to Tackle that ‘Stuck’ Scene
Recently, I gave some advice to a fellow writer and blogger who was stuck on a particular scene in her novel. We’re often prone to random bursts of writer’s block, miniature in size but crippling in nature, where we run into a brick wall at a scene and cannot see a way out. I’m here [...]
January 14, 2016
Movie Review – The 5th Wave
When it comes to summer blockbusters, there’s only one thing I’m looking for: to be entertained. The movie adaptation of Rick Yancey’s YA series, The 5th Wave, is arguably better than the novel (at least in my personal opinion), and delivers on big explosions and bombastic CGI effects – but sadly falls a little short [...]
January 11, 2016
Opinion: The Danger of Hype
I have a problem. It’s a problem that many bookworms, movie buffs, and gaming enthusiasts around the world share with me – a type of problem that’s easy to fall into, but desperately difficult to break free of. I am, of course, talking about over-hyping, or as it’s more commonly referred to as on the [...]
January 8, 2016
Review: Illuminae
Illuminae, by Australian authors Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, is not a novel. A novel, in its usual form, is a collection of pages with words on them, where evocative language is used to visualize a world. Illuminae is not a graphic novel, despite its visual and stylistic elements, because the story is not drawn [...]
