Julia Vee's Blog, page 9
September 24, 2017
The Girl From the Pie Shop
Early afternoon light streamed in from the plate glass windows of the small, bustling diner, illuminating the cramped interior with its century old décor. The mingled smells of cinnamon, coffee, and French fries permeated the room, as the scents from the lunch crowd selections warred with oven-baked aromas. The tourist at Table 7 scrolled the […]
July 26, 2017
YA/NA Science Fiction – Futuristic Books With Heart
Surprising absolutely no one, many YA readers are over age 35! This obviously explains the runaway success of series like The Hunger Games and Divergent. (Yes, the parents read those books too. Shhh.) And now we have the proven category of “New Adult” as well. Continuing on my summer book explorations, today I offer some […]
July 24, 2017
Monday Launch Madness – Alien Incursion Is Up!
It’s been a week of granular details as Ken and I worked through revisions from our editor and the Amazon KPD process. There were a number of different things we didn’t think about until we were knee deep in it, including crucial details like whether the title was in ALL CAPS or if we should […]
July 17, 2017
The Cold War: Alien Incursion
With the assistance of our editor, it looks like our first book is fit for public consumption! We’ll be pressing the publish button before the end of this month (fingers crossed!) and we’re excited to finally have it out into the world. It takes a lot of work for even a shorter work (this one […]
July 9, 2017
Assassins, Exotic Locales, and Cyber Warfare…oh my!
I took a break from my usual science fiction and sci-fi military reading and film consumption to binge read one of my favorite authors. I read the John Rain thrillers over a decade ago. Our moody anti-hero, John Rain, is a disenchanted Vietnam vet turned contract killer in Tokyo and Osaka. It’s hard to stay […]
June 17, 2017
“We are jolly green giants, walking the Earth with guns.”
FULL METAL JACKET AND THE HERO’S JOURNEY It was the 30th anniversary of Full Metal Jacket this week. At the urging of of my co-author, I finally watched it. It took 3 evenings with Netflix (Netflix and chill at my house only happens after the kids are down and the dog has been walked) but it […]
June 9, 2017
Level Up Your Military Sci Fi Summer Reading Game Now
Ah, summer. It’s time to hit the beach and grab a good book, right? Well, it used to be like that before I had kids. Now it’s more like, “what sports camp are they at this week and do I have to make their lunches?” However, the summer nights are still great for reading […]
May 31, 2017
If You See It, You Can Believe It
An author I really admire and enjoy once shared her character inspiration board on Twitter. She had assembled a number of vintage photos (Victorian era) onto a Pinterest board for her steampunk romance. I thought that was pretty brilliant. So a social media tool that I had previously thought I had no use for suddenly started […]
May 26, 2017
Renegade Profiles: Sci-Fi Author Jon Cronshaw
Author Jon Cronshaw JV: Why do dystopian/post-apocalypse novels all have zombies? Haha. Although these sub-genres have a lot of crossover, they also seem to be tackling different primal questions. With dystopian fiction, the core questions are about the ways people are controlled by a ruling class and how it’s possible to change the world. Zombie […]
May 24, 2017
Nail Your Opening Line With Tips From The Great Masters
It’s hard to write that first hook. You want to grab your reader, drag them right into your story…but how? I struggled to do this so I just started pulling books off the shelf. Some of these opening paragraphs (or even just the first sentence) really nail that hook. Consider this one: “I’d been waiting […]
