Bryan Thomas Schmidt's Blog, page 63

Review: Purgatory by Mike Resnick

Recently read Mike Resnick's 1993 book Purgatory, the first in a three-book series. What a great read! I couldn't put it down. As you may know, Resnick is one of the most prolific and successful of Science Fiction writers. His books and stories have appeared everywhere. What you may not know is that Resnick, like myself, has a passion for Africa, and he uses it a lot in his work. We have corresponded and chatted about this, and he sent me several stories, but this book is tops.

Purgatory...

Terror Warning for US-Mexico Border

Okay, those who are shaking their heads at my post about the Arizona immigration law, please read this terror warning issued in the last two days. The borders are an issue and terrorists are trying to take advantage, as I suggested.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/26/...

The Real AZ Immigration Law for those who Ignorantly Criticize

I live 15 minutes from Mexico. Not a day goes by that we don't hear news reports of brutal murders. The drug cartels are at war, and the Mexican government's paltry efforts have continually failed to stop it. Sometimes, the cartels even cross into El Paso and murder people. It's a scary situation a lot of people live with daily. We see Mexican license plates all over town. Who knows who those people could be? Although the majority of those killed do seem to have ties to cartels in one ...

A Surprising Influence

As a writer, you often get asked whom your influences are. For me, that's a long list, but one of them may surprise you. Although I am focused mostly on writing fiction, he is a historian. He's not world famous or even best selling but in Western Writers of America and in the Southwest he is well known as a great storyteller, especially here in El Paso.

Leon Metz grew up in West Virginia but came to El Paso to serve at Fort Bliss and never left. He's written some important books about loca...

Self-Publishing

Well, it's time to get back to blogging after another week of insane busyness. I'm not sure if anyone regularly follows this or not, but from the comments at least a couple of people have stopped in. Since I just had my first experience with self-publishing, and I try and make this blog about all things related to writing, publishing, editing, creating and reading fiction, it seems appropriate to blog on that experience.

First, a disclaimer. I don't put much credence in self-publishing. Ok...

Specfic Magazines

When I started writing my science fiction novel last August, I immediately recognized that I had been reading spec fic only randomly for the past decade, which meant I had a lot of ground to make up and a lot of research to do on the current state of the market. One of the challenges in writing speculative fiction is to not copy what's already been done. Because most of the ideas anymore have been done is some way before, the trick is to find a new story to wrap around an old idea, a new wa...

Favorite Non-SciFi and Fantasy Books In No Particular Order

Here are some books which I remember reading and being impacted by which don't fall in the Science Fiction and Fantasy list I provided earlier. These are books I read and still remember as great reads.

This Present Darkness - Frank Peretti
The book that launched Christian speculative fiction, a great read

The Presidential Agent Series - WEB Griffin
This guy replaced Tom Clancy in my espionage reading because he writes fantastic characters and tension without the long descriptions of hardware. A...

Review: Deadman Switch by Timothy Zahn

Timothy Zahn is one of my favorite writers and has been very influential in my own writing. Like me, Zahn writes a lot of space opera, and he's most famous for his Thrawn series of Star Wars novels. But he's been writing a long time and has some great other stuff as well. His Quadrail series (Night Train to Rigel, Odd Girl Out, etc), in particular, is a great read.

Recently, I heard about another of his books, Deadman Switch, which features spiritual themes. Since I use a lot of spiritua...

Word Limits

I have been really neglecting my blogging duties lately. Apologies to anyone out there who actually wanted to hear from me. The reason for this, besides deadlines to write yet more release notes and update the user guides again at work, is that I have been writing a set of serial stories which will begin running in July in Digital Dragon Magazine online, and I decided to release them as a book and include chapters from my two novels. The idea is to get my name out there by handing them out...

Critiquing Protocols

Criticism is a part of life. It's even more so a part of the writer's life. From readers to editors to agents, opinions are everywhere, and sometimes it can be hard to process them and keep from having a part of yourself crushed under all that weight. Even worse, so many times you never get to hear those opinions. They just reject your work, that's all you know. That's one reason why critique groups are invaluable. First, they help you polish your work. Second, they help you test reade...