Michael E. Henderson's Blog: Henderson's The Literary Man

Book Review (sorta): Ulysses by James Joyce

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I tried. I first met this bloated fiasco of a book in hardcover close to twenty years ago. I started to read it, but soon realized that it was unreadable. I put it down and ended up getting rid of it (with most of my library) when I moved to Italy.

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Years later, after hearing it repeatedly called a masterpiece, I bought it on Kindle. I was not able to make much progress there, either, and put it down again.

Deciding to give it another go, I recently bought a hardco...

Interview with Author Jason Brant

Jason Brant writes horror and thrillers, which are crammed full of action and scariness, mixed with humor. I chose to interview Jason because he does indie publishing right. He can make up an exciting and interesting story and type it out. After that, though, he knows he’s an idiot (He says so himself, see the answer to question 16). To know you’re an idiot, and take steps to obscure it behind the work of others, such as editors and cover designers, reduces the appearance of idiocy to the poi...

How Not to Start Your Novel, Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts about how not to start your novel. One of the most common questions I see from new writers is how to start. I can't necessarily tell you how to start your novel, but I can tell you how not to, particularly if you want to find an agent or a publisher.

I follow a couple of thousand people on Twitter, largely other authors, many of whom are self-published. The self-published people love to hawk their books, and I like to go to Amazon to “Look Inside,” whi...

Printed Woman Deleted Scene

Every author has heard that the story usually starts with the second chapter, and they are advised to delete the first chapter. I did that with Printed Woman. Here is the original Chapter One.

 

“Assume everything is a lie.”

The professor pointed to the hologram displaying an outline of the history of philosophy for the past five thousand years. The black robe of an instructor billowed as he moved.

“That was the view of the thinkers of the third millennium. But what’s wrong with that notion?”...

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley: an Examination

 

Note: I have not read any reviews or analyses of this book, so all the observations contained herein are mine. To the extent they contradict others, I don’t care. To the extent they jibe with others, it is coincidence.

 

This, believe it or not, is the first time I’ve read this book. I had a rough idea what it was about, but it turned out to be vastly different than I expected. One thing that struck me was how silly a lot of it is. It’s a parody, really. The silliest thing was the use of “...

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley: an Examination

 

 

Note: I have not read any reviews or analyses of this book, so all the observations contained herein are mine. To the extent they contradict others, I don’t care. To the extent they jibe with others, it is coincidence.

 

This, believe it or not, is the first time I’ve read this book. I had a rough idea what it was about, but it turned out to be vastly different than I expected. One thing that struck me was how silly a lot of it is. It’s a parody, really. The silliest thing was the use of...

Music Software

I'm fooling with a music notation program called Musescore. Pretty good, so far. There's a bit of a learning curve, but they have a decent online manual. Here's a snippet of what it sounds like:

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Edit to Avoid Bad Reviews

I read a book review today from a site that reviews books for self-published authors for a fee, the lowest of which is $97. For this fee, the author got one star (out of four) review for his book. Why? Because the book, although it may have a decent story, was riddled with typos, word usage, grammatical, and punctuation errors. This author is what’s wrong with self-publishing, and why it has a well-deserved bad reputation.* Why would anyone publish such a book? Maybe out of ignorance, or out...

Writing a Novel is Like Playing Chess

I’ve been working on my chess game lately, and realized that playing chess bears a lot of similarities to writing a novel.

Structure. Chess is very structured. Like a story, it is divided into three acts. There is a beginning (opening), middle game, and endgame. Strict rules govern movement of the pieces. Although are no rules as to how long a game can go (outside of the fifty move rule), it is rare to see a game of more than fifty moves, and most games last around thirty moves.

Planning. In...

On Writing Science Fiction: What Would Aliens Look Like?

Traveling around the universe, if it is to be any fun, requires there to be aliens. The big question for science fiction writers is: What will they look like? In my view, they would look a lot like we do, for the same reason we look like we do.

By aliens I mean creatures capable of developing societies, technology, and language, much the way we have. I don’t doubt that there microbial forms of life, or even more advanced creatures on other planets. That’s one thing. The real fun in science fi...