James Bow's Blog, page 121

Bad to the Bone (Skulduggery Pleasant's 'Scepter of the Ancients' Reviewed)

Note that this review contains significant spoilers.

Twelve-year-old Stephanie Edgley is bored. She is a normal girl living a normal life in the Dublin suburb of Harrow, and it's making her a little crazy. So she is quite upset when her favourite uncle, Gordon, passes away unexpectedly. Gordon was her favourite not just because he doted on her shamelessly, but because he lived in a sprawling manor house in the country, wrote bestselling novels about magic and sorcery, and would regale her...

Escape Artist (Icarus Down Passes 45,000 Words)

A little Zoe Keating to brighten your day. This is a fascinating video, so check it out. Her latest album, Into the Trees is due out March 1st.

Icarus Down Scorecard

Word Count: 47,850

Increase Since Last Report: 5990 (Feb 8)

Icarus Down is on a bit of a roll. I'm closing in on the first act (which will likely top out at 35,000. I've already written 12,000 words in Act Two, and Act Three should be about as long as well.

Today is going to be spent cleaning and, I hope, writing, so I leave...

Happy Eighth Birthday, Blog

It is a little frightening looking back at the early posts of this blog and contemplating how much has changed. Back then, thirty was a big and important number. Now I'm two years away from my fortieth birthday. Back then, Erin and I were alone in this big house. Now the house is not nearly so big.

For the first thirty years of my life, I never kept a diary or a journal. I regret that, now. I took up blogging because it was a neat new thing, but also because I wanted to take my writing to the ...

Erin's Plain Kate Debuts this September.

Have a look at the cover…

All together now: Ooo!! Aaaaa!

The hardback book will debut September 1st, and one of the first venues Erin will be reading at is at the Eden Mills Writers Festival on September 20.

The True Meaning of Smekday Reviewed

Cover of The True Meaning of Smekday

It isn't often that a book surprises me. Generally, I don't let them. I tend to do a fair amount of browsing before I buy books in bookstores; I listen for recommendations and occasionally I look into a popular series' fan fiction before I tackle the book itself.

Erin, however, obtained a copy of Adam Rex's debut...

A Little Bit of Subterfuge (Icarus Down Passes 40,000 Words)

The photograph above is entitled Fog During Lunch and is by David Kinney. It is used in accordance with his Creative Commons license.

Icarus Down Scorecard

Word Count: 41860

Increase Since Last Report: 7030 (Jan 22)

I'm pleased to say that I'm on a bit of a roll with Icarus Down — pleased to say, and also a little reluctant, as I don't want to jinx it. But I am enjoying this part of the writing process, where I'm discovering the tale, much as if I was reading it for the first time.

Here's a...

The Best Places to Write in Toronto

In my parents' library there's a book collecting the best New Yorker cartoons of the last few decades or so. It was a Christmas gift from years back, and as I was in a phase when I devoured all cartoons everywhere, I breezed through that book in about a week. It says a lot about me that I got as many of the jokes that I did, but one cartoon in particular stood out. It had a man, who was obviously a writer (you could tell by the pen in his hand and the beret on his head), sitting at his desk i...

Again With the Scourage of Comment Spam

Image via Wikipedia

Over the past four weeks or so, I've noticed a significant increase in attempts to shove comment spam into my various posts. Fortunately, the fact that I moderate all 'anonymous' comments (that is to say, comments from commentators who don't sign in) has kept these comments from polluting my blog, but dealing with them is proving to be a chore. More embarrassingly, over on the Waterloo Wellington Bloggers Association blog, people who post there have found a number of...

Quick Hits, Groundhog Day

You know, if a groundhog saw its shadow and could guarantee that we'd only experience six more weeks of winter, I'd be a happy man.

The meme of using a clip of Hitler's epic rant from Download and using subtitles to link it to any sort of rant-worthy episode was getting old a year ago back when Hitler stood in for Stephen Harper on some issue. More recently, it's been applied to the iPad, while violating the dramatic principle of the thing: anything Hitler rants against is clearly a good

Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals Reviewed

Unseen Academicals, the important thing about the novel, is that it's not about football.

Sort of.

Terry Pratchett has had a pretty good year. When he announced that he had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers, his many fans were heartbroken, but he sternly told us to buck up and said that he s...