Nancy E. Shaffer's Blog, page 6

Internalized self-pub-o-phobia

I have noticed an unsettling trend with myself lately. I’ve been doing a lot of eBook searches, looking for reading material. What I’ve noticed is, if I get the impression that a book is self-published, I have a tendency to think, “The writing is probably crap,” and pass it by.

And I myself have a self-published novel.

I think we’re past the point where one can assume that books that have not been accepted by a publisher are a sign of a weak writer. And yet, that lingering assumption remains in...

The interplanetary Bechdel Test

With apologies to the actual Bechdel Test, which is about gender in TV, film, and other fictional media.

I am reading Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells, which got 4.3 out of 5 stars on Amazon with 1,115 raters. Honestly, I am not sure how it got that rating. The story was pretty good up to the point where the intrepid ship of Earth astronauts docks with the mysterious alien craft parked out in the asteroid belt and our heroine, a linguistics expert, starts up a telepathic correspondence with t...

Oodles of Mars Comet links

Image credit: NASA JPL

This morning, I’m really flummoxed that I don’t have that telescope Santa keeps promising me for Christmas. I was out ogling the early morning sky, and it was possible to see comet Siding Spring near Mars then, hours before its closest fly-by (2:27 PM EDT, 11:27 PM PDT, 18:27 GMT). That’s day time in North America, and yet the real irony belongs to Australia, where the comet was originally discovered last year. The comet closest fly-by won’t even be in their sky at all....

Space!

I have been a space cadet geek since I was old enough to understand what those Apollo missions on television were,

and have been a die-hard Trekkie with an ‘ie’ since [date redacted], but my actual active following of Cool Space Stuff has been intermittent over the years. I remember staying up late with a gallon of vanilla ice cream watching the Voyager 2 fly-by of Neptune in ’89, and being flabbergasted that I was the sole person in the office during one of my summer jobs in the ’90’s to go o...

Moonwalk One

This is a fascinating documentary, covering every aspect of the Apollo 11 mission and the science and technology that supported it. It also paints a layered portrait of the the world that was watching (not to mention a vintage glimpse at mid-century America. The business and restaurant signs! OMG!) Very human, poetic, philosophical, and informative at the same time. It brought tears to my eyes more than once.

I was too young to remember this event and the world it took place in. My mom tells m...

Once Upon A Time geeking, pt II: Gastown, Vancouver, BC

With bonus Highlander.

Anyone who’s watched OUAT, Highlander, X-Files, Continuum, or a dozen other made-in-Canada TV shows will recognize Gastown. It is the semi-gentrified “hip” neighborhood along the waterfront in downtown Vancouver. Like such neighborhoods in many cities, you can turn a corner and go from a trendy shopping area to a dodgy skid row. Most of the OUAT “Manhattan” scenes were filmed in the Alexander/Powell/Carrall street triangle.

On-screen and off-screen photos follow. Warning:...

Once Upon A Time geeking, pt I: Steveston, BC

So on my most recent vacation, I went to Storybrooke. Er, Steveston and Ft Langley, BC.

Most of “Storybrooke” is located along Moncton and Bayview streets between Third Avenue and No 1 Road in Steveston. This quaint little Richmond area burg appears to have embraced its alternate identity (hey, tourist money!). Although filming had not yet started, some of the buildings retained their “Storybrooke” signage. Others were disconcertingly Steveston/Canadian.

Actually walking the street and seeing w...

140 characters of character

I’ve figured out my writer’s platform “Twitter strategy”: follow who’s interesting, regardless of who they are and what they tweet about, and have fun. One thing I won’t be doing: tweeting every hour on the hour with Yet Another Promo of My Book. That is a one-way ticket to being boring and unfollowed. It seems a lot of writers on Twitter only follow you so you’ll follow them, and then it’s promo, promo, promo. Like a hall of mirrors, writers tweet “Read my book” at each other, instead of tal...

Now, that’s just cheating

Spoiler warning: Skin Game (Jim Butcher), Inferno and The Lost Symbol (Dan Brown)

A while back, I posted an angst about point of view and the pacing of information reveals in my novel. My novel is, at its core, a mystery. The answers to the mystery gradually unfold for the reader as the protagonists investigate and make discoveries. In the first draft, I set a major “reveal” towards the end of the novel. The challenge was setting up that reveal without giving it away.

The novel uses rotating th...

I’ve got an itch to scratch

Just got done reading the first book of James SA Corey’s Expanse series, Leviathan Awakes. In a nutshell, it’s a space opera set in a future where humans have settled the solar system, but are not yet able to reach other solar systems.

I’ve been wanting to find a book series or television series about this for a while, because it’s cool and realistic to hope for, even if it might not happen in my lifetime. It’s maddening reading about all the robot probes the nations of Earth have sent to the...