Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 260

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good


I'm very happy to see Diana Gabaldon's latest novel in the Outlander series sitting at number two on the New York Times bestseller list. She's been such a gracious mentor to us on the CompuServe books and writers forum over the years! Maybe "Echo in the Bone" will even knock that Dan Brown guy out of the top spot for a few days.

Those of us who've been avidly reading this series since it began in 1998 with "Outlander" are happy to hear that "Echo in the Bone" isn't going to be the end....

Friday Wrap-Up

With the cool air flowing into north Georgia, I enjoyed driving the eleven miles to the Maysville Public Library to drop off copies of "The Sun Singer" and "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire." I'll be there for Jackson County Authors Day on November 7.

Kudos to Georgia's Living Jackson Magazine
on going green by using recycled paper beginning with the October 2009 issue (on Jackson County, Georgia newsstands now). Only 2% of the nation's consumer magazines use recycled paper. The issue...

Roberto Bolano's 2,247-word sentence

Last year, I read news stories and reviews buzzing about the late author Roberto Bolano's five-page sentence in his novel 2666. At the time, the sentence was an amusing novelty. I saw references to Faulkner's penchant for long sentences. I heard jokes about a sentence that was longer some short stories.

And then I forgot about it.

Several days ago, I started reading 2666: I had waited until the book came out in paperback. I found Bolano's style easy to read, filled with amusing metaphors and o...

Monday Morning Madness

Monday morning madness appears weekly like a noxious TV series the network doesn't have the sense to cancel, and since it's my Monday, I'm the "star."

The "alarm" rings, actually WSB radio in Atlanta in the middle of a traffic report: "All y'all heading south on the connector are screwed because a molasses truck turned over right next to the sign for the Varsity."

The cats are hungry: "Hey Ace, how long does it take to dump some Purina One into four bowls, for heaven's sakes, you'd think you ha...

Are you ready for the 'Exquisite Corpse Adventure"?

Jon Scieszka has written the first episode of the Exquisite Corpse Adventure and placed it on the new Library of Congress site Read.gov. Nobody knows where this year-long serialized story will end up, but Scieszka is kicking off the serial today at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. It all begins with these words: This story starts with a train rushing through the night.

According to Read.gov, "Ever heard of an Exquisite Corpse? It's not what you might think. An Exquisite Corpse is...

Here comes the sun

After a week of heavy rain, today's sunshine is a very welcome sight. Roads and rail lines around the Atlanta metro area are under water or washed out. There are many flooded neighborhoods. The amount of rain this past week reminds me of the disruption caused in 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Ivan swept through the area. I remember that night well since I was doing a book signing for "The Sun Singer" at the public library. 18 people actually showed up in spite of the wind and the rain.

By...

"The Apartment" to the Rescue

I'm a long-time fan of the 1960 movie "The Apartment" starring Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray and Jack Lemmon. Directed by Billy Wilder and written by Wilder and
I.A.L. Diamond, it's a wonderful comedy with a bite.

Yesterday, when I posted "Movie and Book References Help Define Your Characters" on my Writer's Notebook Blog, I focused on my use of "Farewell, My Lovely," to help me illustrate the old-fashioned noir protagonist in my recent novel "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire."

There'...

Review: Dan Brown's 'The Lost Symbol'

Now boarding on track 33, the Symbolism Express departing for the Freemasons, the Invisible College, the Office of Security, the SMSC, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and multiple points around the cryptic compass.

Your temporal destination, not Paris and London, but Washington, D.C.

Your conductor, Harvard symbiologist Robert Langdon, the Indiana Jones of the new age.

Tied to the tracks in the gathering darkness ahead and facing certain death, if not embarrassment, another keeper of the ancie...

The Long and the Short of It

Two manuscripts went out today, one an 800-word short story for a flash fiction contest and the other, my 240,000-word novel "Garden of Heaven" in hopes of landing at a prospective publisher.

The flash fiction contest is sponsored by The Collagist magazine from Dzanc Books. The deadline is November 15 and there's a $5 entry fee. If you like writing short, this might be the place for you.

I haven't submitted "Garden of Heaven" any where since early spring. The last publisher found it interesting...

Writers, do you want to be Dan Brown

Dan Brown's new novel "The Lost Symbol" sits on top of the Amazon bestseller list even though it won't be released for another three days. 5,000,000 copies have already been printed. The buzz about this book has been strong, partly because the exact nature of the plot has been guarded with the level of security we've come to expect of Ft. Knox and the Coca-Cola formula.

Let's set aside the good, the bad, and the ugly of all "The Da Vinci Code" reviews, controversies, and criticisms. The book h...