Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 19
May 17, 2015
Das ist gut!
After Obsession, the young adult novel I wrote with Carrie Jones (released in the U.S. in Sept. 2011) is now available in German.
I really like this cover!
To mark the German-language release, Darkstars Fantasy News has published a brand new interview with me and Carrie. You can read it here.
Or you can read it here in German.
They’ve also published a review of the novel, which is only available in German.
I don’t know enough German to read the review. I can pick out words here and there bas...
May 15, 2015
Review: The End of the Affair
After having watched a good film adaptation of this novel several weeks ago, I had high hopes for the actual book. In places it lived up to those, but overall, just not so much.
Knowing where Greene was going with the story made me impatient with the long buildup and non-linear format of the first part of the story. After that it smoothed out and was extremely enjoyable (if you like the rather relaxed and proper pace of British literature). But in the end it devolved into the main character’s...
May 2, 2015
Review: The Girl with All the Gifts
One of the more interesting zombie novels I’ve read. This one is set about 20 years after the zombie apocalypse and focuses on a 10-year-old girl who is very smart, but must come to terms with the fact she is a Hungry, which is the name given to zombies in this story (the word zombie is conspicuously absent). She has no memory of living anywhere other than the military base where she is when the story begins, but all that changes the day the base’s lead scientist decides it’s Melaney’s turn t...
Review: Riddle-Master of Hed
A long-time favorite, it had been at least 20 years since I’d traveled with Morgan from the farming island of Hed to see the High One in Erlenstar Mountain. This was one of those transformative books for me, a fantasy that made me think, made me want to look beyond the boundaries of what we can see and know.
It’s also a book that has a lot of what I would rather read C.S. Lewis refer to as that great “Northness” as Morgan spends a lot of time in the colder realms near the High One’s home, lea...
April 14, 2015
Writer’s Cocktail
Tell a little truth with many lies
It’s the only way I’ve found— Dio, “Straight Through the Heart”
No matter how far out in space your story is set, or how alien your fantasy world, your reader needs a touchstone of reality to identify with. The question, though, especially for those not creating completely new worlds, is just how much truth to tell with the lies?
In my werewolf novel Shara, for instance, I mixed in a fair amount of truth. The description of Enid High School’s 1984 junior/se...
February 25, 2015
Divide, Divide, Divide
WARNING! This blog post is mostly a political rant and will likely offend those who lean to the left and take themselves very seriously. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like lately my Facebook feed has been overwhelmed with petty political rants and memes pushing some agenda. Two of the recent ones that have annoyed me a great deal (probably because they remind me of all the inane bickering that goes on in the Horror Writers Association) are about Women in Horror Month and...
January 24, 2015
Scrivener Again
The last time I wrote about this word processing program made especially for authors I’d imported an MS Word file for a book I was working on. I had an overall favorable opinion, but the newness of the program and the fact I’d begun in Word caused me to go back to the original program to continue working on that project.
Then a depression hit, brought on by a stream of rejections, publishers not living up to contracts or going out of business, and the teaching job sucking up all of my time. It...
January 11, 2015
The Books of 2014
My goal for 2014 was to read 30 books. I did that, plus three. Of those, I only gave a 1-star review to one title, with everything else getting at least three stars. That’s a pretty good year of reading. I thought I’d recap the highlights here, as I tend to do at the start or end of every year.
I’d be hard pressed to pick one and say it was the best book of the year, as there were several that were excellent reads. The one that had the biggest impact on me, that came into my hands at the perfe...
December 30, 2014
Review: Tell the Wolves I’m Home
Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I seldom give up on a book, but about half of this one was all I could take. Within the first couple of chapters I was wondering why I’d thought it would interest me at all. Did I click the wrong link when I bought the audiobook? By Chapter 26 or wherever I finally quit I knew that if I had to endure one more flashback I’d eat the barrel of a pistol. I haven’t returned to the story in about two weeks and still have no desi...
December 29, 2014
2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,000 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.
Click here to see the complete report.
