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Hall treats many different aspects of fiction-writing with brief analysis and plenty of examples. I'm finding it useful.

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

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A book for the slow at heart, the patient reader, or the literary geek.

I'm not sure how much I care about these characters. They seem pretty self-absorbed. And, really, who IS Mary Sabon? Vandermeer name-dropped her in "The Early History of Ambergris". I only know that she has some relationship with Duncan Shreik, but have very little sense of who she is.

STORM OF WINGS: abuse of punctuation: excessive use of colons and exclamation points! Too much "gamboge", too many "equivocal" things, too many "stridulations", way too much cabbage and way too many dead geraniums. Way too many fancy words for too little story. What happened? Alien insects invaded and disrupted reality. Characters completely flat, all victims. It was bad.

Very useful, very insightful.

The purple prose is killing me.

Not impressed with A Storm of Wings so far. The point-of-view keeps jumping around, there is no clear protagonist, and Harrison's prose is self-conscious and literary, which seems to me a distraction from the story -- such that it is at this point. Maybe it will improve.

The Pastel City is a uniquely lyrical yet economically worded story. Well-rendered characters in a far-future science fantasy. Quite good. Just starting A Storm of Wings.

Started reading this book after finishing Robert McKee's STORY, a very different kind of writing book. Coming from that place, my first response to this book was "a load of hippie buddha bullshit, HOW DARE SHE!" Problem is, I come to writing from the same space she writes from. Living in 21st century America and trying to "make it" as a writer, thought I had moved on. Now trying to synthesize the opposites.

This is a book about writing as spiritual practice. That's worthwhile, but it's very different than writing for publication. I'd recommend this book to people interested in delving deep into their psyche through writing or who want to get creative juices flowing, but not for those who are looking for best practices about writing for publication.

Great craft book with insights into what fiction is, why we need it, and how it works.

"It is lovely to watch the colored shadows on the planets of eternal light."