My introduction to Appalachian culture, which figures so strongly in The Hum and the Shiver, really took place in the late 1990s. Prior to that, I’d looked on the Smoky Mountain region of Tennessee with some of the same distant awe as anyone else. Tennessee is a long, narrow state, and I grew up on the whole other end from … Read More
Review: Mean Guns (director’s cut)
There’s a theory that silent-era filmmakers were just on the verge of perfecting movies as a legitimate art form when sound came in and took away the primacy of the image. Suddenly what people said became just as important, if not more so, than what they did. A purely visual medium entered into an uneasy symbiosis with the spoken word. Occasionally, … Read More
The rare ingredient: joy
Something not mentioned often in reviews of books is the writer’s sense of joy. Writing, whatever you may think, really is hard. Done well, it’s as taxing as any other job. You can’t just show up and watch the clock. Sure, some books are better than others, and good writers can write bad books, but unless you’re James Patterson or someone … Read More
A dialogue on the “Common kickass heroine”
Recently my friend, author Teresa Frohock, brought to my attention a review of a current urban fantasy/paranormal romance title in which the reviewer referred to the main character as “the common kickass heroine.” We were both struck by the implications: that what was once a fresh symbol of female empowerment in the male-heavy world of fantasy had become, through repetition … Read More
Crackerbox Palace: the adult world that never was
If you’ve read this blog very often, you probably know I grew up in a tiny Tennessee town with little in the way of cultural opportunities. That meant I learned about music from two sources: WHBQ, an AM station in Memphis where you could hear just about anything (alas, now an all-talk sports station), and the more narrowly-formatted Rock 104 … Read More
Bang Head Here: passive vs active voice
A Facebook friend, Henry Snider, recently asked me, “Why is it that fewer writers seem to understand the difference between showing versus telling? Passive voice (running my head into a wall)!” In my case, passive voice–vastly simplified, the use of “-ing” verbs (telling) instead of “-ed” words (showing), such as “I was running” instead of “I ran”–is simply how my … Read More
The best* Christmas Eve gift
*Sarcasm. Once about ten or twelve years ago, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I went through a process that will be instantly familiar to every struggling writer: I sent a query letter to a publisher, and they responded with a request to read the first three chapters of my manuscript. This happened fairly often, so I did not … Read More
Wake of the Bloody Angel cover art
For all the fans of Eddie LaCrosse, here’s a peek at the cover for his next adventure, Wake of the Bloody Angel. Watch for it summer 2012!
Review: Death Watch
I met Ari Berk at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association annual banquet a few months ago; we shared a table as we each signed 200 copies of our most recent books. He was a great person to have beside me for such a repetitive and time-consuming task, and when he told me about his new YA novel Death Watch, I … Read More
Announcing the second Tufa novel
It’s official: there will be a second Tufa novel. Titled Wisp of a Thing, it will not be a straight sequel, but another story in the same setting, with many of the same characters. Release date, cover art, and back cover text are all to come. But I wanted to announce this during the holidays, to thank everyone who … Read More