My top ten mythical beasts

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must sit back and ponder the universe’s imponderable questions, such as: Do you get wetter or drier if you run home in the rain? Why is moldy cheese good but moldy milk bad? And what are the most super-duper awesomest mythical beasts ever?

Coincidentally, just as I was drawing up a list of the latter, I was asked to write a top ten for a blog called the Creatively Green Write At Home Mom as part of my book tour to promote the Embodied Trilogy Special Edition Ebook Collection. Here’s the link to the post, and be warned… the number one might surprise you!

Here’s one final issue to ponder while walking through the rain or eating moldy cheese: Are ebooks real? And if they aren’t, does that mean they’re mythical beasts too?

John

PS – Let me know what your favorite mythical beasts are and why in the comments below.

Photo from Wikipedia: CC-BY-SA-2.5

Awesome review!

Authors never read reviews of their books. No way, Jose. Not in a million years. But if ever they totally by accident stumble upon one, they sure hope  the review looks like this one, that appeared today on the Silver Dagger Scriptorium website.

Punctuation rules!

This is pretty awesome. Also awesomely pretty. Now you can see what books look like with all the words removed and only the punctuation marks remaining. The author of this article compares different works by famous authors, with some astonishing results.

A single-minded bookstore

According to this article in The Guardian just before Christmas, there’s a bookshop in Japan that only stocks one book at a time – some classics, some contemporary works.

Owner Yoshiyuki Morioka explains how he came up with the concept: “Before opening this bookstore in Ginza, I had been running another one in Kayabacho for 10 years. There, I had around 200 books as stock, and used to organise several book launches per year. During such events, a lot of people visited the store for the sake of a single book. As I experienced this for some time, I started to believe that perhaps with only one book, a bookstore could be managed.”

This is pretty much as close to being the anti-Amazon as it gets!

A new honorific in the Mx.

No, that title doesn’t contain a typo. The New York Times has just used the newly coined honorific Mx. that identifies neither marital status nor gender.

Maybe Mx. could also be useful for sci-fi and fantasy authors when writing politely about aliens or supernatural beings of indeterminate sex? Should Time Lords/Ladies like Doctor Who henceforth be called Mx. Who? Or Missy be called Mx. Master? No, that sounds like a kitchen blender. I’ve been thinking about this for far too long, as you can see…

Mx. Master and the Blender Men

Photo credit: BBC

Underwriting can be deadly to any story

Great advice from Rachel Starr Thompson about the pitfalls of underwriting. No, that’s not the insurance industry kind of underwriting, it’s when an author tries too hard to show without telling and then skips the interesting stuff going on in the characters’ heads that actually makes any story compelling.

Nope, not this kind of underwriting.

Photo credit: free pictures of money / Foter.com / CC BY

The grim reaper. No, not Death – the book editor!

Nice little post about the pain and ultimate pleasure of the editing process, written by fellow Montreal author Alice Zorn. This is something I’ll be facing very shortly…

An environmentally conscious editor on the way to work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Bill Gracey / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Some authors are stuck in the past, others have forgotten the past

Blogger Kristen Lamb entertainingly tells it like it is.

An agent query letter that brought home the six-figure bacon!

Kristin Nelson at Nelson Literary Agency has kindly shared the query letter by author Scott Reintgen that convinced her to sign him. I’m guessing Scott was already pretty happy about that. But when Kristin brokered a mid-six-figure deal with Crown Books for Young Readers for Scott’s debut science fiction young adult trilogy, he must have been ecstatic.

Use the link above to read the full query letter that Scott sent Kristin and with one click on the Send button propelled his career into the stratosphere!

 

The Little Bookstore That Couldn’t

This article about Amazon’s new bricks-and-mortar bookstore is far more fun than the store itself seems to be.