Tag: fiction
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Searching For The Truth
After my experiences with my first two books, you’d likely understand that I felt my writing skills were buried in my imagination, filed under “wishful thinking.” So I set out to seek the truth in that regard. Another piece of new writing would surely bare that. I decided a short story or essay wasn’t going…
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The Ongoing Drama of Multiple Lives
A Dweller on Two Planets Or, The Dividing of the Way, by Phylos the Thibetan Yes, this book is as odd and arcane as the above title and author suggest. I happened on it during my current preoccupation with the supposed sunken continent of Atlantis, a fascination I’ll soon lay by. But for the moment,…
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My Books of ‘Twenty-three
What a year ‘twenty-three was! I had moved back to Georgia after two decades in North Carolina – at the behest of my step-kids. I’m old, they said, you need to be nearby so we can make sure you’re taken care of. Well, I didn’t feel so old until I undertook an interstate move to…
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Finally!
A brief essay in the October 9, 2023 issue of Publisher’s Weekly recognizes precisely the issue I’ve been harping on these past 5-10 years: when it comes to writing sellable fiction, story’s the thing. For years, largely due to the influence of writer-academics, there’s been a lot of experimentation with fiction, principally regarding the American…
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The Ways of Publishing Part 1
The following data come from late February of 2023 – this year: “The total number of new book titles released annually is around 4 million. It can be estimated that between 500,000 to 1 million of these new titles are published through traditional publishers. At least 1.7 million self-published titles each year are considered to be…
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Recapping My 2022 Reads
Books read here in 2022 weren’t as voluminous as I had hoped, but then I didn’t expect to expend as much time and energy packing and moving back to Georgia. Still the books read were more than I thought at years end. Were there surprises, as I now – 25% of 2023 already gone –…
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The Subterranean South
The Fighter, by Michael Farris Smith How does one learn to write, except by imitation? Hemingway had Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Fitzgerald had, well, Hemingway, and the author here had Harry Crews and Ray Carver, although Cormac McCarthy would seem to be whispering in his ear, too. Of course, reading will only get you part of…
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Reading Recap for 2021
It’s that time of year again – time to take stock of my reading habit and what its makeup has been for the year. 31 books in all – – 16 fiction and 13 non-fiction, and 2 memoirs that I separated from the others. I know – a few people read as many as 200…
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Sometimes Good Writing Isn’t Enough
The Fisherman, by John Langhan Two things: First, the evolution of the novel is changing again, cyclically. At its beginning, it was something of a written version of oral storytelling, but with the author speaking often to “dear reader.” Then modernism fell on us, in which the novel became a bit like poetry, i.e., the…
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Imitating Hemingway
Hemingway’s Girl, by Erika Robuck When a writer tries to draft along behind a literary stylist as style-shattering as Hemingway, that writer had better either be damned good at mimicking Hemingway as a stylist, or they had better have a similarly unique style of their own, or something very, very important to say. This author…