“Why is it always a blonde?” About once a year there comes along a book that irks me for a strong reason. A very strong reason. It might be the author’s vast credentials that appear to have been squandered, the inability to push the genre when it wishes to do so badly, or just the…
“My lighthouse is no longer lit, Virgil, Because there are no more boats to warn off. Five hundred years ago we landed here, And five hundred years ago we, well… stopped.” They say that nothing is original anymore, and oftentimes I am hard pressed to agree. Until now. The past year has seen little in…
I wanted to try something different. See, time’s getting shorter and shorter for me, so I thought: What jives with this and still gives me my reading fix? Short stories of course! So I’m deciding to both hone my reviewing skills and my comprehension while still being on the go. Because yes, that makes sense.…
An update of sorts; I’m doing a major bit of planning. For the entire book. Yep. I finished plotting the whole thing, or at least the broad strokes. I’m confident that this book will be better than the previous one. It’s sharper and better poised. My characters feel natural, and the plot isn’t some confusing…
Well, y’know, it’s near the holidays. And for all you 70 some odd followers of this blog, I know the perfect gift. It’s a book, of course. I don’t do fancy electronic promotions. No, I promote books. All of you know one of my favorite authors is Andrez Bergen. Sometimes I think people see me…
Don’t you just love the cover? The colors blend very well, red and black. That silhouette of a smoking gangster perfectly encapsulates the narrator, a fallen angel impersonating some Philip Marlowe. That detail is shown off by the stunning wings. Really eye catching. Then you have the cityscape in the background. I mean, if I…
As you can tell by my sporadic postings of this thing, I’ve thought about changing it to Whatever Wednesday. Bad jokes aside, the reason for my general quietness is work. Lots and lots of work. I’ve got essays and other crap flowing out my ears; tons of books backlogged to review. Not fun. On top…
“It’s only at the end of things that you come to any appreciation for what you’ve let slide by.” I have only read one other book this year with an ending so enthralling. Its name is Republic of Thieves. About a month back, a genre review website launched the exclusive cover reveal for this book,…
I was fourteen when a scene came to me, a man riding sluggishly through the midnight snowstorm. For weeks, it tormented my mind, so I wrote it down. I will admit that during that winter I experienced what I later found out to be depression. But while all that tumult in my head drug by,…
“The word was out – choose a side or choose a headstone.” It’s no surprise that I love the Prohibition Era. So when I saw that this book was hailed as one of the best noir novels of the past decade, I jumped aboard. What I found was a very interesting story underneath the trappings…
Acerbic Writing 