I think a lot about writing action scenes. I don’t mean action scenes in the literary sense, but action scenes in the sense that probably attracted a lot of us to speculative fiction in the first place, the kinds of action scenes with flashing swords, sparking wands, roaring dragons, and pirouetting starships.
Writing 21st Century Fiction Review
I wish that the human brain was a better tool for diagnosing itself, because I would be very interested to know how much of my distaste for this book arose from the writing style, rather than the contents. To be honest, the writing sounded juvenile. It is my hope that the author adopted this style in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, rather than it being an actual reflection of their intellectual capacity, but I found it quite off-putting, and rather undermining to those parts of the book that are valid. While I realize that an inaccurate understanding of electromagnetism does not preclude wisdom in the area of fiction writing, making a blatantly invalid analogy does make me question how well the rest of the book was thought through before being published. And that was just the most obvious example; the whole tone of the book conveyed a similar impression.
Endings
It might seem like an oversimplification, but it is very viable to divide a story into just three parts: beginning, middle, and end.
Weekly Writing Update
This was a pretty good week, writing-wise.
Cybersecurity Warning
With a title like "Google Bans Apps With Hidden Data-Harvesting Software," you might not be expecting a huge, new cybersecurity scare. In this case, the details make the difference.
Foundation Review
It was actually a television adaptation of Foundation that prompted me to realize how long it had been since I last read this science fiction classic, and that it was probably time for a revisit. My wife and I recently watched AppleTV’s interpretation of Asimov’s novel, and so I decided it was an opportune time for a reread.
5 Minutes a Day
Five minutes a day is not some kind of magic number or formula, but merely a stand-in for the idea of incremental, rather than drastic, changes to create new habits and routines.
Weekly Writing Update
How are we already starting April? That's a disconcerting thought. As you hopefully saw, March's Blood Magic episode, Making Change, is now live, so I encourage you to head over there and read it soon.
Solar Flares and Aquatic Suction Cups
I couldn't decide between two articles this week, so I decided to just post two. First up, a research paper I came across in Science Advances that studies how suction cups adhere underwater.
Reaper Review
Will Wight’s Cradle series might be my current guilty pleasure read. These fast, light, action-packed, “martial arts” fantasy novels aren’t Brandon Sanderson masterpieces that will massively alter my understanding of how to write fantasy, they aren’t four thousand year old tomes of philosophy or history, they aren’t detailed technical analyses of obscure mathematical theorems (a textbook on the disc embedding theorem might hold the prize for the strangest book currently on my reading list), but every time a new one comes out (which happens with impressive frequency), I get a copy within weeks, and read it within days.
IGC Publishing 