Monday, June 28, 2010

Odds and Ends

Dropped in on the local Strawberry Festival/Book Sale on Saturday afternoon. I went armed with a list of authors and book titles, of which I found none. But I did find some unexpected treasures.

Larry Brown's "Big Bad Love" I opened expecting a novel but was thrilled to find it was a collection of his short stories. Yahoo! I've been watching out for anything by Ken Bruen since our library has no idea who he is and found "The Magdalen Martyrs". Oh, Happy Day! My first Bruen and it had just been donated to the sale that morning! William G. Tapply was another author whose books I couldn't find and I lucked into one from his Brady Coyne series. I've been doing a bit of research on Steampunk, which was the list I had, and found instead "An Illustrated Short History of the World" by H.G. Wells, who along with Jules Verne, is the foundation for Steampunk writing. Hopefully it will give me some insight into his writing world.

If you ever need to cover one of your characters in blood without actually killing them - give them a scalp wound. My son came running into the house yesterday afternoon covered in blood. Since he had four kids swarming around him, I was trying to find out which one of them was hurt and how bad. It was none of them. He'd slipped in the creek and hit his head on a rock, tiny cut, no stitches needed, but he looked like he was bleeding to death. Scared the crap out of everyone for a few minutes!

It's looking like another zine has bit the dust. The linkage to Pine Tree Mysteries isn't working and it looks like they might have shut down the site.

If you're stuck on a story and think you've got a bad case of writer's block, drop on over to Storytellers Unplugged and read Richard Dansky's latest essay. http://storytellersunplugged.com/richarddansky/2010/06/27/i-got-your-writers-block-right-here/

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