My recent poll proved Charlie Fox is a favorite thriller heroine ahead of Katniss Everdeen. Oddly, several well-known and long-standing female leads in thrillers fell below the entry “Still Looking”. Are some of the popular characters like Tempe Brennan, Stephanie Plum or Kay Scarpetta played out? Too much of the same thing? Charlie Fox evolved […]
Review: Killer Instinct
Killer Instinct – Author Zöe Sharp – ~99,000 words, $14.95 PB / $3.49 E I accidentally followed some author I’d never heard of simply because her tweets tended toward humor. After reading a few of her clever observations, I picked up Killer Instinct, her first book. Wow. What a great book. And don’t I feel […]
Heroine Archetype: Katniss Everdeen
I read 50-80 books a year and post reviews for 10-20 of them. This is the only one that is not a review. I’m posting this in the hopes of getting more writers, movie moguls, TV producers, etc to understand how a real literary heroine works. Since everyone finally caught on to The Hunger Games, writers […]
On Writing v5.1: Cash is Good – ROI
Our goal as writers is to craft a story so interesting that strangers will pay money to hear it. Let’s start with definitions: ROI stands for Return On Investment. The equation: Revenue minus Costs divided by Costs. In publishing, this is a very tricky number because books have a startup cost but very little operational […]
Review: Prophecy
Review by Seeley James Prophecy – Author J.F. Penn ~55,000 words, $2.99 E When I read J.F. Penn’s first book, Pentecost, the enthusiasm and energy took me by surprise and turned me into a believer. Now that I’ve read her second book, I am awestruck. She spins a tale containing more than merely plausible science […]