Skip to main content

Good Sci fi News for a New Year and Writer’s Resolutions

2016 New Years greeting within a mosaic style border.
Photo Credit: Pixabay.com


I hope everybody had a great holiday season. Mine was groovy. One of the best gifts I got was from my brother. He knows how much I like Neil Gaiman’s work so he got me Gaiman’s latest biography, The Art of Neil Gaiman: The Story of a Writer by Hayley Campbell. Campbell does a super job telling the story of Gaiman’s career as a writer and uses abundant photos and interview clips.

I’ve been a little burned out from writing several articles for clients over the weekend and so that’s why I’m posting late again, but I should be back on my Saturday publishing schedule this weekend now that the holiday rush is done. I’ve also had a bit of a cold today and so have been mostly taking it easy on this slightly moanday Monday, so I’m going to keep this post simple and short. I said I would post my writing resolutions for the new year but first I want to leave you with a couple of links to good sci fi news to start the year off.

Print books have actually rose again and so more werepurchased in 2015! While this may be news that already occurred last year, it actually occurred at the end so it can be considered news that carries into 2016. So, hopefully print books will have a greater influence on both the market and reading culture this year. This, however, in no way means that ebooks are out. People still don’t like lugging a pile of books around when they travel, so there’s still sales to be made with ebooks. But at least the art of tangible books will be around for a while longer, hopefully a lot longer.

The other good news is that more people read science fiction and fantasy last year! That shows you the speculative genre is becoming more popular and mainstream, even among books. Check out more about these two trends at io9.com.  

Speaking about the greater acceptance of sci fi and fantasy literature, the other great news is that the New York Times published their first science fiction/fantasy book review column! You can find out more in my article at Examiner.com. 

And now my writers’ resolutions for 2016:

  • Write a whole novel(la) (first draft).
  • Make a stricter and more organized writing schedule.
  • Learn a new medium to promote my work (e.g. video, podcasting).
  • Improve my networking. I tend to take too much work on my own thinking I can do it all.
  • Invite more guest bloggers. I’m going to try to feature more this year. So people who are interested in guest-blogging, please let me know in the box below and we’ll set something up that works best for you.
  • Guest-blog at least twice this year. Those of you who are looking for a guest blogger-- again, talk to me in the box below.

·
So what are your writers’ or readers’ resolutions for the new year?


Until next time . . . 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least...
3 comments
Read more

Book-To-Movie: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Black Cat'

Credit: Wikimedia Commons It's another fourth Monday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. A few years back, we had a BTM for Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat" and its movie adaptation. However, the movie we reviewed was actually a segment in Roger Corman’s anthology film, "Tales of Terror", which features three of Poe's short stories, including "Black Cat". And I'll tell you now, I liked that version far more than the version that we're going to review today which is the 1934 Universal adaptation starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I like Corman's version better mostly because it stays more faithful to the original short story than Universal's does. However, even though Universal's "Black Cat", directed by Edgar Ulmer, strays (excuse the pun) far from Poe's short stor...
2 comments
Read more

Book-To-Movie: ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’

Both the 1959 and the 2008 movies based on Jules Verne's novel, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", feature terrifying monsters such as the ones here in this illustration from an early edition of the book. Credit: Édouard Riou/ Wikimedia Commons   Warning: This review may contain spoilers. As I said last post , I’ve postponed the month’s Book-To-Movie review from last week to this week. For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. And this weekend’s review is of Jules Verne’s novel, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and its movie adaptations. There have been several movies based on this novel that was originally published in Paris in 1864 (as “Voyage au Centre de la Terre”). However, most of them have been either made for TV or video. Because I believe movies are best when made for the big screen, I am going to review the theatrical films in which there have been two: the 195...
4 comments
Read more