My 14th book, The Girl And The Mountain came out today.
14… crap, I’m old. It’s true though, look!. Plus there’s a collection of short stories, 2 free books on Wattpad, a book that was too bad to put on Wattpad, a secret trilogy (co-authored), the third book in this current trilogy, an unpublished thriller … so by some measures … 23 books?
I also herd the cool cats who do all the work on the SPFBO (Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off), a contest that ends in 2 weeks - check out this year’s scoreboard, it’s hotting up!
That’s about it really. I used to be a research scientist but writing took over. I used to leave the house occasionally but the pandemic took over. I don’t collect owls.
EDIT - off to bed - it’s late in the UK - will come back and finish answering tomorrow.
First off, our apologies for the delay it took in getting this out there. COVID has been rough and many of our mods with the most stats experience have been hit hard due to being essential workers, in healthcare, or other issues brought on by the pandemic. That combined with the massive increase in the number of respondents (we shot up from 1750 in 2019 to over 5000!!! for 2020) meant the responses already took much longer to catalogue and whip into shape. Well, we finally managed to lock one unlucky mod in a basement without food or water until they wrestled the census results into something readable complete this monumental task.
Due to the sheer number of responses, the census has become a massive undertaking and we’ll probably have to rework the questions to make putting the results together less time intensive for the future. With that out of the way, let’s delve into our results with some visual data and wordclouds!
Top 10 …
Like, if a book starts describing something like “he tilted his head to the side the way a dog might and gave her a friendly but curious look that said he desired her but didn’t want her to know about his haunted past”, I will start tilting my head and trying to make that face to figure what the author was trying to indicate. Am I alone?
Edit: Wow! I didn’t expect to wake up to so many replies. Thanks, fellow weirdos. I’m glad we’ve all found each other. Shout out to all the writers and artists that do this too!
Edit 2: Also, for anyone curious, I made up the terrible description above. Here’s another bad one for fun: “With her shoulders hunched forward and neck back, she turned up her nose and squinted as though walking into a cold headwind, her wry smile telling the world around her she was finally ready to forgive her estranged father”
To give some context: I have watched every Jurassic Park movie in the franchise, and have played the Lego game (super fun) a few times through. The first time I saw Jurassic Park was on VHS.
I have never read any of Michael Crichton’s work, so I can’t compare how Jurassic Park is to any of his other works.
My thoughts: I completely understand that a book and its movie are always different. This is more about: why did they make Hammond’s character so much more likeable, friendly, and gave him “sweet grandpa” vibes in the movie? Why were certain characters kept alive during the movie? Why didn’t we see more dinosaurs in the movie?
And a praise for Michael Crichton: I just came from reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy. Vandermeer has a way of slowing down reading with heavy diction and over explainations (not disparaging though, I do really like his work). I was expecting a science based novel like Jurassic Park to be the same way, but it …
So my library sadly had to shut down due to COVID, so I switched to another one. I ordered my first set of books, and 4 of the 5 books I ordered were abridged. (Apparently, this happened because my mom let it slip that I was 14, and they thought all 14-year-olds were reluctant readers who only read Wimpy Kid and only read classics because they were forced to.) My first impulse was to return them, but the library said that I could only get the books I wanted after 2 weeks, and I’ve already read all the books at home 6 times over in the lockdown.
So I opened the first book: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. First off, why would you even abridge Sherlock Holmes? Seriously, it’s really short, and not hard to understand at all. For children? I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, since the first short story starts with a woman recieving a pair of human ears by mail. And the illustrations are not even the iconic Sidney Paget ones, they look like doodles that my more …
I finished it a few weeks ago. I struggled with the right adjective for the title. Amazing? Criminally underrated? Fantastic? Shocking? I settled on life-changing because it’s true.
I’m a big reader of fantasy sagas and the Dark Tower was like a two-by-four between the eyes. As I’ve grown older, I’ve feared that I was growing out of fantasy. The last several fantasy novels I’ve read were guilty pleasures, yes, fun, yes, but they left me empty. They didn’t stick with me.
But The Dark Tower reminded me that fantasy is a pretty broad category, and even within that category The Dark Tower is the weird platypus creature of fantasy sagas. It was written over the course of 30 years, and the story reflects the growth of the writer, evolving both narratively and thematically as King grew up, matured, started a family, and struggled with substance abuse. And there’s at least one story swerve caused by other true-life events. It is also, I think, not a …
I made a list combining all of the recently announced nominees for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and added links for where to find them for free online. None of the works that have been published as a book are available for free online, but everything else is and has been linked. The link to Meg Ellison’s “The Pill” comes by courtesy of u/Arkron66. Hopefully some of you find this useful. Enjoy!
Novels:
Novella:
I’ll put mine in the comments too :)
Cheers!
I’ve read some wonderful sci fi books from relatively unknown (and uncelebrated) authors.
What excellent SF books don’t get talked about enough?
Cheers!
Idea shamelessly stolen from the folks over in /r/horrorlit
Seriously, I don’t think there’s a single American sitcom, or show in general, that has such sharp writing, with their meta humor, running gags, and subtle foreshadowing. I don’t really like season 4 that much, because I didn’t find it lived up to the standards of Arrested Development, and I thought season 5 was worse, but those first three seasons were golden.
I’m Bob Odenkirk and joining me today is director Ilya Naishuller to talk all things on our new action film NOBODY which is available to watch now on demand. Together, we transformed me into a lasagna loving, a$$ kicking, kitty cat bracelet rescuing, ultimate Nobody. You can find me on my Twitter @MrBobOdenkirk and my newly launched Instagram @therealbobodenkirk and Ilya at @naishuller. Okay Reddit, Ask us Anything!
Edit: Ilya - Thank you very much for your questions and your time, Bob and I are done, though I plan to drop by tomorrow and answer some more questions for me that I might have missed. Have a great weekend everyone!
Proof:
https://twitter.com/NobodyMovie/status/1382824984284856320
https://www.instagram.com/p/CNu8fE3hZi3/?igshid=1t2lmsn0vl7c0