I really enjoyed the holiday season this year, but I didn’t read a lot of Christmas or holiday stories. That’s unusual for me. I’ve been on a mystery and crime fiction binge for months now, and that continued. I did try to transition to some holiday stories, but they were too sweet for me. And the one author I read first, someone whose work I […]
Recommended Reading List: May, 2020
The weather has become quite lovely here, and I have made it a point to read every night on my balcony. I can’t tell you what a balm that has been for my soul. Much of what I’ve read I can’t recommend, including an Edgar-nominated novel that was supposed to be “gothic” and “feminist” and was neither. The heroine never did anything except get rescued […]
Recommended Reading List: February, 2020
As I mentioned in the January recommended reading list, the post auto-posted, which I’ve set them up to do. So many of you get annoyed when I don’t finish and delay the list. Good thing that did auto-post, because I never did get around to updating anything in February. I’m writing all of this on the last day of the month and the first few […]
Recommended Reading List: May 2019
May started much better than any other month in 2019. I carved out some time late in the day to get reading done, even if I hadn’t finished my email or any of the other work I had. I was really feeling the lack of leisure reading time and it was starting to have an impact on my writing. Lots of good reading this month, […]
Business Musings: Ghostwriting, Plagiarism, and The Latest Scandal
Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from interviewers that I have never gotten before. They ask, “Are you going to join the latest trend and hire ghostwriters to put out more books in your series?” So far, I have managed to refrain (at least on podcasts) from responding, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and simply say, “No, I’m too much of a control […]
Business Musings: The Ideas of A Cold-Fogged Brain (Discoverability Again)
I feel like I’ve been on a particularly grueling business trip, and am slowly recalibrating back into my office. I worked very hard in the front part of April as I prepared for the science fiction writing workshop I ran here on the Oregon Coast. Then the workshop happened. Lots of great discussions, great questions, great stories, and dedicated work later, we finished…and I got […]
Recommended Reading List: January, 2015
Wow, when I get behind, I get behind. I ran out of time to write about books as I finished them, and figured I could do it in February. Yeah, right. With two workshops, and a bunch of deadlines, February has proven to be a nightmare of scheduling—which is why this thing barely squeezed in before the month ended. I read a lot in January. […]
The Business Rusch: Unintended Consequences
I am completely overwhelmed. Not because I just finished teaching a week-long workshop. Not because one of my novels decided to become triplets. Not because it’s about to become November. Because I have too much to read. Seriously. I preorder a lot of books, and pick up the rest from my favorite local bookseller. One week before the workshop, I put a spending freeze on […]
The Business Rusch: Carrots And Sticks
Once upon a time, maybe five years ago, I used to wake up and figure in my head which deadlines I needed to tackle that day. The most critical, the hardest, or the ones with the most cache/money/interest always got put in line first, and then I would build everything else around those. I had several systems for this, including one on my paper calendar, […]
Recommended Reading List: June, 2013
Who knew that a chair could be so important? My best reading chair is in my writing office, but I have a strict rule: I cannot read any fiction but my own in that office. I learned the hard way that if I read other people’s fiction in my office, I never get any writing done. The reading chair we had in the living room […]
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