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Hooray! Frankly, I’ll take just about any sort of review on “Ice” just so it’s noticed, but I love how all three (so far) are five-stars on Amazon.
Click on the link to find the review and read it. If you’ve read “Ice” and haven’t reviewed it on Amazon and Goodreads, please, please, please do so. Even if the review is less than complementary, I’ll learn more about how to improve my writing.
Here’s my “blurb:”
Cover art for “The Fallen Shall Rise”
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My science fiction novella The Fallen Shall Rise published by Starry Eyed Press for their 224-Verse series is here.
Promotional image for “The Fallen Shall Rise” by James Pyles
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This is a novella that was accepted for publication by Starry Eyed Press that I’m now able to talk about in more detail.
The tale takes place in a shared universe called the 224-Verse. My story “The Fallen Shall Rise” is set against a wider backdrop of galactic political intrigue and presents the mystery of why a civilization fell thousands of years ago.
An interview about my story conducted by the publishers will be forthcoming. In the meantime, here’s a small excerpt:
Cover art for the Cloaked Press anthology “Spring Into SciFi 2022”
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My SciFi short story “Tiamat Descending” has been accepted by Cloaked Press for the 2022 edition of their annual anthology Spring Into SciFi. I’ve proudly had stories published in this anthology series since 2019.
The cover displayed above will show the names of the contributors in its next iteration and the expected publication date is March 21st.
Here’s part of the official announcement on Facebook:
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It took two days for me to work my way through the two-disc set of Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021). I saw the 2017 version and wasn’t incredibly impressed. I was hoping for more in the “Snyder Cut.”
Given the breadth of this film, I’m commenting on things in no particular order and this review will not be comprehensive.
At slightly over four hours of run time, there’s plenty of room for character development, origin stories, and “mood,” but I think it could have been a shorter, tighter movie.
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I suppose the number seems mysterious, but it’s born out of curiosity. I’ve written and submitted eleven short stories between December 2021 and today (February 11, 2022). One was already rejected, so I didn’t count it, but ten stories are still “in play,” still submitted and being considered.
Of those ten stories, the word count total is 69,415 words. A small novel basically.
So I thought I’d share a little bit of each of them. There’s no guarantee that any of them will be accepted for publication. But it’ll still be fun to share the first paragraph of each one in no particular order.
Story 9390
The Mahli war cruiser attacked the starship Raeb from below the system’s ecliptic plane, accelerating from behind a ring of asteroids where it was hiding to mask its waste heat. It took less than three seconds for their weapon to form a transitory miniature singularity. It distorted and then shredded major portions of the Raeb’s hull, exposing over half of the ship’s interior to space. But that would be the only shot they’d get.
DVD case for season 1 of Star Trek: Picard
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I saw the DVD set for season 1 of Star Trek: Picard at my local public library and worked up the nerve to actually watch it. Fortunately, since I got it at the library, it was free, and also it was only ten episodes, so not an enormous investment of time.
Keep in mind, I fully expected to hate it based on what I’ve read so far, so that’s why it took this long to get around to it.
The show wasn’t horrible horrible, but it wasn’t over the top great either. Fans are quick to point out that the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation were poor as well, and they’re right. This was different.
Cover art for Ryan Graudin’s novel “Wolf by Wolf”
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I first heard of Ryan Graudin‘s YA novel Wolf by Wolf: One girl’s mission to win a race and kill Hitler by reading the Tor.com (I know, I know) article 5 Adrenaline-Pumping YA SFF Survival Books authored by Meg Long. It’s published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which doesn’t seem to have a direct connection to Tor, but publishing is going in a decidedly singular direction (in spite of certain opinions to the contrary), so it’s hard to be sure.
Of the five books Long listed, Graudin’s seemed to have the most interesting premise, but then again, it was also yet another reworking of “What if Nazi Germany Had Won World War Two?” It’s not like we don’t have a few of those lying around.
The novel, the first in a series, was published in 2015, so enough time has passed for it to be read and reviewed aplenty. For example:
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So I was having a discussion with my grandson, actually playing a game with him over the phone, and realized I needed a bar. That is, I needed a bar as one of the scenes for our game. Author Spider Robinson (apparently his given first name is a jealously guarded secret) wrote a collection of short stories in the late 1970s called Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. I remembered reading it when it was first published and I remembered liking it, but that’s all. I had long since gotten rid of my original copy, so I bought the digital version.
After reading the first couple of short stories, I not only realized I had remembered this collection wrong, but found it was totally unsuitable for what I had in mind for the game with my grandson. I immediately set to work at creating my own “fantastical” saloon which, as of today, I also decided to incorporate in a short story I’ve just plotted out.
But that’s neither here nor there for this review.
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I found the 2021 film Black Widow as a DVD at my local public library yesterday. Naturally I checked it out so I could watch and review it. I’ve heard various unflattering things about the movie, and I wanted to see for myself.
Oh, tons of spoilers follow, so if you haven’t seen the movie and want to, don’t read any further.
In no particular order:
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