My favorite story in Great Irish Tales of the Unimaginable (1994) is “The Last Warrior Quest” by Peter Tremayne. I’ve read several of Tremayne’s mysteries featuring Sister Fidelma and enjoyed all of them. But this short story concerns an older warrior on his Last Quest. Moving and compelling.
I also enjoyed Julia O’Faolain’s “Legend for a Painting” about a lady living with a dragon and a knight who wants to “save” her.
I’ve read several anthologies edited by Peter Haining. My one criticism of Hailing’s choices is that sometimes he chooses very old and very dated stories that I find tedious. You might struggle with this, too. GRADE: B
Diane and I traveled to Sheas Performing Arts Center to see the touring version of The Wiz. As you can see from the photo above, it is flashy, colorful, and a bit kooky. The musical follows the L. Frank Baum novel, The Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy taken by a tornado to a world of witches, magic, and The Yellow Brick Road. Dorothy’s house squashes The Wicked Witch of the East, Evermean, and Dorothy is rewarded by The Good Witch of the North with silver slippers (with magical powers).
Dorothy want’s to return to Kansas, so The Good Witch tells her to go to the Emerald City and ask The Wizard of Oz for help. Along the journey, Dorothy meets a talking Scarecrow who wants a brain, a Tin Man who wants a heart, and a cowardly Lion who wants courage. They arrive at the Emerald City and speak with The Wiz who proclaims that he will only grant their wishes on the condition that they kill Evermean’s sister, Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West.
Most of you know how that turns out. I’m sure this touring company version is being boosted by the success of Wicked, Part One. If you’re a fan of The Wizard of Oz, this musical will take you over the rainbow! GRADE: B
“Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise.” (p. 109) This quote from W. H. Auden sets the mood for many of the chapters in Gareth L. Powell’s useful About Writing: The Authorized Field Guide for Aspiring Authors (2022). The “field guide” format means Powell invites readers to browse his book in any order they like.
I’ve read over a hundred books on writing. Every time I write, I try to improve my writing. Gareth Powell provides tips from years of writing, some of which might help me…and you.
My favorite chapter in About Writing is “Ten Books That Changed My World.” I’ve read six of the ten. Powell has good taste in books.
What is your writing process? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Foreword 1
How to Use This Book 5
The Artist’s Prayer 7
Part 1 About Getting Started — 9
Getting Organised 11
Getting Started 15
Tools of the Trade 17
Choosing Your Teachers 21
Where Do You Get Your Crazy Ideas? 25
55 Story Ideas 33
When to Write and When to Edit 41
Exercise the Storytelling Muscles 43
Internalise the Identity 45
Don’t Wait for Inspiration 49
Beating the Blank Page: How to Jumpstart Your Story 51
Three Ways to Breathe Life into Your Fiction 53
Balancing Writing with Your Day Job 57
Part 2 About Novels — 63
The Real Secret to Writing a Novel 65
When is a Novel Not a Novel? 69
Understand What Your Novel Is About 73
What Is Plot? 77
Creating Authentic Characters 81
World-Building 85
Part 3 About Genres — 89
A Note on Genre 91
Crime 93
Romance 95
Horror 97
Historical Fiction 99
Young Adult Fiction 101
Mainstream and Literary Fiction 103
Fantasy 105
Science Fiction 107
Part 4 About Writing — 117
How I Write 119
The Essential Qualities of a Novelist 127
Ten Tips for Novelists 131
Daily Productivity Sheet 133
Three Ways of Finding More Time to Write 137
Five Essential Rules for Writing Better Fiction 141
Five Lessons Writers Can Learn from Athletes 145
Three Things to Remember When Writing Action Scenes 149
Find Your Carnegie Hall 155
A Simple Trick to Keep Your Creativity Flowing 157
Saving What You Take Out 161
A Trilogy of Things I Learned While Writing a Trilogy 163
Everybody’s a Geek About Something 169
Dealing with Writer’s Block 173
Beating Writer’s Block with 100 Words 181
How to Keep Being Creative in a Crisis 183
Part 5 About Getting Published — 189
Eight Steps to Becoming a Published Writer 191
Publishing vs Self-Publishing 195
Why Get an Agent, and What to Look For199
Ten Tips for Finding an Agent 201
How to Write a Novel Outline 205
How to Write a Novel Synopsis 211
The Secret Formula for Writing an Effective Elevator Pitch 217
How to Write a Cover Letter 221
How to Be More Confident 225
Dealing with Rejections 229
Imposter Syndrome233
Part 6 About Being Published — 237
Becoming a Full-Time Author 239
What to Look for in a Publisher 243
Advances: How Do They Work? 247
Advances: What to Do with Them 251
Dealing with Editors 253
Being Edited 255
Ten Tips to Deal with an Edit 259
The Knee-Jerk ‘No!’ 263
Covers – The Front Cover, and Cover Copy 267
Publication Day 269
Ten Ways to Maximise Your Publicity and Marketing 271
Ten Top Tips for Selling Books on Social Media 275
“It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?” –George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Many of my friends stopped watching the news on TV and reading newspapers and magazines after the November 2024 Election. And, given the chaos caused by Trump, Musk, and DOGE who can blame them?
Mark Lilla’s new book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, explores both the positives and negatives of Knowledge. Lilla provides numerous examples of people whose lives fell apart after they learned the Truth about their situations. The prime example is Oedipus who finds out he murdered his father and married his mother.
Lilla makes a case for staying in ignorance. He cites James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA. “When Watson had his genome sequenced in 2007, he made sure that the value of his APOE4 genotype, which indicates the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, would not be published. He also stipulated that it not be revealed to him.” (p. 97-98) Too much knowledge can be hurtful especially if you can’t do anything about it.
Knowledge is risky business anyway. Lilla quotes Randall Jarrell: “A poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.” (p. 138)
What stance are you taking today about Knowledge and Ignorance? How much do you want to know about what’s going on today? GRADE: B+
Bill Knott’s friend and fellow poet, Thomas Lux, edited I Am Flying Into Myself and provides a moving Introduction to this quirky poet. Bill Knott lost his parents at an early age. He suffered abuse in orphanages. After a brief stint in the Army, Knott drifted from job to job. Knot took a poetry class from John Logan and started to write poems in the 1960s. His first book of poems, The Naomi Poems, was published under the pseudonym of “St. Geraud” who was “a virgin and a suicide.”
As you can surmise, Bill Knott was a weird dude. His poems are quirky and moody. Here’s a sample:
“Death”
Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest. They will place my hands like this, It will look as though I am flying into myself.
Bill Knott died in Bay City, Michigan after failed heart surgery in 2014. Who is your favorite poet?
Tony Tanner ((18 March 1935 – 5 December 1998) was a British literary critic of the 19th and 20th centuries, and a pioneering figure in the study of American literature. He was a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, where he taught and studied for 38 years, from 1960 until his death in 1998. My first Tony Tanner book was The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (1965).
Reading The Reign of Wonder in the mid-Sixties when I was 16 years old was probably a too ambitious move on my part. I had read some of the writers Tanner analyzed–Twain, some Emerson, some Hemingway, some Thoreau, some Whitman–but none of Henry James, Gertrude Stein, or Sherwood Anderson. James, Stein, and Anderson would have to wait until I attended Marquette University in 1967 and those writers showed up in my required English classes.
But what I gleaned from The Reign of Wonder made me want to read more of Tanner’s writings. Over the years, I read several of Tanner’s books of literary criticism. I enjoyed his Henry James: The Writer and His Work (1985), a short work based on a series of pamphlets the British Council asked Tanner to write about Henry James. For a newcomer to Henry James, Tanner’s slim book guides the reader through James’s long and varied career while providing key insights into James’s works.
Although Tony Tanner wrote about many American writers, both old and new, it was obvious he was most fascinated by Henry James: “From a distance the theme of the blank, quivering American sensibility immersed and involved in the European order seems indeed to be basic to James’s fiction. From the wide-eyed, socially non comprehending condor of Daisy Miller to the perpetually open eyes of Adam Verver; from Daisy Miller’s death in the miasmic atmosphere of Rome to Milly Teale’s turn to the wall in Venice, from succumbing of Roderick Hudson to the suicide of Grace Mavis on board the Patagonia; from the undamaged return of Christopher Newman to the perverse yet enlightened renunciation of Lambert Stretcher; from the confident dismissal of Europeans by Betsy Alden and Pandora, through the precarious victory of Francie Dodson, on to the new kind of mastery of a shattered European society as managed by Mrs. Gracedew and Maggie Verver: in all these related and developed themes the dramatic interlocking of a new sensibility with an old civilization is the fulcrum.” (p. 264-265)
Henry James took risks by making women and children centers of his stories. Take What Maisie Knew (1897) where Maisie, a child abandoned by her real parents and exploited by adulterous step-parents, tries to figure out situations without understanding adult motives. As Tanner cleverly assesses the novel, “In a sense the book hinges on what Maisie does not know.” (p. 288)
In 2000, Cambridge University Press published The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo. While the essays delve into Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Howells, Fitzgerald, DeLillo and Pynchon, the best essays in The American Mystery focus on Henry James. If you’re interested in astute literary criticism of classic American writers, The American Mystery, The Reign of Wonder, and Henry James are hard to beat. GRADE: A (for all three)
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Foreword — ix
Edward W. Said
Sources — xii
Introduction: Tony Tanner on American means of writing and means of writing America — xiv
Ian F. A. Bell
Lustres and condiments: Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays
1(8)
`A summer in the country’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
9(30)
`Nothing but cakes and ale’: Herman Melville’s White-Jacket
39(23)
`All interweavingly working together’: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
62(19)
Melville’s counterfeit detector: The Confidence-Man
81(23)
`The Story in It’ – and the story without it
104(17)
Henry James
Henry James’s `saddest story’: The Other House
121(11)
Henry James and Shakespeare
132(17)
`Feelings of middle life’: William Dean Howells’s Indian Summer
149(17)
`The story of the moon that never rose’: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
166(35)
Don DeLillo and `the American mystery’: Underworld
201(21)
`The Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes’: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
222(17)
Index — 239
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Acknowledgements
viii
Introduction: the sleep of reason
1
The Transcendentalists
Saints behold: the transcendentalist point of view
19
Emerson: the unconquered eye and the enchanted circle
26
Thoreau and the sauntering eye
46
Walt Whitman’s ecstatic first step Transcendentalism and Imagism
64 87
Mark Twain
The doctors of the wilderness
97
A system of reduction
104
The voice of the outlaw
127
The pond of youth
143
Huck Finn and the reflections of a saphead
155
The Twentieth Century
Gertrude Stein and the complete actual present
187
Sherwood Anderson’s Little Things
205
Ernest Hemingway’s Unhurried Sensations
228
Henry James
The candid outsider
261
The range of wonderment
278
The subjective adventure
309
Afterword: wonder and alienation – the mystic and the moviegoer
336
References
362
Index– 381
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Preface — ix
I. America and Europe, 1843-1881: ” A Complex Fate” — 3
II. London, 1882-1898: “The Compendium of the World” — 49
III. Lamb House, 1899-1916: “The Divine Unrest” — 97
My favorite movie of 2024 was A Complete Unknown. Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan at the beginning of his career in the early 1960s in New York City. The movie is based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties (2016).
The musical performances by Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez were convincing. Chalamet learned 35 Bob Dylan songs and some of them show up on this movie soundtrack.
If you’re a fan of Bob Dylan, you’ll enjoy this look at Dylan’s life from 1961-1965. GRADE: A (for both the movie and the soundtrack)
I’ve enjoy Will Murray’s The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu, Volume 1 (you can read my review here) and The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu, Volume 2 (you can read my review here). The latest in the series, The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu, Volume 3 arrived and it features more original stories than the previous two volumes that mostly reprinted stories Will Murray wrote for various anthologies.
You’ll meet ghouls in “What Ghouls These Portals Be.” Dark forces threaten our world in “The House at One Tower Way.” The secret to time travel and reading the Future come together in “Kingsport Tea.”
I enjoyed “Cthulhu’s Garden” and was unnerved by “The Summoner of Khalk’ru.”
If you’re in the mood for another group of Lovecraftian horror stories, give Will Murray’s third volume a try. GRADE: B+
This edition of Turbotax does away with the CD-ROM. Users need to download the tax program and install it on their computers. I miss the CD-ROM because downloads can be problematic. Fortunately, I was able to download and install Turbotax in five minutes.
I’ve used Turbotax for decades. Some years are much better than others. This latest version transferred last year’s tax information and it took me about an hour to input all our tax information.
Once the tax calculations were done, I had to e-file the Federal and State returns which involves typing in numbers from Diane and my NY State driver’s licenses. Since the IRS just laid off 5,000 employees during Tax Season, my confidence in the processing of my Federal Tax Return is not high. But the IRS notified me they received my e-filed return. I’m still waiting to hear from NY State.
Basically, our tax returns now that we’re retired consists of four numbers: Diane’s Social Security and NY State pension and my Social Security and NY State pension. We have no deductions since Patrick and Katie are off on their own, our house and vehicles are paid off, and our lives are placid and debt-free.
We owe the Feds some money and NY State some money. We’ll send them some checks and be done with this chore for another year. How are your taxes?
John Warner, a writer and college professor, does a Deep Dive into ChatGPT and related Artificial Intelligence programs in his new book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI (2025). “Large language models [like ChatGPT] do not ‘write.’ They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity.” (p. 18) Or care about truth, accuracy, or veracity. But they are very good at generating words.
In addition to being a word generator, AI can be used to scam the innocent. “An AI-generated book, The Evolution of Jazz: A Century of Improvisation and Innovation by Frank Gioia and Ted Alkyer, came into the world. The dual authors were designed to take advantage of the fact that Ted Gioia (The History of Jazz) and Alkyer ( publisher of Downbeat magazine) are two noted jazz experts…. Because both Gioia and Alkyer have their own public platforms and were able to make a fuss, the scam was exposed and the books will pulled from sale…” (p. 189)
So Artificial Intelligence programs can “write” fake books. All too often, the scammers using AI end up making money before they’re found out–or continue to operate their schemes indefinitely. They certainly don’t have to pay the AI program to generate more books.
“In 2021, Brandon Sanderson, a best-selling author of science fiction and fantasy, announced on the Kickstarter platform that he was setting out to raise $1 million as a crowdfunding effort for four yet-to-be-written novels. By the time the campaign was over, Sanderson had raised over $41 million.” (p. 198). Is the the future for writers in the Age of AI? Do you use Artificial Intelligence? Are you as worried about the Artificial Intelligence future as I am? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction — 1
PART ONE
Chapter 1 Automation, Not Intelligence — 15
Chapter 2 Stop, Now, Before It’s Too Late! — 29
Chapter 3 A Personal History of the Automation of Writing — 43
PART TWO
Chapter 4 Only Humans Write — 55
Chapter 5 Writing Is Thinking — 61
Chapter 6 Writing Is Feeling — 75
Chapter 7 Writing Is a Practice — 89
Chapter 8 Life with a Writing Practice — 103
Chapter 9 Reading and Writing — 113
PART THREE
Chapter 10 Reading, Writing, and Robots — 127
Chapter 11 Here Come the Teaching Machines (Again) — 133
Chapter 12 Writing in the Classroom of Today (and Tomorrow) — 147
Chapter 13 Reading Like a Writer — 165
Chapter 14 Content vs. Writing — 179
Chapter 15 On the Future of Writing for Money — 191
Chapter 16 My Digital Doppelgänger — 211
PART FOUR
Chapter 17 A Framework for Action: Resist, Renew, Explore — 225
