TLDR: In the bleak future of humanity, there is only eat, and perhaps, being eaten alive in this combat-heavy but well-written Warhammer 40k novel.

Triskellian is a tech priest, a machine-worshiping half-cyborg. He’s also the runt of the litter of tech-priesthood, with everyone from the Grand Fabricator to your junior acolyte looking down on his fascination with bio-engineering. And his only friends are a comic duo of misshapen tech-Igors.

Davien is a spy, the vanguard of a proletariat revolution that never comes. She’s also the last guardian of a sick brother, and a more-or-less fanatic follower of a cult of murderous, bio-engineered aliens. And if that isn’t bleak enough, the pair of them live on an Adeptus Mechanicus forge world, a hollowed out shell of poisoned planet where everything is either a smoking factory, an open pit mine, or a tenement crawling with filthy, starving, diseased humanity.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Warhammer 40k, which puts the “grim” in “grimdark”. (more…)

TLDR: Lucy, a super-sexed girl-next-door, goes on the ultimate power fantasy, as justified by a 13-year-old boy’s rule-of-cool in a movie that fails due to motivational mismatch.

I don’t usually do this, but I’ll review a movie that didn’t work to show why. Also, because otherwise I’d have lost an hour of my life (I skimmed a lot through all the obvious parts).

Synopsis: Lucy is an exchange student in Taiwan, where she is tricked into delivering a case of drugs to a big drug lord. There, she is abused and cut open to become a drug mule with a bag of drugs hidden inside her abdomen.

So far, the movie is a standard thriller: Lucy is forced into a bad situation, the situation gets worse, and everything she does to stay alive and escape is completely inadequate. She’s running while tied to a wall (literally). If you can forgive the cross-cut hunting and lecture scenes, it’s actually a fairly standard setup with some nice cinematography.

But then things change. (more…)

Tainted Grail! The characters! The minis! The story! Oh, the story! It’s amazing! It’s fantastic! It’s a game that drove me absolutely nuts.

Disclaimer: This isn’t a review. I can’t write a review of Tainted Grail because, after playing some 45 hours of two-handed solo, and restarting four times, I never made it past chapter 4 of the original campaign. Not once.

No, this is letter of grievances. (more…)

Sometimes you read a book at exactly the right time to change your world. Algis Budrys’ “Writing to the Point: A Complete Guide to Selling Fiction” was one of those books for me.

Writing to the Point is a short (152 airy pages) yet deep (spanning everything from “Chapter 1: The Basic Basics” to dealing with agents and who to format a manuscript) writing advice book. It took me slightly less than an hour-and-a-half to read, and I haven’t come away from a writing how-to book this turbo-charged in a long, long time. (more…)

So I’m a stage 2 writer. Or maybe early stage 3. I don’t know. And until I read Dean Wesley Smith’s “Stages of a Fiction Writer”, I had no idea what any of that meant.

Stages of a Fiction Writer is a short book. Very short. It doesn’t have very much concrete content. And yet it’s eminently readable. I should know, I’ve read it twice now. (more…)

I finished Leah Cutter‘s The Beginning Professional Writer in one sitting, even though she explicitly wrote not to.

OK, it’s a short book. It’s got a bowl of letter cereal on the cover. It looks like it’s been designed as a junior student essay.

It’s also the most eminently quotable, fact packed book I’ve read in a long time. And I do mean that as a compliment because it is easy to read, too. And it will tell you everything you need to know as a beginning professional writer. (more…)

I’m a pantser, the type of writer who loves to go off unprepared and discover the story as I write it. Every single work on the technical side of writing I’ve read up to this point has, more or less explicitly, spoken of outlines. Made me feel like an idiot for not being able to use one.

Along comes “Writing into the Dark: How to Write a Novel without an Outline” and it’s all about pantsing, or writing into the dark as Dean Wesley Smith calls it. Reading it was like being six years old and finding the secret hiding place of the cookie jar. (more…)

Sometimes you get handed a book that you wouldn’t have bought in a million years and it turns out to contain grains of pure gold. Bob Mayer’s “The Novel Writer’s Toolkit” was one of those for me.

Overview

Bob Mayer is a rather accomplished writer, both in terms of books published (over 60) and money earned (unknown but from what he says “good”). He knows what he’s talking about and he isn’t shy about using himself as an example.

In The Novel Writer’s Toolkit (TNWT) Mayer presents 9 tools (read themes) dealing with everything a writer needs to know, from personal insights (common traits of successful writers, knowing why you write, etc.) to more commonplace advice on plot, theme, character creation and similar.

In some areas The Novel Writer’s Toolkit shines when compared to regular writer’s books, such as the focus on selling and making a career and the key to defining your kernel idea (writing to a premise sentence), which makes the book stand out from the pack. (more…)

I can’t tell you what you should write. That’s entirely up to you. But if you are the least bit interested in having a career as a fiction writer then I can tell you what to read: Douglas Smith’s “Playing the Short Game: How to Market & Sell Short Fiction”. From now on this is my go-to book for all things related to starting and maintaining my fiction writing career. (more…)

I’ve been trying to include my children in my hobby (a fancy way of saying “I’m going to addict the little suckers so I have someone to play with when I’m in the retirement home”). They’re three and five years old and I’ve had various successes with introducing them to games. However, I recently found a game that worked perfectly.

That game was Castle Panic, a co-op with strong alpha player tendencies where you defend your castle from hordes of advancing monsters. Once could call it an extremely simple tower defense game, albeit it doesn’t live up to the tower defense requirements (for me). My kids, however, love it.

I’ve tried other games previously: Memory, Tempo Kleine Fishe, Connect Four, a couple of my own design but they always failed my criteria for a good children’s game as my kids either didn’t like them, liked them but couldn’t play them or could play them but got into fights over them. (more…)