Page 6 of posts filed: The Hardest Part

The Hardest Part: Danny Birt on Ending

Posted on 2013-07-18 at 17:54 by montsamu

When I asked NC author Danny Birt about the hardest part of writing Ending, the recently-published fourth book in his Laurian Pentology, I thought I might get an essay about the tumultuous landscape of publishing that led to both a delay between the book and its predecessor and to a new publisher, Dark Quest Books. Instead, Danny writes here about stepping beyond "write what you know" (which for Danny certainly includes a playful sense of humor, revealed in his "Rum and Runestones" short stories, his YA

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged danny birt

The Hardest Part: Richard Dansky on Vaporware

Posted on 2013-06-12 at 16:29 by montsamu

Durham author Richard Dansky has helped hawk Bull Spec to passers-by at the Bimbe Cultural Arts Festival while wearing a vintage Montreal Expos shirt; he let me excerpt his novel, Firefly Rain, in Bull Spec #2; he's been pressed to participate in several NC Speculative Fiction Night events, most recently in April, where he read from his new collection Snowbird Gothic; and he's written a long list of reviews, interviews, and articles for Bull Spec, most recently a tribute to the late Ray Bradbury in issue #8

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged richard dansky, vaporware

The Hardest Part: Matthew Ross on The Secret of Ji

Posted on 2013-05-29 at 14:20 by montsamu

UNC/Duke professor Tyler Curtain has an avid interest in literary sf and fantasy translations, and introduced me to Duke ecology PhD student Matthew Ross, whose translation from the French of Pierre Grimbert's bestselling and award-winning The Secret of Ji: Six Heirs was about to be published by AmazonCrossing (Publishers Weekly review) and Brilliance Audio (SFFAudio review). Ross talked a bit about this process at the recent NC Speculative Fiction Night in April, where he also gave a reading from the book,

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged matthew ross

The Hardest Part: Tonia Brown on Gnomageddon

Posted on 2013-05-22 at 13:15 by montsamu

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged tonia brown

The Hardest Part: Athena Andreadis on The Other Half of the Sky

Posted on 2013-05-01 at 14:23 by montsamu

There's an awful lot of work that goes into an anthology, from conception, to soliciting and editing stories, and all manner of strange things, I's to dot and T's to cross, fonts to choose and cover art to go over again and again. Athena Andreadis, author of the poems "Spacetime Geodesics" which appeared in Bull Spec #6 and "Night Patrol" which appeared in Bull Spec #7, writes about the hardest part of putting together the just-released anthology The Other Half of the Sky.

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The Hardest Part: M. David Blake on the 2013 Campbellian Pre-Reading Anthology

Posted on 2013-02-27 at 13:0 by montsamu

M. David Blake, whom I know simply as Marc, has the deepest memory for fandom and sf of just about anyone I can think of. He keeps up with novels, with short fiction, and even the fanzines. And! He's currently in his second year of eligibility for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, as I was lucky enough (very lucky!) to publish "Absinthe Fish" in Bull Spec #5 back in 2011, easily the most critically well-received short story from Bull Spec's run so far. He's also taken up editing, including Stu

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The Hardest Part: Gail Z. Martin on Ice Forged

Posted on 2013-01-23 at 16:15 by montsamu

After six books across two publishers in the world of her Chronicles of the Necromancer series, Charlotte author Gail Z. Martin's new book, Ice Forged (Orbit, January 2013) remains firmly in epic fantasy territory but otherwise starts an entirely new world. While earlier this week The Exploding Spaceship reviewed the book, here Martin writes that yes, indeed, while starting from scratch can be a refreshing change of pace, it was also the hardest part of creating her newest book.

By Gail Z. Martin:

F

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged gail z. martin, ice forged

The Hardest Part: Daniel M. Kimmel on Shh! It's a Secret

Posted on 2013-01-16 at 23:55 by montsamu

Daniel M. Kimmel's last book, a collection of sf film criticism entitled Jar Jar Binks Must Die... and Other Observations about Science Fiction Movies was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Work; it also contained Kimmel's review of Them!, a 1954 film about atomic bomb radiation creating giant ants which first appeared in Bull Spec #6. Now he's back with another book, this time his debut novel, in which Kimmel takes his often funny and insightful comments about Hollywood and sf filmmaking and turns

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged daniel m. kimmel

The Hardest Part: James Maxey on Witchbreaker

Posted on 2012-12-28 at 1:51 by montsamu

I said about all I can say so far about Hillsborough, NC author James Maxey's latest novel, Witchbreaker, in my write-up for the book's Christmas Day release. Luckily for us, Maxey has a bit more to say about its writing. You might think that after his previous 5 fantasy novels from Solaris Books (The Dragon Age trilogy: Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed; and the first two books in the Dragon Apocalypse: Greatshadow and Hush) and his superhero novels Nobody Gets the Girl and Burn Baby Burn that he'd

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The Hardest Part: C.S. Fuqua on Rise Up

Posted on 2012-11-28 at 21:19 by montsamu

When Bull Spec opened for submissions in November 2009, I had no idea what to expect. Certainly not the avalanche of good stories which buried me for the better part of two years. But there's a fine line between a good story and one of those stories that I just had to publish, and the very first of these was "Rise Up" by C.S. Fuqua. (So early in fact that this was before there was even a "magazine", only a vague idea about publishing a story now and then.) Reading the story, listening to the music, I knew

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged cs fuqua, the hardest part