Tuesday, December 7, 2010

My website is UP and I'm moving!

It's been in development a while and it will continue to grow and get tweaked, but my website is now up and running! The contents of this blog have been exported there, but it's still called Writer's Grove and new entries will appear there from now on. I hope you'll all stop by to check it out and come back often. Feel free to comment!

It's easy to comment, by the way; you don't have to follow me or register. And once I figure out how to do it, you can even have a little avatar doodad show up next to your name. Also, if you're on Facebook, there's a cool goodie on the home page you can click to "Like" me without leaving the site. Same goes for Twitter.

Know what else is super cool? If you go to the Books page on the site you'll see the final cover for my third book, HAMMERED! It's been up on Amazon for a while, but I haven't posted it anywhere myself.

There will be a free short story posted on the site in the coming weeks, along with some other goodies—keep checking the Goodies page. :) 

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Sentence Envy


Sometimes I congratulate myself for something I’ve written, a sentence or a phrase that I think is fairly succulent and worth chewing on for a while. But most of the time, when I read, I’m struck by Sentence Envy. Other authors write delicious things I wish I’d written. But there’s one particular author who writes sentences that just get in my head and kind of turn in circles, like a dog settling down for a nap, and then they rest there, fat and sassy, a tether to a different world. It’s William Gibson. Here’s what I mean:

The receptionist in the cool gray anteroom of the Galerie Duperey might well have grown there, a lovely and likely poisonous plant, rooted behind a slab of polished marble inlaid with an enameled keyboard.  —Count Zero
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. —Neuromancer
“Call him,” he repeated, wrapped in Japanese herringbone Gore-tex, multiply flapped and counterintuitively buckled.  —Zero History

His worlds are at once slick and dissonant, a polished surface with an invisible coating of malice on top, constant tension embedded in the language itself. I can’t write like that, but I’m glad somebody does. If you’ve never read Gibson, you’re missing out one of the premier wordsmiths of our time.

Does anyone else get struck by Sentence Envy?