Nicholas Bruner
Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Young Adult Author
What I’m Reading: Mexican Gothic
One of my reading goals for 2021 is to read more horror, and so when Amazon recommended Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, I ordered a copy. I didn’t realize until I did a little research today for this review that MG is actually a bit of a phenomenon–a best-seller, and apparently it will soon be a mini-series on Hulu. Well, I can see why, because it’s a fascinating and entertaining novel. It’s something of a haunted house tale, told with a lot of panache.
What I’m Reading: Newsletter Ninja
This will not be a long review, as Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert, by Tammi Labrecque, is pretty self-explanatory. I mean, it’s all right there in the title! I’ve reached the point in my writing endeavor where I have three books published and would like to attract more attention to my writing. How? Advertising on Facebook or other sites? Well, yes. But I’ve noticed in a lot of author blogs, many of the most successful self-published authors use their mailing lists as a key component of selling books and keeping in touch with readers.
Read MoreWhat I’m Reading: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I haven’t read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream since I was a freshman in college, and when my father recently told me he was re-reading it, I decided to follow suit. It’s a short play, but packs a lot of plot and characters into those relatively few pages. To refresh your own memory: Duke Theseus and Hippolyta (from Greek mythology) are to be married three days hence in Athens. Meanwhile, beauteous Hermia and young Lysander are in love with each other, but Hermia’s father has ordered Hermia to marry Demetrius. As Athenian law requires Hermia to obey her father’s wishes, Theseus decrees that if she won’t marry Demetrius, she must decide whether to be put to death or join a nunnery. For his part, Demetrius is pursued by Hermia’s childhood friend Helena, to whom he had previously proposed, but whom he now despises.
What I’m Reading: The Picture of Dorian Gray
So I read Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest back in high school and found it amusing, but it did nothing to prepare me for this. I mean, I knew the premise of the story, of course–that Dorian Gray has a painting of himself that ages while he remains the same age. But what I didn’t realize is that this is a real horror book, with murder and suspense, even a fairly seedy scene in an opium den.
What I’m Reading: The Mote in God’s Eye
Now this is a great science fiction novel, and simultaneously an illustration of the limits of genre fiction. The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, succeeds at every level as an SF story. The primary character in a very large cast is Captain Blaine of the Imperial Space Navy, who leads an expedition to the Mote, a remote corner of the galaxy where humans, whose empire spans hundreds of worlds, have detected the first intelligence alien species they’ve ever encountered.
What I’m Reading: Perdido Street Station
Perdido Street Station is a book by China Mieville sent to me last Christmas by my brother, who’s getting his Master’s in English literature and recommended this highly. (I have previously, and quite positively, covered a comic series China Mieville wrote, here.) It’s a little bit hard to describe the book because there’s a lot going on in it, but I’ll make a brief attempt to summarize it.
Writing Goals for 2017
Here are my writing goals for 2017:
1) Finish revisions to my short story, La Jolla Ballroom, and submit for writers’ group anthology. This one is done, I did the final revisions this morning.
2) Finish current novel, The Love Machine, by June. I think I’m over halfway done at this point. I’ve been doing editing and revision of each chapter after reading it aloud at my writers’ group, so it (hopefully) will need little revision once I get to the end. June’s pretty ambitious, but I should be able to manage it.
3) In January, complete beta reads for manuscripts. I’m beta reading two novels for fellow authors in my writers’ group.
4) Revise third novel (probably starting in June). Also, come up with a good title for it. My third novel, finished a couple years ago, languishes in limbo. It’s done but needs a a major re-write.
5) Continue work on short stories, including Steader, and others as time permits. I have a short story I started a few months ago titled Steader that I think could be really good. Just need to finish it! Plenty of other ideas for stories floating around too, nothing too well-formed, but lots of things with potential.
5A) But only write short stories if it is something new. I feel like I’ve gotten in a little bit of a rut with my short stories–some of my recent ones have seemed too similar in tone, and too easy for me to write. So I’ve determined only to write short stories that will stretch my writing muscles in some way. For La Jolla Ballroom, it’s using period dialect from the 1930s. For Steader, it’s writing a tense thriller.
