There are many tropes. Busty, blonde damsels. Brittle, brunette mistresses. Feisty, red-headed warriors. Alternatively: White-Male-Hero-With-Somnolent-Eyes-Yet-Aerodynamic-Cheek-Bones vs. Anything. Or the ever-plotless vengeance against a villain with no real motivation for villainy save an inscrutable need to inconvenience Our Hero. We know these tropes well. They’re practically family. If one came to your door and asked to come in, you might check for a judicious nod from your mother, but you’d open that door.
urban fantasy
Book Review: Proxy by Alex London
Alex London’s Proxy is probably one of the coolest concepts I’ve encountered in a while. I feel like most dystopian societies resemble one another in their foundation of a oppressive system, but rarely am I as captivated by a dystopia as I was with Proxy. Reading this book was an act of investigation, not only because I wanted to find out what happened next but because the world of Proxy is created with such vivid detail, and with such sound world-building, that it feels nearly tactile. There are some coercive plot devices that make the book feel a tad unstable, and sure, I wasn’t really swayed by either the romance or the twists, but these are easy to overlook when the rest of Proxy was so good.
Beta Reading 2
Two updates!
Beta Reading
Sometime last month I sent a preliminary draft of KMDC to a writer friend who has literally witnessed this project from the very beginning. And about a week ago I sent off the beta draft of KMDC to a few trusted ladies up in Boston. My parents currently have copies loaded on their kindles, and, to complete my Arsenal of Critique, I’ve enlisted another novelist in a trade of manuscripts. (the lovely J.M. Johnson, who you should follow on Twitter. Also, check our her blog).
Here at the Bottom
When I write, I generally keep a scene outline at the bottom of my document. As I figure things out and make edits, this outline tends to accumulate into a chapter outline, then a section outline, then eventually a book outline. It looms beneath my cursor like some sort of stupid, static dirigible, feeding me hints as I encroach on its content, and bumping itself down obediently as I progress.