#Commercial Fiction

[rozmorris]

Your first pages - 4 more book openings critiqued at @Litopia by literary agent @agentpete author @anniesummerlee and me!

I’ve just guested again at Litopia, the online writers’ colony and community. Each week they have a YouTube show, Pop-Up Submissions, where four manuscripts are read and critiqued live on air by literary agent Peter Cox @agentpete and a guest, or sometimes two. This time the other guest was longtime Litopian Annie Summerlee @anniesummerlee , who has published short stories in a range of online…

[sparrowthemockingbard]

The Sentinel, by Andrew Child and Lee Child - With Bonus Jack Reacher Short Story “Long Arms”

Reacher goes back in time to fight Nazi and Stalinist spies in modern-day rural America in this joint effort by Andrew and Lee Child. Bonus Jack Reacher Short Story at the end!

A few months ago, we reviewed Blue Moon, the last Jack Reacher book written solely by Lee Child. This was a turning point for Jack Reacher, and all of his future escapades will be written by Andrew Child. The Sentinel was written by both authors, as a transition novel. I’m one of those readers who loves a good mystery/thriller series. When I first discovered Jack Reacher (in Nothing to Lose) I…

[thepenmuse]

Cover Reveal: The Walk-On

Cover Reveal: The Walk-On

  Commercial Fiction Date Published: February 23, 2023 Publisher: Acorn Publishing     In the twilight of his NFL career as a middle linebacker for the Chicago Storm, Mike “the Steelman” Stalowski masks his physical pain and mental anguish with alcohol and painkillers. The fan favorite has a rebel image and a notorious reputation, and he plays a violent gridiron game fueled by inner…

[bookjunkiez]

The Walk-On Cover Reveal

The Walk-On Cover Reveal

  Commercial Fiction Date Published: February 23, 2023 Publisher: Acorn Publishing     In the twilight of his NFL career as a middle linebacker for the Chicago Storm, Mike “the Steelman” Stalowski masks his physical pain and mental anguish with alcohol and painkillers. The fan favorite has a rebel image and a notorious reputation, and he plays a violent gridiron game fueled by inner…

[spockvarietyhour]

Vehicles and Stations in Ad Astra: International Space Antenna Virgin Commercial Flight (under the banner of Virgin Atlantic) Lunar Rover Pirate Rover Cepheus Vesta IX Mars Rover Cepheus Pod Lima Project

[hotcomicstv]

Otomo Complete Works 8 review

[colorisbyshe]

this post is so funny to me because like... no... every gender/sexuality is writing the worst romance imaginable. commercial romance and honestly... indie romance is 99.999% slop. often fun slop, like get me a second bowl of it slop, but... slop.

and, yes, Gender-Norms-Are-Killing-Us-All type slop, too. even in the gay shit. even in the trans shit. even when they're Own Voices written and consulted.

romance is a low barrier to entry type genre that caters even more to wish fulfillment and tropes than other genres and... well... a lot of that stuff is propped up by things like heteronormativity and things adjacent to that

bisexuals and other gay people can't save the genre.... not even the insane ones

like... commercial romance is always gonna fall into... appealing to the widest base of consumers i'm sorry!

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[dadvans]

hobbies.

whenever i'm facing writer's block, i re-open the fic that is the easiest for me to write without thinking, which is my would-be-about-as-historically-accurate-as-it-could-get-if-it-weren't-omegaverse oregon trail PWP AU (normal), and instead of posting anything, i just keep adding more pretending there isn't a john mulaney-coded voice in my head saying "...could be a series"

[terminallyworkingonit]

I wish the Mythbusters were real cause then I could ask them to test if Serena Williams can deflect an RPG with a tennis racket if she swings hard enough.

[viillette]

it's so crazy how few historical fiction novels are like sharon kay penman's. the way that they're built out of the skeleton of the historical record seems so obvious, but there's so few people who are actually willing to commit to it in the way that she did. it seems like so often that's just a starting point which gets reformed to fit a coherent narrative, but she makes no real attempt to do that. there's themes and foils and patterns, but first and foremost it is a reconstruction. you can't really know what someone who lived that long ago was like, only what they did, and you can feel how she takes these isolated, dramatic events and builds a whole life around them. the books are nothing more than an answer to the question 'what might someone have been like, what could the history between these people have been, to possibly explain something like this?' the ability to string together a handful of facts and events from medieval chronicles to create people that feel so real, and psychology and relationships that develop so naturally that these distant, seemingly impenetrable choices suddenly feel so immediate and clear is just beyond belief. you know this probably wasn't actually how things happened, but it doesn't matter because it was something like this. the particulars are less important the crushing awareness that at one point all of this made sense. there was a time when all of this was right now. the world is unrecognizable and exactly the same. that's something which sounds very simple but is incredibly difficult to accomplish.

you come to know these people so well, their loves and hatreds and ambitions and failures, and those things are rarely resolved in the end. you know them from the time that they're children, you watch each one of them die, and none of it means anything in particular except that they were a human being. things which seem like they must be building to some tragic fallout end in anticlimax. things which seem utterly inconsequential in the moment manifest again decades later in cataclysmic disaster. and then you see it all play out again from the beginning with their children, and their children's children. all these uncanny echoes, this endlessly unfolding palimpsest of lives, each laid over the triumphs and mistakes of those who came before. i've never read anything so epic with so much mastery over the micro and macro levels of history. it's the minute, seemingly inconsequential everyday details, which build into a lifetime, which builds into generation of lives, which builds into the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires. it's the merciless endlessly turning wheel of fortune that replays the same songs in different keys again and again for all time. a person is both an individual with free will, and the prisoner of their blood and circumstances. somehow everything has infinite weight, is tied to everything that has come before and will come after, is the culmination of someone's entire existence—their pains and joys and fears and hopes—and yet is simultaneously completely meaningless, just one more victim of fate in an endless procession of lives and choices. the whole impotent tragedy of humanity is laid out in front of you and it's so repulsive and beautiful. it's deep love and unfathomable, senseless horror briefly and miraculously reverberating in a vacuum, an absurd aberration fading into silence.

if it's not obvious these books have made me cry like 10 different times

[beesarthur]

Shrinking (2023) is about grief: the grief of a sudden death, the anticipatory grief of having a progressive disease, the grief you do or don't (let yourself) feel when a relationship ends. It's about life stages, and growing up, and growing old. It's about therapy and friendship and being a mentor (or a grumpy surrogate grandfather). It's about figuring out who you want to be for yourself and for others, and how you can get there. It's about the dual relationships we make along the way. It's (not) about safe dick. It's about the coping mechanisms that don't work and the ones that do. It's about relationships with dads and relationships to being a dad. It's about hydration. It's about rocks. It's about making new friends as adults who thought they didn't like each other. It's about marriage, and what it is and isn't and can be. It's about wearing your mom's heels. It's about hiking, and what you wear hiking, and the things that happen while hiking.

[ziskandra]

listen, listen

I know this is gonna be a controversial take, but the more I think about it, the more obsessed I am with the idea of Varric voluntarily helping The Crimson Knight (especially in a worldstate where Hawke was left in the Fade).

I’ve talked before about how I view Meredith as the type of person who is motivated by her desire to protect her own at all costs, and how this leads her down the path of Well-Intentioned Extremism, and culminating in becoming the embodiment of the uh, Knight Templar trope.

And Varric is obviously motivated by his motivation to protect Hawke: he shielded them from the Inquisition, and when push came to shove and he was forced to expose Hawke to the Inquisition anyway, it can result in Hawke’s death. The Inquisition fails Hawke, who is basically Varric’s moral compass — without Hawke’s influence, he defaults to siding with the templars at the end of DA2.

Most of the Inquisitor’s inner circle scatters over Thedas and Varric returns to Kirkwall. Varric loves Kirkwall; he’s a Kirkwaller through and through: even though he’s never envisioned nor wanted a life of politics, he becomes the fucking viscount, because there’s nobody else left who wants one drop of the poisoned chalice of that role.

And Kirkwall is a city that has always been dependent on its templars for protection. They are the city’s military force, and the city is noticeably weaker once the templars abandon it — depending on world state, it can lose a significant portion of its territory to one of Varric’s former companions. If someone he knew and trusted can do that to Kirkwall, who else might take advantage of Kirkwall in its weakened state?

Varric is isolated and alone, away from anyone who might be able to help him see the situation in a different light: his main support network is Aveline and Seneschal Bran, neither of whom are known for their ardent support of mage rights. They’re doing their best to clear Kirkwall of the impacts of the war, of the red lyrium, and even though they’re doing their best to avoid exposure, being around that much red lyrium cannot be healthy. Slowly, the paranoia and increased penchant for violence settle in. It becomes impossible to resist spending more time around the substance — and sometimes, it talks! And it sounds like Meredith Stannard.

Varric is desperate and scared and has lost everyone he has ever loved. The Inquisition has been downsized or disbanded, and his only purpose is to serve his city: the same intention with which Meredith started, the same intention and fears that the red lyrium feeds upon in them both.

Varric fears becoming his parents: people who failed to protect him because they were too caught up in their past mistakes.

But sometimes, as people, in our attempts to avoid our fears, we end up barreling into them headfirst instead.

[spockvarietyhour]

Babylon 5 Commercial, January 1994