Book Reviewing and Blogging

Recently, a fair amount of discussion (and debate) on book reviewing and blogging made its way across the SF&F blogosphere. I found this discussion intriguing and informative, and so wanted to collect and organize the various comments here.

Author Mark Charan Newton cast the first stone with his blog post, What Makes a Good Book Blogger? (From a Writer's Point of View).

Some book bloggers/reviewers responded (reading the comments for these posts expands the discussion significantly):

• King of the Nerds

• Fantasy Book News & Reviews

• Neth Space

• The World in the Satin Bag

The discussion also led to blog posts on the issue of reviewing from 2008:

• OF Blog of the Fallen: 1 March 2008 and 10 December 2008

• Jeff VanderMeer (29 March 2008)

• Hal Duncan (8 June 2008)

Finally, James at Speculative Horizons posted his excellent and helpful tips on blogging and reviewing: Things I've learned about blogging.

A Response to Ted Gioia's "Notes on Conceptual Fiction"

Source: Gioia’s essay can be read here. I was originally linked to it from SF Signal. See some discussion about Gioia’s essay here.

I feel the need to respond to Ted Gioia’s essay “Notes on Conceptual Fiction” because it represents bad criticism, even if its heart is in the right place. Gioia’s terminology proves suspect and unstable, and his categories and grounds of judgement in the end commit the same fallacies as those he critiques. Most importantly, as much as Gioia argues for the importance of SF&F to fiction of the last century or so, which he is correct to do, he ultimately does a disservice to SF&F by attempting to value it on its own terms, in contradistinction to broader, traditional terms of literary merit.

Read more . . .

Keys to Publishing

I came across the following podcasts rather belatedly, but enjoyed them nonetheless. The series is "Keys to Publishing," and it was presented by Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing and I Should Be Writing, involving words of wisdom from various published SF&F authors. Here are the links to the relevant podcasts:

• Key #1 (Persistence): AISFP 56

• Key #2 (Commitment): ISBW 94

• Key #3 (Balance): AISFP 58

• Key #4 (Market Awareness): ISBW 96

• Key #5 (Feedback): AISFP 59

• Key #6 (Write More): ISBW 97

Lots of sage advice in these keys, boiling down to keep writing and write often, understand the market, and revise smartly.

Bits that really stick with me, as I ponder starting to write SF&F: to be a writer and get published, you must be "extraordinarily, bloody persistent"; those who lose faith are unpublished novelists; make writing a kind of regimen or habit, doing it every day, whether 300 or 1000 words; if you're not actively trying to sell your work, writing is just a hobby; "write harder, faster, deeper, slower" -- i.e., write constantly and work your way through blocks.

Many thanks to AISFP and ISBW for this series.

Best of 2008 Lists

Some "Best of 2008" lists are out for SF&F:

• Locus Online's 2008 Recommended Reading List

• The SF Site's Best Read of the Year in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Editors' Choice)

• The SF Site's Readers' Choice Best Read of the Year ...

There is some intriguing overlap between Locus and The SF Site: Iain M. Banks, Matter; Greg Bear, City at the End of Time; Cory Doctorow, Little Brother; Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book; Neal Stephenson, Anathem (by most accounts, the SF novel of the year, and perhaps one of the most significant novels of 2008 in general); Michael Swanwick, Dragons of Babel; and others.

I have Anathem in the on-deck circle, and I am interested in the Banks and Bear novels (just purchased Bear's Darwin's Radio); Swanwick seems worth checking out, especially because I see that his short stories in particular are consistently garnering Hugo/Nebula nominations.

UPDATE: Over at Realms of Speculative Fantasy is a 5-part summary of several "best of" lists culled from various blogs and web sites. Certainly a Herculean task, and much appreciated. Here are the links to each part: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6.