Joe Beernink
Author of NOWHERE WILD, NOWHERE HOME
Monthly Archives: December 2010
My introduction to Steam Punk was Cherie Priest’s book Boneshaker which I read back in 2009 after meeting her at the PNWA Conference. I loved it. I then read a Steam Punk anthology of short stories that I didn’t like so much, and I sort of shied away from the genre for a bit. I had heard many good things about Scott Westerfeld’s books, but I hadn’t actually picked one up until… Read More
Judging by the number of people I’ve seen on the train reading Stieg Larsson’s books in the past two years, I know I’m late to the party on this one. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is this first of Larsson’s three published novels starring character Lisbeth Salander, an emotionally troubled woman who has a gift for computer hacking and digging into secrets she shouldn’t know. Mikael Blomkvist is a magazine editor… Read More
I’m a big, big John Scalzi fan. I started reading his blog and his books in early 2010. I haven’t read all his books yet, but I’m getting there. My latest read from his collection is The Android’s Dream. The murder of an alien diplomat puts Earth on the verge of war and likely eradication, and it is up to one man to find the key to preventing an untimely end to… Read More
I think I wrote less this week than I have in any week in the last two years. I’m not exactly sure on that, but since I have no active work in progress, I am strictly in a planning phase for my next book. I refined the synopsis, brain dumped facts and figures for the world I am building, and tried to organize my thoughts on the plot and the characters. I… Read More
I don’t read non-fiction, not related to writing or software development, very often. I will read historical fiction, but in general, I read books in my leisure time to get away from the real world; to immerse myself in a world that may be believable, but I can always hold out hope that these things did not, or could not happen, because they are fiction. Sure, they may be inspired by real… Read More
I slept in this morning. Why? Because I could. Yesterday I finished the first edit of my latest book, now titled Army of the Risen (AOtR). Again, Huzzah! I sent it right to FedexOffice for printing and picked it up late yesterday afternoon. Lisa is reading it as we speak I write this, and I am getting caught up on blog entries. Hence, the flurry of activity here. How did I get… Read More
When you pick up the hardcover edition of The Passage by Justin Cronin, you know you are not going to be able to take this one everywhere you go. It’s huge. It’s heavy. It’s Stephen King-sized. And in a lot of ways, it’s very reminiscent of King’s The Stand. Though I have not read The Stand in twenty years, it still does occupy a haloed place on my bookshelf because it was… Read More
One of my all time favorite books is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. He also wrote one of my least favorite books, Empire. Shadow Puppets falls somewhere in between, though slides more towards the Empire class than Ender’s Game. Card followed up the Ender storyline with a whole series of books about the hero, Ender, and then another series about one of Ender’s Jeesh, Bean. This ‘Shadow’ series includes two books… Read More
This morning I finished another draft of The Forgotten Road. I say another with a very tired voice, because since November of 2009, this is my 10th full edit. I don’t know exactly how many I did before that, but it was at least 4. I started this book in August 2008, before the stock market collapsed, before H1N1, before I had even heard of the PNWA. A lot has happened in… Read More
Joe Beernink 