Joe Beernink
Author of NOWHERE WILD, NOWHERE HOME
Monthly Archives: July 2011
This is one of those lazy, hazy, summer weekends. Run a few errands. Pull a few weeds in the garden. Cut the grass. Play some video games with the kids. Read a book or two. Watch a movie. It’s time to rest, and to relax. Perhaps even to chill. Because there won’t be another one like it for the next two months. The PNWA convention is next weekend. The following weekend, we… Read More
The 2011 PNWA Conference is less than a week away now. If you haven’t got your tickets yet, check out http://www.pnwa.org and see what you can get. I’m going to be moderating two sessions this year. First, on Friday afternoon at 1:30 PM, I’ll be sitting down with Author Nancy Kress talking about how to Write Successful Science Fiction and Fantasy. Nancy is the author of the Hugo and Nebula award nominated… Read More
I’ve read a lot of Bernard Cornwell’s books over the last few years. I love learning about history by reading fictionalized accounts. I don’t usually worry about the accuracy of how Cornwell portrays certain historical figures. If I really wanted to know about King George or General Wellington, I would read a biography. Cornwell’s strength is in the details of battle and the strategies and tactics used during each era. He puts… Read More
Becoming an author these days is so much more than just writing. Let me rephrase that. Becoming a successful, published author these days is so much more than just writing. You need to be be better at editing than ever before because the publishing houses have so few resources available to do that for you. You need to know how to find an agent, or failing that, know how to self-publish. Writing… Read More
I picked up this book at a grocery store while on vacation in Canada. I had read myself through the book I had planned to keep me busy for the entire trip (Jasper Fforde’s The Big Over Easy). The store had a very limited collection, and I was in a big hurry. The front cover looked pretty good. I thought this was a straight serial killer-murder mystery. Was I ever wrong. I… Read More
I’m currently reading a book about building your writing platform. A writing platform isn’t a physical structure per say – its your marketing base; your audience’s perception of you as a writer, how they find you, and how publishers evaluate your marketing base when you come to them with a book. It’s a lot of work to do build this platform, and do it well. The author of the book points out… Read More
I posted a book review yesterday over on my other, slightly neglected blog site DevScape for a technical book called The Nomadic Developer by Aaron Erickson. The book, and the blog, are both worth a read if you have any technical interests . I generally won’t post links to technical articles I write here (I can get very geeky), but since it’s a book review, I’ll make an exception, just this once.
On Friday afternoon, my wife loaded up the kids and headed over the mountains to my in-laws for the weekend. For the first time since my kids were born four and a half years ago, I had the house to myself for the weekend, and wasn’t working! I also had no writing projects I needed to get done, and no project around the house I needed to take care of. In short,… Read More
I will admit that until John Scalzi wrote Fuzzy Nation, I had never heard of Little Fuzzy or even H. Beam Piper. Piper wrote Little Fuzzy back in 1962 and was nominated for a Hugo Award. As the story goes, Little Fuzzy was one of John Scalzi favorite books of his younger years, and when another writing project fell apart, John decided to reboot this series for fun. This is not a… Read More
It’s been nearly a month since my last true status update on my writing. But don’t worry, I have plenty of excuses for not giving you the news I know you want to know. 1) I’ve been working on a super secret project that has consumed all of my allotted writing time. Blogging fell to the bottom of the list. The project is done now, but I still can’t talk about it…. Read More
Joe Beernink 