Aram Zucker-Scharff

How much my novel cost me:

Writing my first book got me into debt. To finish the next one, I had to become solvent

This is an amazing read for a lot of reasons, 
for painting a reality to the insanity of Girls, who’s creator Gould sets up as sort of her foil; 
for being an honest and well-written argument both for and against novel writing (as opposed to the quasi-mystical crap you’ll usually find); 
and for being a sort of snapshot of the literate Millennial.

More than that, it’s fascinating as a sort of counter-narrative to the old stories from our parents: this is no fairy tale, you’re not special, sometimes getting by is more important than starving for the ideal.

Just finished Old Man’s War by John Scalzi: Scalzi’s first novel, it came out in 2006 and so I missed it while I was focusing in on other stuff at the time. It’s a shame I hadn’t spotted it earlier. I picked this one up because of his novel Reds…

EBooks may be on the rise but they have a major flaw. Their greatest obstacle is that they function like paper books, but that’s not how we read. I don’t know why it is that most eBook reading software now insists on using a pages metaphor. We had been forced into a certain format by the requirements of the […]

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