Category Archives: Books

Giving away some ebooks

Posted on 2020-04-26 by Garrett Wollman

Long time no see, blog fam! I wish I could blame the COVID-19 situation for my lack of posting so far this year, but in fact I’ve had very limited energy at all this whole year, and indeed going back … Continue reading →

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My decade, 2010–2019

Posted on 2020-01-01 by Garrett Wollman

Attention conservation notice: about 8,500 words about me and what I did for the past ten years, what I previously wrote about that, and how I feel in hindsight. Minimally edited, rather disjointed, and jumps around in time a lot … Continue reading →

Posted in Administrivia, Books, Computing, Food, sports, States of mind, Transportation, travel | Tagged , | Comments Off on My decade, 2010–2019

Quote of the Day

Posted on 2017-03-07 by Garrett Wollman

This past weekend, I read a couple of YA novels that took the standard fairy-tale premise of “the prince saves the princess and they lived happily ever after” and turn it around into “the princess saves the princess (and whether … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, States of mind | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day

Sitting here after spending another late morning abed with a book, I came to think for a moment: those authors whose books meant so much to me when I was growing up, they are as much older than me now … Continue reading →

Posted on 2017-03-05 by Garrett Wollman | Comments Off on Reflections

Cookbooks are said to be the hottest category in trade publishing right now, but it’s probably a stretch to say they’re “taking over”. However, I wasted quite a bit of time creating the following (somewhat silly) table, counting the number … Continue reading →

Posted on 2016-12-27 by Garrett Wollman | Comments Off on Are cookbooks taking over publishing?

Quote of the day

Posted on 2016-09-17 by Garrett Wollman

(A teacher in a sorcery school is giving an impromptu lecture:) “Each of you may live a long time; each of you is of significant strength. You could do good, if you could judge all the consequences of what you … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Law & Society | Tagged , | Comments Off on Quote of the day

Advice for fantasy writers, from a reader (Originally published as a sequence of tweets in slightly different form.) Let the story go where it needs to go. Don’t fill in too much of the background. Remember that, if you’re successful, … Continue reading →

Posted on 2016-09-16 by Garrett Wollman | Comments Off on Advice for fantasy writers

I first became aware of Graydon Saunders many years ago, through the intercession of (or perhaps collaboration with) Welsh-Canadian fantasy writer Jo Walton. While it was as a poet that I knew him, he apparently works in IT (specifically document-processing … Continue reading →

Posted on 2016-09-04 by Garrett Wollman | Comments Off on Go buy these books

Somehow, the question came up on alt.usage.english of the distribution of author surnames (in people’s personal libraries) over the letters of the alphabet. Since I have a library database, I came up with the followng crazy query to answer this … Continue reading →

Posted on 2015-08-05 by Garrett Wollman | Comments Off on From the “Pointless SQL Queries” file…

2014 in review: new books

Posted on 2014-12-30 by Garrett Wollman

It seems to be a custom for bloggers, like journalists, to write end-of-the-year pieces. I’ve been writing this for more than a year now, so I figure that’s sufficient to consider it a real thing. I’m going to start, though, … Continue reading →

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