I have learned a thing or two about gambling this past month. The first lesson is: don’t make a wager with your spouse unless you know with certainty that you can win (seriously, this should be a maxim in life). The second is: don’t bet on the film version of a worldwide fantasy classic if you’re limiting…
Sadly, Bilbo and the dwarves have fallen down the dark goblin hole, while the vampires still sparkle in sunlight. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was outperformed at the domestic box office by The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 by around $28 million in the first three weeks. The Twilight film grossed $249,598,866 after its…
Enoch’s Device is now up on Goodreads and Shelfari, so please tell your friends on those sites! Also, the novel is now available on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com. A print version should be available starting in early January. In the meantime, you can check out my new author’s page on Amazon here. It…
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opened this weekend, setting a new December record according to Box Office Mojo. The film earned $84.6 million in the U.S., which is great – but it’s far behind what I need to win my domestic wager. The Hobbit faces a long trek up the Lonely Mountain! The Hobbit’s opening…
The other night, my wife and I made a friendly wager, perhaps a foolish one on my part. She has long been a fan of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and predicted, rather confidently, that the new Hobbit film would never beat out the latest Twilight movie at the box office. I told her she was…
I recently re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the first time in probably ten years. Once I got past the older and awkward narrative viewpoint (in Tolkien’s defense, the omniscient point-of-view was in vogue back in 1937, especially for what was considered a children’s book), I was reminded of how rich and wonderful the story…
The other day I was looking at the top shelf of my bookshelf and realized it contains a number of beautiful hardcover books, but they’re not necessarily my favorite novels (due, in part, to the fact that I keep my Bernard Cornwell novels together, and every book I own of The Warlord Chronicles are all…
I have long been a fan of Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! as an excellent resource on storytelling, and plot in particular. This week, in preparation for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), author Bethany Myers posted an article titled Plot Like A Pro, a creative piece applying Snyder’s 15 elements of story structure to Harry…
The folks at Middle-Earth News previewed two TV spots for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which will debut in December. One of the spots is featured below. You can view the other one here. Meanwhile, Andrew Russo of Scifi Bloggers published an article on the demise of the TV show Heroes titled How Heroes Devolved:…
One of the most interesting bits of news this week concerned a heretofore unpublished poem by J.R.R. Tolkien titled The Fall of Arthur. Middle-Earth News announced this week that the poem will be published in its entirety by Harper Collins on May 23, 2013. For anyone who has read Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and…
Last week, I mentioned how my upcoming novel, Enoch’s Device, was a bit of a journey tale. This was a reference to a series of posts I wrote on Long Journeys about a year ago, during a time when I was travelling constantly, with little time to write. A year later, I find myself in…