Category: General


Why I’m No Longer Recommending Tuscany Press to Authors

Filed under: Commentary, Industry, Publishing, Science Fiction — 17 Comments
February 12, 2015

EDIT: Since posting this yesterday, several people have privately told me of more issues with Tuscany Press. Some of it has been anecdotal, but others have been verifiable; and it all adds up to an unpleasant picture. The editor-in-chief at Tuscany has told me that the essay I fisked in the following post is opinion and should not be construed as Tuscany’s stance, but he did not address the issue that it was approved by Tuscany despite being obviously wrong. I may do an update on this issue soon.

ANOTHER EDIT: I’ve posted an update on this situation here.

Tuscany Press has been my go-to publishing house to recommend to fellow Catholic authors. I’m associated with Chesterton Press, a smaller indie Catholic Press (my Novel Ninja business is separate and not exclusive to Catholic fiction), but Tuscany is a larger operation and can handle more submissions at a time. However, I’m no longer recommending them, due to a recent post on their subsidiary, CatholicFiction.Net, on why science fiction is evil.  Continue reading →

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Jim Butcher’s New Series — Release Date Announced

Filed under: News and Updates — Leave a comment
February 10, 2015

It should be no surprise to any of you that I’m a bit of a Jim Butcher fan. In fact, if I don’t find anything even better in the meantime, he’s got my top vote for this year’s Hugo Awards. Skin Game was pretty awesome, as you might gather from my review.

Well, he’s been working on a new series for a while, The Cinder Spires, promised to be a steampunk fantasy. That’s a rather broad description but, knowing Butcher, we’ll get a fairly thought-out magic system with a delightful blend of brute-force and subtlety, a complex society buried under a seemingly-simplistic exterior, and a good dose of sarcastic humor.

Oh, and explosions. This book has airships, and the title of the first book is The Aeronaut’s Windlass. If we get through this novel without at least two airship crashes, I’ll be surprised. Jim Butcher tends to be rather hard on his characters’ insurance rates, and airships tend to be ever so fragile.

The release date is September 29th of this year. That’s a Tuesday, in case anyone is scheduling out their time off from work. (*cough* Novel Ninja Freelance Editing does not and will never endorse calling in sick on account of the publication of oh never mind.)  Continue reading →

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Spider-Man is Back with Marvel

Filed under: News and Updates — Leave a comment

Okay, okay, the superhero Spider-Man, a comic book character that predates the X-Men, never left Marvel. Well, except in one respect: Sony bought the movie rights to the character’s franchise back when no one expected superhero movies to be this big and mainstream.

The cinematic rights to Spider-man had been bought in the 80s, and eventually wound up in Sony’s hands. Marvel has reportedly wanted them back now that they’ve been so successful with their “Cinematic Universe,” the collection of shared-world movies (and now two TV shows, Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter) that began with Iron Man in 2008. It’s been a rumor for years now that Marvel might get Spider-man back, or that Sony might relent and recognize the earnings potential that would come with crossovers.

Unlike most pie-in-the-sky, Internet-geek-community rumors . . . this has now been confirmed as true.  Continue reading →

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What If Groundhog Day Were Directed by Jackie Chan?

Filed under: Just For Fun, Writing Tips — Leave a comment
February 2, 2015

Happy Deja Vu Day!

The movie Groundhog Day is famous, and it always gets referenced on February 2nd (at least here in the US, where it’s one of the weirder holidays ever dreamed up before pot was legal). Of course, the movie Edge of Tomorrow is a lot more recent, and has more guns, so maybe that little trend is on the downslide.

Well, here’s something for your relive-each-day enjoyment: two martial arts short films with the same concept. Continue reading →

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A Light in the Darkness

Filed under: Personal — 1 Comment
December 24, 2014

It’s Christmas.228283_564760040220120_6873465_n

I stay away from politics and religion on this blog. I don’t do that because I don’t have any or don’t want to discuss them; on the contrary, as my conversations and posts on other sites bear out, I do indeed have them, and I do indeed discuss them. In fact, I stand firmly behind my literary hero G. K. Chesterton in this regard, who (when he was instructed he could write about anything other than these two subjects) said “There is nothing else worth writing about.”

Rather, I stay away from discussing them (aside from the occasional review) because I don’t want to argue about them. Not, at least, here on this blog, which I have always intended as a source of information about stories, whether written or being written. These two subjects are divisive, despite being — by definition — unitive at the same time.

But I am going to talk for a moment about “the reason for the season.” Not a Jesus lecture, not some sermon about how getting together with a bunch of strangers to read from a 1,700-year-old book of 1,900-plus-year-old words on a cold day is the most important thing you can do on an arbitrary day of the last month of the equally-arbitrary year. It’s not even something Christian, really — or rather, not exclusively Christian. And that’s fine. We celebrate a lot of holidays without having a direct connection to the origin of those celebrations.

I look around, in fact, and see a lot of people celebrating a holiday that belongs to a religion I profess, yet they themselves don’t profess the same beliefs. Sometimes they differ a lot. Other times, just enough to really notice. And as I look around for a common denominator, asking myself why Christmas matters to so many non-Christians, I find myself settling on two ideas: hope and family.  Continue reading →

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Author Earnings Report

Filed under: Industry, News and Updates, Publishing — Leave a comment
July 17, 2014

AuthorEarnings.com has come out with a new Amazon earnings report, and the trends are eye-opening. As they say, it’ll be fascinating to see this go through a full year’s cycle — though at that point I’ll want to see multiple years, because I’m the kind of guy who actually likes charts and stuff. (Oh, and information is good too.)

Continue reading →

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The Reason for the Silence

Filed under: Editing, Personal — Leave a comment
April 30, 2014

So, another long period of no posts? Oh, I’ve been around. You just can’t see me . . .

Actually, a large part of the reason has been that I got an offer on a full-time job that has morphed from being simply a managing editor for a new journal to . . . well, a lot more. My skills as an editor are a large part of it, but my new company is also interested in using me in other ways. It’s really very exciting. I won’t be working with fiction, but it’s really surprising how many ways my creative writing experience is helping to move their project forward.

So what does that mean for this blog, and the Novel Ninja Freelance Editing business? Well, the blog is still going to continue, and I’m still going to accept manuscripts. Odds are, though, that I’m going to be even more picky about what I take on. The new job will mean that I won’t depend on income from NNFE, but I still want to continue with my passion for stories.  Continue reading →

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AwesomeCon, Day One

Filed under: Conventions, Industry, Just For Fun, Personal — 2 Comments
April 18, 2014

As I noted before, AwesomeCon is much bigger this year. I forgot my camera and didn’t want to just use my phone, so I’ll take pictures tomorrow; but I found myself looking around the dealer hall in disbelief. That room alone would convince anyone who didn’t know better that this was an established con, and not something in its second year. The staff and other volunteers were doing a top-notch job, and the convention center staff were extremely helpful to everyone.

Also, I was amused to hear one of the screens playing “Everything is Awesome” (from The LEGO Movie) on continuous loop in the library. Despite its ultimate meaning in the movie, I was still appreciative! Continue reading →

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Dynamically Awesome(Con)

Filed under: Conventions, News and Updates, Personal — Leave a comment
April 16, 2014

ACDClogoThis Easter weekend happens to fall on the third weekend in April, which means only one thing: it’s time to cosplay as the Easter Bunny at AwesomeCon!

. . . okay, I won’t actually be in a bunny costume. But I will be at AwesomeCon. I was invited back to do another presentation at DC’s only genre convention (sorry, otaku, but Katsucon doesn’t count). I’ll be part of a panel this Friday at 4pm, called “Worldbuilding and Fantasy,” and giving a solo talk on Easter Sunday, “Writing Dynamic Characters,” at 11:15am.

I was at AwesomeCon last year, and it was pretty fun. It wasn’t the biggest convention I’ve ever been to (nor was it the smallest), but between what I observed and my brief conversations with Ben Penrod, the convention organizer, I could tell it wasn’t going to be satisfied with a small footprint.  Continue reading →

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March 25: Ring Destruction Day

Filed under: Just For Fun — 6 Comments
March 25, 2014
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Kind of like remembering a messy divorce, only with more epic battles.

That’s right, Tolkien fans! It’s the anniversary of the day when, mumbleteen thousand years ago, Frodo, Sam, and Gollum entered Mount Doom to pitch the One Ring into the fire below.

“Wait,” some of you are asking, “Why did Tolkien use modern dates in a fantasy world like Middle-earth? I mean, I get that it’s supposed to be our super-duper epic forgotten past, but really.”

Yeah, I get that. But you also have to remember that Tolkien was three things, in this order: a proud Catholic, an expert philologist, and a fascinated medievalist. What does all that have to do with March 25th? I’m glad you asked!

Continue reading →

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