Musings of a Hopeful Author

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons My rating: 2 of 5 stars While I appreciate a clear level of research and attention to detail about the time period, I really didn’t enjoy this book. I felt like the effort to add in so much color and personality from the time and the US made it far too easy and common to lose sight of the point of the book. Yes, the many characters were interesting and it was neat to have a glimpse into their associations and their world, but I feel like it would have been better without tying a mystery into it, or at least better than trying to make it a Holmes mystery. A book about those characters at a weekend party and seeing all of them interacting to solve a crime together would have been better, but dragging it out for so long and adding and taking away people to rehash conversations was a bit much. I also didn't find Holmes particularly likable and thought he was a bit of a name dropper and something of a braggart about his past cases/experiences and not in...

So, as a northern Virginia resident, I am one of the many who was caught in the blizzard and basically snowed in for the last couple of days.  While it has given me some quality alone time... quite a lot, actually, it has also reminded me of my writing goals and shortcomings in meeting those goals.  While I have not been super productive on the writing front since finishing the first draft of my angels story, I have not been completely unproductive.  I have sent drafts to a few folks for feedback.  I've gotten some good general feedback so far, and still have a few folks left to hear from before taking a second swing at the next draft. Until then, however, I have continued to make progress on my interview story.  It's not that far along just yet, but personalities are definitely starting to develop and scenes are being set for overall flow of the story.  I'm thinking it will be about 20-25 chapters long with most of those being driven by interview questio...