Category: Reading
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Subgenre Defined: Cosmic Horror
As I have said time and time again, I love me a good genre mashup. The more obscure the resulting subgenre, the better. Genre mashups offer a bending or re-imagining of tropes from sometimes wildly opposing creative origins, and are a lot of fun to read and write. Earlier this…
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Paperback vs. Hardcover vs. eBook vs. Audiobook: How Do I Read?
I’ll start by saying, I do not care how someone else receives their stories. I think there are nuanced differences, sure, but I also think that as long as you are consuming stories–and more importantly, understanding them–then how they make their way into your brain is irrelevant. The story is…
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Reader Recs: Cosmic Horror
Hello all! I’m keeping it short this week and trying something I’ve never done on this blog before: putting out a call for your book recommendations! I’m currently working on the outline for my third novel–this one a cosmic horror set in NorCal (in a fictionalized version of the town…
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The Art of Time Travel: How Sci-Fi Has Changed
Over the few years, I’ve found myself reading more classic science fiction than usual. Recently, I read Larry Niven’s Ringworld series for and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama for the first time, followed by Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a favorite of mine from adolescence. While I loved each of them, I couldn’t help but…
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Artemis II & Science Fiction
As a life-long enthusiast of science fiction, science fact, and space exploration as a concept, I have always sort of (and perhaps naively) took it for granted that we would one day go back to the moon. It felt like an inevitability to me. Yet, now that it’s finally happening…
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My Top 5 Sci-Fi Books
I have always been a child of science fiction–which is kind of odd, since neither of my parents were super into it when I was a kid. I don’t know where it came from (though I suspect it was the syndicated Star Trek I watched during the day at my…
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TBR Piles: How I Choose What to Read Next
When I was a little kid, I was a massively avid reader. I would often read three books at a time: whatever I had been assigned for English, and two more for my own pleasure. I consumed books at an incredible rate, and was thus a frequent visitor of my…
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The Yips: How to Break a Reading Slump
As a speculative fiction author, I believe strongly that in order to be a great writer, you must be a great reader. And not just of your preferred genre. You must read wide and often, casting your net as broadly as you can. However, despite that belief, I find myself…
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7 of My All-Time Favorite Books
I’ve been an avid reader since I was young, so there’s no way I could accurately rate every book I’ve ever read. There are definitely some that should be on this list that I have forgotten, and certainly more that I haven’t read yet. So, let’s just call these 7 of my…
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Raye’s Rants: Stories, Politics, and Escapism
We just had a long weekend here in Canada for our Thanksgiving, and it has thrown off my whole work schedule for the week. I usually work on the Mondays of long weekends to avoid that, but this time we took some much needed family time, so I’m a little…
E.S. Raye 