August | 2016 | Author Scott Dyson

Well, according to most of the spam I get, you can expect to find “excellently reliable information that I will return often to be able to read and interact.”

(EMPTY SPAM – CLICK)

Okay, that’s enough of that.

So what do I actually blog about? I don’t exactly have a theme. I’m a writer, but I rarely blog about the writing process. I’ve never really taken courses in fiction writing. What I know is what I know from my own reading. I’ve read a lot, and fairly broadly. I read cozy mysteries, hard-boiled mysteries, suspense thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, young adult, middle grade, comedy, biography, political analysis (though not much), economic analysis (also not that much), and even a bit of romance now and then. (I confess that I’ve read Nora Roberts and Diane Gabaldon among others.)

I like movies,but these days I see so few that I rarely blog about them. I tend to like most everything, so I’m a terrible reviewer. I doubt that people can form too many opinions from reading about my reactions to films. Maybe some, but as I said, I am mostly positive about stuff I watch.

I read a lot, so I tend to put up book reports/reviews on here. When I find a new author, or read something that I enjoy (which is a lot of stuff) I like to share it. Whether anyone’s reading it is another story.

I love music, have played music most of my life, and have listened to a wide variety of music pre-2K. (Some of the stuff I hear these days doesn’t much sound like music, and there is so much stuff out there now that I’ve never heard of…) I don’t often blog about music, but I will bet that for every new artist that I haven’t heard of, I can name one that hardly anyone else has heard of.

So, in answer to that title question, it’s not really about any of those things…but it could be about any of those things on a given day, in a specific post.

Mostly I want to make people aware about what I’m publishing, and since I haven’t put anything new out since last spring (2015), I haven’t posted too much. (But look for something coming up…including the addition of a newsletter, as soon as I can take enough time to figure out how to do it.)

But every so often I’ll get on a roll and post a bunch of stuff about something that interests me. Hopefully it interests someone else as well!

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PS: A post-apocalyptic novel from author M.P. McDonald, INFECTION, is free today! If you like that sort of thing, she’s a very good author and it promises to be an interesting story! I just downloaded it myself…

Whoa, it’s been almost a month since I posted anything here.

I’ve been writing a little, trying to get my ducks in a row for some sort of concerted effort to release four novellas/novels within a short time. Working on my post-apocalyptic novel, which is part The Stand and part Wool. (There are three ways to survive this apocalypse. 1. Build a shelter. 2. Be immune to this virus. 3. Be invited.) Reworking blurbs for those three novellas and one novel.

But I’ve been reading.

A short time ago, I posted that I’d read, and was impressed with, Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One. I finished his second novel, a mashup of alien movie themes and stories, titled Armada. I enjoyed it, not quite as much as the debut, but it was still a lot of fun. Aliens are coming to destroy us, but we’ve known about it for the last forty years and have been preparing for the invasion. And guess what? We train our drone pilots by having them play video games. Does that sound familiar? Maybe something like The Last Starfighter? It borrows, or pays homage, to that film along with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact and others. It kept me (and my son) reading once we got into it.

I also picked up another book, one I’ve had sitting on the bookshelves since before Borders closed its doors (it still had the Borders sticker on it) called WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer. I’ve always enjoyed Sawyer’s works, and this one ended up being really good. A blind girl with a very specific and rare type of blindness gets an implant which allows the visual signals to be altered and transmitted through the optic nerve, and it also allows her to “see” the World Wide Web. Through her enhanced awareness of the Web, she becomes aware of something – some entity – lurking in the background of that network, and whatever it is, it’s learning and becoming more aware of itself. Interesting premise, well-executed, with good characters and a setup for future books. I may read in in the three book series at some point.

My ebook reading included Fatally Bound by Roger Stelljes, a thriller featuring a couple of too-good-to-be-true sleuths/agents. I liked it, and it worked on a number of levels as they work the investigation alongside an FBI task force to locate a serial killer who is targeting various women who seem to have no common features or connections between them. Also I read another installment in Boyd Craven’s The World Burns serial, this the seventh story, titled The World Cowers. I have come to know and care about his characters and I want to find out where he’s ultimately going with the tale. Also finished Sleep Tight by Anne Frasier, another serial killer thriller, and also a pretty good read. And I read Edward W. Robertson’s third Rebel Stars book, titled Ronin. Enjoyed it quite a bit. Good space opera.

There are others, but that’s a good summary of some of the books I’ve been reading.

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