Malasz

Amazon link Meet Hess and Elza. Like Nick and Nora, Harry and Sally, Pat and Tiffany, they're a memorable couple, trading wisecracks and getting out of difficult situations. The difference with Hess and Elza is that they're linked eternally, through countless Iterations of worlds. They are Observers, a handful of humanoids sent by a Creator to observe His/Her/Its world (though, if this Creator is so omnipotent, why does “He/She/It” need anybody to do the observing for “Him/Her/It”?). Other Observers go through their Iterations as different genders, but Hess and Elza are always a man and a woman. They constantly snipe at each other, each accusing the other of “participating” in the world too much. They seem to be the only Observers with empathy. Like other Observers, they can die, but are dead only temporarily. Every time one pops up in a different Iteration, they seek the other. It is much more difficult in preliterate and even pre-Internet worlds. Other Observers, who do much ...

We've finally done it. The New Podler Review of Books has taken its first step into social media. You can now find us on GooglePlus . So why did it take us so long? Because no one wanted to do it. Back when the blog's namesake founder was here, site promotion was his responsibility. There was a MySpace page, but when he went AWOL that page stagnated and died. And then MySpace died too when everyone abandoned it for Facebook. While MySpace has come back from the dead as some music and movie industries promo monster, its new form is alien to us. So that left the members of the Podler Staff to handle PR. Yes, we received your invites to friend you on Facebook but no one wanted the responsibility of managing a Facebook page. I abhor Facebook because I'm an anti-social curmudgeon. Excuse me a second. Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn! Where was I? Oh yeah, Facebook. So while I hate it, the others all have busy lives and didn't need the extra time suck. So why are we now on G...

Grab a comfy chair by the fire, a hot drink, and a book of good horror stories.  Those rattling shutters outside?  Just the blowing snow.  Those shadows dancing in the corner?  Fire light, nothing more.  And the whispers behind your chair are your imagination. Maybe. That’s the feeling Mark Fuller Dillon conveys throughout his short story collection In a Season of Dead Weather . In most of the stories, it was never quite clear whether the “horror” was in the narrator’s mind or if it was real. The reader was left to interpret at the end. And that worked for me. Each Lovecraftian tale was expertly crafted, with poetic and visceral language describing characters enduring the loneliness and isolation of a long winter in the country or the city. Dillon is a Quebec native, so he’s no stranger to maddeningly endless winters (I’m a west Michigan native, so I can sympathize). Most of the stories were quite literary and a little confusing to me, a genre reader. But t...

Legend has it that Shakespeare's play, Macbeth , is cursed . As such, the superstitious who work on the play will refer (and insist others do the same) to it as "The Scottish Play". Many have speculated as to the reason, but Harry Greenville writes a novel with his own explanation: the Bard stole the idea from someone else. Shakespeare's victim then sets out to exact revenge through sabotage. Greenville, an aspiring actor living in L.A., makes the mistake of uploading it to a website where it is pilfered. When Greenville learns that his story is being made into a movie, he sets out to exact revenge of his own. There's such a superb attention to detail here that I would swear that Collis worked on a movie set at one point in his life or he performed a mind meld with someone who did. Collis introduces us to the boredom of limo drivers, the humiliating subservience of runners, the brown nosing of the wannabes, and the egos of Hollywood's lords. But at no point d...

It has been a long standing tradition of independent publishing that lousy book covers were the norm. So many authors shunned investing any money in their covers that they doomed themselves to ridicule (at best) or obscurity. While it might not necessarily be prudent to judge a book by its cover, all too often it was a safe bet that a crappy cover meant crappy writing. Potential readers chuckled and moved on. In defense of the mass of indie authors who chose low quality covers, the big stumbling block to a quality cover was price. Spending five hundred to a thousand dollars on a cover for a book that would be exceptionally lucky to earn $100 for the author was an investment most chose not to make. When I scored a cover for my novel for $200, I was psyched. But I'm here to tell you today that everyone can have a professional looking cover for $200 or even much less. I was relating my tale of book cover design woe (which I'll share in a later post) with my friend and fellow ind...

Greetings, fellow bibliophiles! Today I have the pleasure of introducing you all to Mike Gullickson, author of The Northern Star:  The Beginning. Erin aka The Bookworm: "Thank you for agreeing to do this interview! First, Tell us about what inspired the story?" Mike Gullickson: “A lot of my novels start with images that pop in my head. I wish I could draw. My mom insists I can, but she’s referencing dinosaurs from 4th grade and that’s when I peaked. For The Northern Star , I distinctly remember when it came into existence. It occurred about ten years ago while I was listening to Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong.” There’s a line in the song: There is no future left at all/That I know (I checked. It’s actually “There is no future left at all/That I think,” but it’s too late to go back, I heard “that I know” for the last decade.) And that line haunted me with imagery that became The Northern Star . The story changed significantly since those first images, but that’s how it began...

el·lip·sis – noun \i-ˈlip-səs, e-\ a : the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete;  b : a sudden leap from one topic to another : marks or a mark (as …) indicating an omission (as of words) or a pause The above definition is taken from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Since I’ve begun to read indie author works, I’ve noticed that writers seem to be in love with these three little dots. So much so that they misuse them all the time. At first, I thought it was just one book or author but after ten plus books where 75% of them misuse the ellipsis, I feel the need to step in. The main use of an ellipsis is to shorten a quotation or to show a trailing off in speech. Here is an example of each. For the quotation, let’s take a simple quote from Cicero: Original – “A friend is, as it were, a second self.” Ellipsisfied – “A friend is... a second self.” Notice that is replaces an unnecessary po...