Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

New Weird/Bizarro Summer Reading: Want to join me?

Over the next two months I will be researching and reading for an essay I am writing on the New Weird and Bizarro subgenres and their influence on SF/F in the last ten years. The list isn’t terribly long, and does include some older titles for historical reference, but I thought I would see if […]

Amazon (Retailer) vs. Macmillan (Publisher): Epic Battle or Silly Mistake? (Update)

(Some new links and stuff have been added on the bottom.) The short version: Amazon pulled all of Macmillan’s titles (print and otherwise) from their website due, apparently, to the publisher’s desire to raise ebook prices. Speculation says this is because Amazon wants people to buy the Kindle, making higher prices for ebooks bad news […]

One More For the Crazy: How To Ruin Your Career

This will be brief, folks, because you should be reading this post and following the links to the incident rather than wasting time seeing what I have to say. I’m not even the first one to get to this, obviously. The short of it is this:Candace Sams, author of some book whose title sounds idiotic […]

Thoughts On Taking Criticism

These last few days have put a lot of interesting thoughts into my head, particularly on the issue of how to take criticism. I consider this to be a writer’s best skill aside from talent, because how you react to what others say about you or your writing will have an influence on how you […]

GRRM: Tired of Your Crap

…and for good reason. This was brought to my attention by a friend (whose blog I would mention here, except I’m not sure he or she would like me to for very complicated reasons):Apparently GRRM is pretty much sick and tired of all of you out there yelling at him about the lateness of his […]

Atwood Boycotts Dubai

Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature in Dubai will now be down one world-class author after it banned a book containing a gay character. Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, was to be amongst over 60 prestigious authors attending the event, but since the organisers decided to ban Geraldine Bedell’s The Gulf Between Us. In […]