Posts Tagged ‘fiction’

A friend who is in the process of writing a non-fiction book asked me what it takes to get published.  I thought I’d share what I told her.  Call it another data point for anyone in the hunt for working with a publisher.  I also think most of this applies to self-publishing as well. 1. […]

Fear Is The Door To Possibility

Posted: 18th April 2012 by Richard Hacker in Creativity, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , ,

William Kenower spoke at a recent Pacific Northwest Writers Association about the myths that keep us from writing.  He’s a very good engaging, fun speaker.  And he has been blogging about writing for a number of years now, regularly interviewing writers of all genres and measures of success.  The bottom line of his presentation is […]

As an author writing a YA novel I face the conundrum of determining how much graphic sex, violence and profanity my characters will experience in the course of the story.  YA presents a challenge because you’re dealing with a broad spectrum of intellectual and emotional capacity to understand what is being presented.  The distance between […]

I recently caught the movie Jumper on cable (2008) — a bit of Hollywood fluff. One of those movies you tell people to wait for it to come out on DVD. Then out of curiosity, I picked up the novel used as the basis for the movie screenplay, Jumper by Steven Gould. Actually, the word […]

Unless you’ve been living on a small deserted island somewhere in the Pacific, you’ve seen a tremendous change in the publishing industry over the last few years. I’ve found myself in many conversations around books, bookstores, the big chains, the online retailers, and the medium itself. Before we used to beat each other up over […]

Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is the first in a trilogy set in Marseilles. Izzo’s Marseilles takes the city off my list of places to visit. The town, dark, gritty, with a raging undercurrent of bigotry, however, provides fertile soil for a crime thriller. A flawed protagonist moves […]

Art Becomes Life

Posted: 29th June 2011 by Richard Hacker in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , ,

We’ve all heard the saying, “life becomes art.” Recently I had one of those life becomes art moments. On a trip back from Austin, an officer at the security check pulls me out, asking me to identify my backpack. I do, and he proceeds to take me to a search area and pull everything out […]

Sol LeWitt American, born 1928 Four-Sided Pyramid, 1999 I visited Washington DC last week and, as usual, took the opportunity to visit the Mall and some of my favorite museums: The American History Museum, Air and Space Museum, Museum of Art and a stroll through the Museum of Art Sculpture Garden. A mom with her […]

Ah, Time Travel! That magical staple of science fiction. As I ponder my own path through the science fiction landscape, one recurring plot device would have to be time travel. The following is a list of the formative time travel plots, not comprehensive at all and not necessarily in order of quality, but more chronologically that I encountered growing up.