Fellow author Denver Wilson and I talk about novel lengths over the years. Thanks to the good people at Confusion for producing this series of podcasts. The last graph shown in the podcast: Here are the links discussed in the podcast: •https://capitalizemytitle.com/famous-book-series-and-novel-word-counts/ •http://www.kruegerbooks.com/books/best-sellers/index.html •https://discoverscifi.com/the-top-10-greatest-sci-fi-writers/ •https://www.isfdb.org/ •Ray’s Substack posts on the…
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How Do You Read?
Two-timing, and more. Essay. 800 words, 4-minute read. How Do You Read? By Ray Tabler. How do you read books? That is, do you read one book at a time? Or do you have a number of books going all at once, skipping between as the mood takes you? Personally,…
Trigger Words
Bookends of storytelling. Essay. 600 words, 3-minute read. Trigger Words By Ray Tabler Once upon a time… Those are magical words. Words to conjure with, to conjure within a listener’s head. Throughout the history of storytelling there have always been specific phrases to signal leaving this world and entering another….
Fictional and Fraudulent Memoirs
A wink and a nod. Essay. 1200 words, 6-minute read. Fictional and Fraudulent Memoirs By Ray Tabler Publishing, as we currently think of the term, is a relatively recent development. Before Gutenberg’s handy dandy book-producing machine literature had to be hand copied by monks, scholars, and scribes on to specially…
Parcel Post
Mostly fact. Essay. 700 words, 4-minute read. Parcel Post By Ray Tabler I’m a firm believer that a writer of fiction will struggle to outdo real life in terms of unlikely incidents. As the old saying goes, fact is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense. For example,…
Don’t Quit Your Day Job (encore)
A little meditation on working (and playing) for a living. Essay. 1000 words, 5-minute read. This is an essay I first posted in March of 2024, the prehistory of my time on Substack. I think it’s still relevant today. Don’t Quit Your Day Job By Ray Tabler Lately, I find…
Ghostwriting
With “real” ghosts. Essay. 1000 words, 5-minute read. Ghostwriting By Ray Tabler The famous physicist Richard Feynman maintained that the entire universe consists of nothing more than interacting fields of various types. According to Feynman matter, the stuff that makes up you and me and everything else, is simply particularly…
Tears in the Rain
Laughing at fate. Essay. 600 words, 3-minute read. Tears in the Rain By Ray Tabler I am a hopeless optimist. Anyone who has read my books will note that. As my mother told me, there’s a silver lining to every cloud, no matter how darn deep you have to dig…
Art Literature & AI
Change is in our wheelhouse. Essay. 1400 words, 7-minute read. Art Literature & AI By Ray Tabler AI, or large language models, are scaring a lot of people. Understandably so. A good portion of the unease around what we are stuck calling AI stems from the dishonest manner in which…
Licking the Yogurt Lid
Efficient character revelation. Essay. 800 words, 4-minute read. Licking the Yogurt Lid By Ray Tabler Recently, I had a dentist appointment. Because I’ve had both knees replaced, that means I need to choke down 4 horse-pill-sized capsules of amoxicillin an hour before the procedure. Bacteria shook loose from my teeth…