Ace: aceofspadeshq at gee mail.com
Buck: buck.throckmorton at protonmail.com
CBD: cbd at cutjibnewsletter.com
joe mannix: mannix2024 at proton.me
MisHum: petmorons at gee mail.com
J.J. Sefton: sefton at cutjibnewsletter.com
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
AoSHQ Writers Group
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published.
Contact OrangeEnt for info: maildrop62 at proton dot me
Sunday Morning Book Thread - 11-30-2025 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]
Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading (don't knock it 'til you've tried it!). Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...
So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, finish off that pumpkin pie, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?
PIC VIDEO NOTE
I admire the dedication of the curators at Montpelier for their attempt to reconstruct the full library of James Madison. By the time of hid death in 1836 he had an extensive collection of over 4000 books. However, many of them have been lost to the mists of time.
STICK THE LANDING!
Patrick provides some useful advice to writers on how to end their books. He breaks his advice into the following patterns he's seen when analyzing book endings:
Rushed resolution - Does the book wrap up its main conflict too soon? Patrick says that the resolution should take up approximately as much space as the setup in the beginning. This is more a guideline than an absolute, though, as I've read many satisfying stories that were resolved in a fairly short amount of time, but were a slow burn at the beginning. The key, as always, is whether or not the reader will walk away satisfied by the ending. Give the reader some breathing space at the end, especially if the book is emotionally intense in the middle section.
Unearned happy ending - Happy endings should be earned by the characters. They are a reward for the growth and development of the characters as they navigate the conflict in the story. Characters who experience a happy ending, but haven't earned it, will feel fake and will be unsympathetic to the reader. We want to root for the protagonist in the story, even as they experience horrible tragedy, so that we feel like they will be all right in the end. Make their eventual happy ending MEAN something to them--and it will mean just as much to us.
Betrayal ending - Brandon Sanderson has three rules for writing: Promise, Progress, and Payoff. Whatever you set up during the Promise phase must come to fulfillment in the Payoff phase. Don't bait-and-swith the reader without warning. It's OK to throw in a genre shift if you want to do that, but give the reader enough clues so that they recognize that the story is changing in a new direction. Done well, readers will appreciate the twists and turns because you've promised them a good story from the beginning, even if the ending is unexpected.
Earned tragedy - Tragic stories should feel inevitable. The characters destined for tragedy should feel like this is the only way their life could go based on the choices they make throughout the story. In Zelazny's Jack of Shadows, for instance, Jack's descent into tragedy is quite clear halfway through the story when he gets his revenge, but is still unsatisfied. From there, he quickly descends into lust for power, which becomes his undoing. It's telegraphed quite in advance in the story, but we keep reading because we want to see how it plays out.
Emotional landing - Stories should resonate with readers at a deep emotional level. The best stories, as Patrick points out, end with us closing the book, and then just sitting there as we process the journey we've just been through. Michael Ende's The Neverending Story is a powerful example of this. I *always* feel deep emotion when I read that book. I've been that way since the first time I read it when I was about nine years old.
Epilogue debate - Some stories can benefit from an epilogue, while others should probably avoid them. If the story ends with "happily ever after" then we usually don't need an epilogue to tell us how things turn out in the end. If the characters (or the world) go through traumatic experiences, then an epilogue can show us the long-term consequences of the events in the book. In Lord of the Rings, we have a fairly lengthy epilogue section because Frodo is suffering from PTSD from his journeys to Mordor. The only cure is to go over the seas with the Elves, which is eventually what happens. In the Appendices, we find out more about what happens to Sam, Merry, and Pippin, but we don't need a full epilogue to go into details of their lives.
Can you think of any other patterns or rules for endings?
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It was also his last day...
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NOVELIZATIONS OF THE FILM
Anyone a fan of reading novelizations of movies? I have several in my library. For some reason I have all three novelizations of the original Star Wars trilogy as well as five out of six of the original Star Trek movies (I had Star Trek V but ended up throwing it out because it was in such poor condition). I think the oldest novelization I have is 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.
I sort of like novelizations because they often expand on the stories, providing details and context that are missing from the movies. Of course, because they novels are usually based on earlier drafts of the screenplay, the final cut of the movie may be vastly different than the novel in key ways because scenes may be cut or rewritten based on Executive Meddling or because audience test screening didn't go well.
I read Alien a week or so ago and then proceeded to watch the movie immediately afterwards. There are definitely some key differences. In the book, there's a scene where the alien's tail is caught in an airlock door trapping it before it can be expelled out into space. This is a key scene in the book that really hammers home the duplicitous actions of Ash the android. We also see just how corrupt and penny-pinching the Company is in the book, as air is strictly regulated with just barely enough to keep the crew alive as long as they spend nearly all their time in hibernation. In the movie, all of the characters start chain-smoking cigarettes as soon as they wake up from hibernation. I always find smoking scenes in space somewhat ridiculous because the particulates in smoke would play merry havoc with the air scrubbers aboard a space ship or space station.
In the novelization for Star Wars (also written by Alan Dean Foster), we see a few extra scenes, at least one of which made it into the Special Edition of the movie. Han Solo meets up with Jabba the Hutt, but at that point Lucas really hadn't defined the "Hutts" as we know and love them today (giant space slugs), so that scene is a bit incongruous compared to what we see a few years later in Return of the Jedi. In the book, Luke is assigned to "Blue Squadron" as an X-wing pilot, but in the movie his callsign is "Red Five."
In the Star Trek novelizations, particularly with Wrath of Kahn, Search for Spock, and The Voyage Home, we see more details about the stories that connect them more concretely to each other. The young engineer that Scotty cradles in his arms in Wrath of Kahn is his nephew, which is why Scotty is so devastated when the young man is killed in an attack. Lieutenant Saavik and David Marcus become lovers in The Search for Spock, giving David's death a little more emotional impact. And in The Voyage Home we see a few of the events from the perspective of the whales and the probe. The probe wasn't evil. It was a caretaker who saw that its charges were no longer alive, so decided to wipe out the planet and start over.
What about you? Any good novelizations of movies you've read? Any movies you think would make a good novelization?
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WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:
The Black Hole by Alan Dean Foster
Written by Alan Dean Foster, this is the novelization of the movie produced by Walt Disney pictures once upon a time (1979). A research vessel searching the galaxy for intelligent life stumbles across something even stranger--the long-lost spaceship Cygnus, an earlier exploration ship thought to have been lost twenty years ago with all hands on board. Initially dormant, Cygnus wakes up to welcome the crew of the Palomino. Then things get strange as the Palomino crew explore the Cygnus and begin to unravel the mysteries hidden by its enigmatic commander, the megalomaniacal Dr. Hans Reinhardt.
Like a lot of novelizations, this story expands on a fair amount of lore and backstory, providing additional context for events within the movie. For instance, the psychic link between Dr. Kate McCrae and the robot V.I.N.CENT. is explained as a cybernetic implant in Dr. McCrae's brain that gives her a direct link to the robot. It's still a rare and unusual ability, though, as most implants tend to fail. We also see a more "scientific" explanation for what Dr. Reinhardt is attempting to do with the advanced gravitic technology he's discovered/invented. The ending of the book is considerably different than the ending in the movie, which ends on a very dark note indeed.
Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny
Unlike the previous Zelazny book I read--Jack of Shadows--this one has a far lighter, fluffier tone. Fred Cassidy is a perpetual college student who lives quite comfortably on a stipend from his uncle under the stipulation that the money will only continue to flow so long as Fred never graduates college. He's been a student for thirteen years and enjoys his life, although his advisors keep trying to graduate him. Then he's caught up in a farcical quest by aliens, Men in Black, and other factions who believe Fred possesses the mysterious "starstone," a token of galactic importance that was given to Earth to symbolize Earth's eventual acceptance into a galactic federation.
Definitely ends on a much happier note than Jack of Shadows, with a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek humor from our narrator, Fred. All he wants is his life back, but events keep conspiring against him.
Deep Storm by Lincoln Child
Lincoln Child is one half of the duo who writes the Agent Pendergast series, along with Douglas Preston. But he also has several stand-alone novels written solo, though I'm pretty sure they take place within the same universe as the Pendergast novels.
Former Navy medical doctor Peter Crane is summoned to an oil rig in the North Atlantic. The rig has been transformed into a scientific deep-sea research facility and the inhabitants are starting to exhibit bizarre behavior and maladies that don't fit any known pattern of epidemiology. Deep, deep beneath the platform is a facility where the real work is conducted--drilling even deeper into the Earth's crust, where it's reported "Atlantis" has finally been found. The truth is far, far stranger and deadlier, of course. Are aliens involved? Maybe...
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
In some ways, this has a lot of the same plot points as Child's Deep Storm above, even though it takes place 500 years in the future. Humanity has spread to the stars, with incredibly advanced technology, but we are still limited to slower-than-light travel. This makes for a slightly disconnected story as events take place years or even decades apart due to the fact that it takes A LONG TIME to get from point A to point B in space. An ancient civilization went extinct over 900,000 years ago and archaeologist Dan Sylveste will stop at nothing to understand why it was wiped out just as it was on the cusp of achieving spaceflight. He hooks up with a renegade crew of "Ultras" (humans who crew the "lighthugger" ships that travel at 99% the speed of light), who all have their own agenda about Dan's fate. One person was hired specifically to kill him. Others want him to use his link to his dead father to revive their almost-dead Captain. I thought it was hilarious that the captain is named "Brannigan," like the captain from Futurama, but other than the name, there's no resemblance.
This story provides an interesting explanation for the Fermi Paradox, which asks a fundamental question: If it's plausible for the galaxy to be teeming with intelligent alien life, where is it?
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Well, I finally read The Wind in the Willows. For the most part it's enjoyable. Grahame has a real gift for writing excellent lyrical prose. However, his world-building needs a bit of work. Although the main characters are all relatively small animals--a Mole, a Water Rat, a Toad, and a Badger--they interact with the "human" world as equals. So I'm not sure how the scale works here. At one point, Toad rubs his hand through his hair, which I found odd, since I don't ever think of toads having hair (or paws). So it's best to simply enjoy the story for what it is and try not to analyze the world-building too much. They also eat rabbit and bacon. Where do they get it? Do they find it problematic to eat other intelligent animals? (They have encounters with talking rabbits at least once.)
If at Faust You Don't Succeed by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley
I needed some lighter fare after reading Revelation Space, so I turned to If at Faust You Don't Succeed by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley. Like their previous story, Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, thi is a farcical tale, this time about our good buddy Dr. Johann Faust. The powers of Light and Darkness are once again involved in a contest for the Millennium prize. Mephistopheles sets out to corrupt Dr. Faust, but unfortunately makes a pact with the thug Mack the Club, who just happened to be robbing Faust's home while Faust was knocked unconscious in an alleyway. Old Meph' didn't bother to check credentials. Dr. Faust finds out about the bargain Mack makes with Meph and decides that HE should have been the one to make the bargain. Now Faust is chasing Mack and Meph all over creation to set things "right." It's just a fun romp through the cosmos. Not meant to be taken seriously at all.
