DONALD J. BINGLE

If you read a lot of books and you've never heard of Storybundle, you should definitely check it out. Basically, a Storybundle curator (in this case Kevin J. Anderson) picks a theme/topic/sub-genre and picks a dozen or so novels on that topic by a wide variety of authors who have submitted their books for Storybundle's consideration. Then the books are offered to the public for a limited time at a fantastic price. The buyer decides what to pay and can tweak their payment to g

Andy Weir's The Martian already has more than 7,500 reviews on Amazon, so I doubt my review would be much noticed there, which is why I am posting it on my blog, instead. Yes, I know you've already heard about the book and that it is up for some major awards, but I thought I'd give you my take anyway, for what it's worth. Here goes: Three Out of Five Stars for The Martian, A Good, But Not Great, Book: Yes, I'm a fan of hard scifi (I love Mission of Gravity) as well as sof

Did you ever notice that some buskers (street performers) bring a box or milk crate to stand on while they perform? They do that so that more people can see them. Some people may choose to pass by without watching. Heck, some people may turn away after the performance has started because they don't think the performance is worth their time. But if passersby never see the performer, there's almost no chance that they'll stop and watch and maybe drop a few coins or a bill in th

I'm a writer, but I confess I haven't written a book in a while. I've written a number of short stories recently and two novellas under pen names, but not a full-length book recently. (I'm working on a mystery thriller now, but I'm not absolutely positive it will end up long enough to be a book, rather than a longish novella. Since it is a speculative piece of work, rather than written to the specifications of a contract, I'm flexible on how long I make it.) Just so everyon

My last blog post dealt with issues raised by letting people at work know you are a writer, but one thing I did not touch on in that post is the role serendipity--luck, fate, coincidence, whatever you may call it--can have on your writing career. Actors are very familiar with this topic. Whether "discovered" by a talent scout in a drugstore or getting a plum role because the first choice backed out because of other commitments (Sean Connery as James Bond; Harrison Ford as I

If you are a full-time writer without a day-job, this post is not for you. But if, like most writers, you have a day-job to pay the bills and provide affordable health insurance (at least until those Nook and Kindle sales begin to whir), whether to tell people at your day-job that you write on the side is something we all have to face. Sure, when you are first starting out and haven't published yet, it is an easy secret to keep, but when you start getting published on a reg

My wife and I used to go to a lot of local art fairs (before all of our available wall space was pretty well occupied). One of the things about artists is that many, many of them find a style or motif they do reasonably well and which sells well-enough to support the art fair circuit lifestyle and they stick with it. So we would see an artist tent and recognize it as the "fuzzy tree" guy or the "cows in the field" woman or whatever. Sure, we sometimes bought stuff from these