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Continue reading →: More Cheap Reads
The Cabin at the End of the World: Eerie, intense, heart-wrenching thriller. Tension so thick you could bludgeon it with a specially hand-crafted doomsday gardening tool.
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Continue reading →: Cheap Reads
Two good ebook deals today on Amazon: 1) Train Dreams by Denis Johnson Anthony Doerr’s New York Times review. 2) The Color of Water by James McBride Interview with James McBride on Global Perspectives Just under two bucks each. Check ’em out. Huzzah!
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Continue reading →: From Alison Smith’s “Her Left Hand, The Darkness”
“If no one is expecting much, it’s not hard to exceed their expectations.” ” ‘Don’t try to be an author,’ she said as we stood outside a lecture hall in the bitter cold. ‘You cannot control that. Instead, try to be a writer. And to do that, you must write.…
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Continue reading →: Review: Den of ThievesI like a good heist flick (Logan Lucky is a recent top-notch addition to the genre), but Den of Thieves missed the mark for me in a couple spots, and it’s important to figure out/talk about why.
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Continue reading →: Writing Just for the Hell of It.
On the suggestion of an old friend, I started listening to Writing Excuses, a weekly podcast co-hosted by authors Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, and web cartoonist Howard Tayler. In each episode, the hosts and the guests will do a quick dive into some element of craft. In fact,…
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Continue reading →: Down with the Sickness: In Which I Succumb to the Various Illnesses Circulating Throughout My Home and Workplace for the Last Month
Despite my best efforts to build and reinforce bulwarks against the season’s various illnesses perpetually floating about, I managed to get sick this weekend. I’m hoping whatever this is–fingers crossed that its just a common cold–runs its course quickly. I’m doing my damnedest to show it the door with a…
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Continue reading →: Kelly Link: 2018 MacArthur FellowVideo from MacArthur Foundation I can’t remember what I’d read or watched or listened to that pointed me in the direction of Kelly Link, but by the time I finished “The Summer People,” (the first story in her Link’s Get In Trouble collection), I was hooked. And two of the stories…
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Continue reading →: An Exercise in Not Working on Your Newest Short Story: Book Recommendations and Current ReadsEvening, folks. Here are a few book recommendations for you as we speed ever-onward to the cold-weather days which necessitate hunkering down with hot drinks, snacks, and stacks of reading material…
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Continue reading →: Weekly Writing Goals #3Good afternoon, all. I’m close to a week late in posting my weekly writing goals for the third week of January. That’s okay, though. Right? Things got a bit busy, and sometimes by the end of the evening, I’d run out of gas, and just didn’t have it in me…
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Continue reading →: In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’BrienIn his novel, In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien crafts a chimera which somehow manages to be a mystery, a love story, a war story, and a magic act. At times, it’s also a piece of fictional, creative non-fiction or faux journalism. It deals with truth and memory,…
Greetings,
I’m Ryan
I’m an E-12 Data Integrationist, amateur pasty-crafter, and sporadic storyteller. I hang my hat in central Minnesota with my wife, our three children, a labradoodle, and a couple of cats.
I earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Augsburg University, and my fiction has appeared in Talking Soup, Barstow & Grand, and Volume One.
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Purdy Good 