Adam S. Furman

When I first did my research on writing, I saw an offhand comment on having to read a lot.  Well, my research was not so much on writing as it was on the industry of writing, or how to nab an agent or get a nice fat royalty check every week from your New York Times bestseller. The article said to read a lot in the area you wish to write in.  Me being young and naive, I thought this was a sort of sales gimmick.  You want to write as a [insert genre] author? You wanna write in the big leagues?  You can!  Just...buy all my books, buy my imprint's books, and buy all the genre's books.  It's important to support one another as authors, after all. Like I said, I was naive.  As far as the money aspect goes, I had forgotten about this wonderful, magical place called the public library where you can borrow any one of a thousand books for free based off of nothing but the trustworthiness of your word.  In the age of the Internet, these libraries have banded together to o

For those of you who have read Dune , you understand that is nothing short of a masterpiece of fiction.  Unfortunately for me, I hadn't read it until recently (and I have yet to follow up with its half dozen sequels).  For those of you who have not read Dune, it follows the Highborn House Atreides from the lush planet Caladan to the wasteland of Arrakis.  But there are some things that I noticed that Herbert did really well writing Dune . Narrative:  The reader gets to see inside everyone's mind, in nearly every scene.  Initially, this was hard to follow for me because I haven't read too many books where this occurs.  However, once accustomed to it I couldn't stop thinking why more books aren't written this way.  And because of this, I found myself caring more about the characters than about the events that happened to them. Character:  The reader never wonders what a character wants.  The story is character driven.  There are so many egos and this work