Fiction Nation is where you'll find book reviews, essays, gift recommendations, and the secrets to instant weight loss and younger looking skin!
Fiction Nation started its life as an idea for a book review show at XM Satellite Radio. Originally, it was going to focus on science fiction and fantasy, since I felt the nerd population was badly underserved. (Still do.) After about a year of pitching everyone in the building ("Lady, I'm just delivering pizza! And I hate your ideas!") I tried it out on Amy Reyer, who runs Take Five, Women's Talk on XM 155. She decided to put my show on the air, for which I am very grateful. Fiction Nation first aired as one-minute reviewlettes in September of 2005, the first half hour show aired (with my girl Brenda Scott Royce as my first guest) on January 20th 2007, and my first hour long show ran on July 9th 2008.
Fiction Nation is primarily a book review show, but you'll also hear essays about bookstores and writing, among other things. You won't hear reviews of political rants, screeds or tracts. No diet books. No biographies. Nothing but fiction, mostly by authors that you may not yet know. (I figure John Grisham and Stephen King don't need my help at this point.) I've branched out from my original concept and talk about all kinds of fiction, although I do like my vampire books.
Everything you hear on XM can be found here, plus there'll be some web exclusives.
So feel free to poke around. If you're looking for a book I talked about on XM, it'll be in Reviews. Essays used to be called 'rambling diatribes' but we decided that was too long. With the holidays approaching (this will be correct once a year, kind of like a stopped watch) I offer the Audio Archive. The Back of the Stacks is where you'll find reviews of Audible audio books along with a couple of my personal favorites. If you'd like to suggest a book for review or simply want to shower me with praise, go to Contact. I've gathered up all the authors' web pages along with a few I just really like on the Links page.
The XM link is where you can become a subscriber — in fact, go do that first. Follow the directions and get a great deal on an XM Radio with the Friends and Family Plan. You're welcome!
I blame Harlan Ellison.
He was my first literary crush. Picture all those little 6th grade girls, talking about the Partridge Family and trying out for cheerleading, and then add me in, dragging around my dog-eared copy of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Hey, maybe I didn't get to wear the kicky outfit, but come on — that was a really good book!
It just got deeper from there, my love affair with words. Fortunately, my asthma was severe enough to get me out of gym class and into the library, where I pounded the last nail into the coffin of my social life by reading exclusively everything in the science fiction section.
As I got older, I learned to mix with my own kind. We could be spotted by our inability to tan (or play dodgeball) and our desire to somehow share what we had read. I remember the summer I read The Mists of Avalon, or as my mother calls it, "that book you love and everyone else hates that you try to get everyone to read." At the time I truly thought if only I could get people to read it, everything would change.
Eventually, friends stepped in to get me to look at books not set in 1) the Middle Ages or 2) on a spaceship. I will always be grateful to the friend who pressed Jane Austen into my trembling hand. Pride and Prejudice is now one of my favorites, but she went too far when she gave me Mansfield Park. Should've left well enough alone.
When I moved to Key West, I got a job as a disc jockey, and believe me, if you work as a DJ in the Keys, you have a part time job unless you like living in a refrigerator box. I was lucky enough to work at Key West Island Books, where I was introduced to folks like Jim Hall, Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen. When it was time to move on, I found that friends didn't want to help me move (again) because of the inevitable mountain of cartons marked 'books', and writing 'fragile' on them? Isn't fooling anyone, at least not more than once.
These days I have bookshelves in every room of the house, including the bathroom. Amazon sends me birthday cards. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night just to look at them all, all my friends, each one its own adventure. So while my resume looks like I played Jimmy Buffet records for tourists and went on to talk about the traffic, my real life is on those shelves. I used to believe that if you could get someone to read, it could change things.
Now I'm absolutely certain it's true.
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