ezra-finch-writes

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March 2024 Wrap-Up: Audiobooks, the Anxiety of Wasted Time, and Writing Progress

March has been, without a doubt, the month of the audiobook. I don’t have many frustrations with my job, but the one at the top of my list is how much time working full-time takes away from my writing and reading. I work from either 8-5 or 10-7 depending on the weekday, with a thirty-minute commute there and back each morning and evening. All this takes up a big, big chunk of my day, and by the…

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2023 Reading Review, On Annual Reading Goals, & 2024 Goals

2023 Reading Wrapped This year turned out to be my most successful year of reading yet, since I started tracking my reading back in 2013! I’d actually expected to read less this year, since I planned to spend more time drafting; somehow, not only did I read more books than last year, but I also wrote more than I have since 2018! My fiction favorites this year were all translated novels:…

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December 2023 Wrap-Up

Looking back on it, it feels as if things I did at the beginning of the month were so much longer than just a few weeks ago, but day-to-day, it felt like this month was flying by – likely because of everything I found myself doing! Aside from holiday shopping and the usual workday, I: spent far too much time on Pokemon Go, facilitated a super fun DIY Paint-Pour Ornaments program at work, and…

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November 2023 Wrap-Up

Another one of my favorite months, and another busy one, given the Thanksgiving holiday. With the extra days off work, I did some travelling to Virginia to visit with family and spent one afternoon exploring Old Town Alexandria, and the next at the National Harbor across the state line in Maryland, where I was lucky enough to see a really interesting Titanic Exhibition, which featured a good deal…

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Looking Ahead to October: September's Wrap-Up and Booklist

A few of my coworkers were talking today about how this September felt like one of the longest months so far this year, but personally, my September went by in something of a blur. But I’m enjoying the marginally-cooler weather, and especially looking forward to October, despite how busy my work calendar is next month. It’s my favorite month of the year, for all the usual Autumn and Halloween…

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A Little Note on Pseudonyms

Just a short post today!

So, why use a pseudonym? There’s plenty of reasons why an author might choose to do so, privacy being at the top of the list, but for me, it’s more a matter of organization. I’m not trying to hide my real name – which, aside from the surname, is exactly the same, and relatively easy to find. Choosing to use a pseudonym for my writing life is mostly just a way for me to keep it separate from my…

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International Podcast Day Recommendations, 2020

International Podcast Day was this past Wednesday, September 30th, and before this year, I’d never really taken much notice of it – to be honest, I hadn’t taken much notice of podcasts in general. I’d briefly been a member of the British History Podcast back in late 2016 / early 2017, and before that, in high school, I’d tried to listen to Welcome to Night Vale; but as much as I liked the podcast…

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Genre in Translation: Re-Imagining and Rewriting

Genre in Translation: Re-Imagining and Rewriting

To start: this is a post I’ve been meaning to write since LAST June. A year later, after musing on-and-off over the topic, I finally feel able to write a post about it, rather than a handful of scattered scribbles (which is what I’ve been doing since I first started considering genre translation last year). So, you’ll have to bear with me for yet another post exploring genre!

Now, I know the…

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Des Moines Tribune, Iowa, December 20, 1928

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What is Speculative Noir? OR, some thoughts on genre.

What is Speculative Noir? OR, some thoughts on genre.

What is Speculative Noir? Or Speculative Fiction in general? I had to think about it a few months ago, when my dad asked what genre my current novel project, SkullWIP, could be categorized under. I’d told him it was a Speculative Noir novel, but he’d asked, “I mean, which shelf would it be on, in a bookstore? Mystery? Crime? Drama?”

The first novel on this stack of TBR books is Stefan…

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Writing the Crime and Corruption of the 1930s with the Glitz and Glamour of the 1920s — The Personal Press of Ezra James Finch While Noir Fiction is a genre that can easily be set in more than a few time periods (TVTropes has a very informative page on Film Noir that lists the 1950s-80s, as well as Victorian England, as common Noir settings, for example) for me, the term brings to mind specifically those decades between the World […]

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The Pink Rag, Topeka, Kansas, July 28, 1921

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A Tentative 2020 TBR List

A Tentative 2020 TBR List

I say tentative, seeing as every year I optimistically add titles to my TBR list that just don’t get read. But don’t we all? I’ll only list a handful of my 2020 hopefuls, knowing most of the books I read this year will be new impulse buys and library loans; but jumping right into it:

Fiction Death Watch (The Undertaken Series #1 ) // Ari Berk

I picked this one up as an impulse buy at…

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Ezra James Finch's 2019 Reading Recap

So far this year – what, there’s still ten days left in 2019, I might read another, who am I to say – I’ve managed to read 33 books.

A few facts for ya:

my goal for this year was to read 50 titles, but 2019 turned out to be my least-productive year, reading-wise, since I joined Goodreads in 2012;

however, I DID read 5 non-fiction books this year, which is saying something, seeing as I only…

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style: long eye contact and long coats

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Wrote up a post over on my Wordpress about writing setting, and grounding yourself/readers/characters in your novel. Feel free to check it out! ^^^

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but if i don’t have a hyperfixation i’ll die