Dearly Beloved You Guys:

I'm not entirely sure when but somewhere in the past year my capacity for blogging suffered. I could blame the usual suspects: writing deadlines, a demanding day job, the need to have a personal life, blah blah blah. But really, true culprits are my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Between medicine and publishing, the past few months have been filled with wonderful, horrible, life-changing events, all of which I have tried to ball into the most concise phrasing possible to fit into social media. Where once life inspired essays, now it inspires tweets.

One of the most thought provoking books I read this year was The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. I strongly disagree with much of of Carr's pessimistic analysis, which can crudely be summed up as 'the internet is making us dumb.'  I do not think it is necessarily a bad thing that social media has induced me to try to write and think concisely. It's not such a new idea after all, witness Strunk and White.

However, I cannot deny that the internet and social media in particular has changed how I express myself and how I think. It has given me a preference for the concise, witty tweet that will win an instant response. I should hate to let the mental capacity for longer expression atrophy. So, as I prepare for Spellbound's book tour next week, I'm making a resolution to try to produce more blog posts, fewer facebook statuses. We shall  see how that works out.

Meanwhile, on the update front, I'm proud to report that Spellbound has earned a starred review from the notoriously difficult to please Kirkus Review!

 Middle volumes are always tricky, but Charlton succeeds brilliantly here; this is no mere setup for the final installment. By shifting locales from the first book, he widens the reader's view of the author's richly detailed world, characters, and magical systems, all of which are informed by his experiences as a medical student and a severe dyslexic. Absolutely not to be missed.