To Publish or Not To Publish

Indie Book Review: Each Angel Burns

2012-02-18T19:47:00.000-05:00

I ended up reading Each Angel Burns by Kathleen Valentine because of the debate as to whether or not it was a "Catholic" novel. A while back it was reviewed on a Catholic fiction site and the reviewer didn't think it was much of a Catholic novel. This resulted in some discussion and controversy. Now, while it's true that I'm not wildly qualified to judge this, I'm not any sort of literary scholar, I do know basic Catholic theology and I like to read. So onto the To Be Read list it went. Months later, I'm adding my two cents to the pot.

But before we get into that, let's talk about it as just a novel.

As a novel it is elegant and graceful, with characters I enjoyed and a writing style that mirrored the gentle souls of the main characters.

The story line is... meandering... and honestly I could have handled a few less detours from the main plot. None of them are terrible or badly written, but one in particular made me want to yell, "No, Valentine...the main plot, stick to the main plot!" I truly enjoyed these characters and wanted to spend time with them, but by the time we were reaching the climax of the story, the fine eddies of extra storyline were getting on my nerves.

Almost all of the main action takes place in flashbacks. And once again, they aren't badly written, but they do add a distance from the events, and I would have liked the immediacy of going through most of the main plot points first hand. One of the flashbacks I completely understand, and fully see it's value. But most of the rest of them followed the pattern of the main story moving ahead a day or two, then one of the characters would remember the night before. In that sort of case, there wasn't much need for the flashback.

It's a little rough on the proofreading front. As any of my regular readers know, I've seen much, much, much worse recently, but I wouldn't call it a clean copy, either. Call it a solid B effort for proofing.

So, all in all, as a novel, I liked it. I read it in two days, and when I wasn't reading I was thinking about it. That, to me, is a sign of a good novel.

So, it's a good novel, but is it a Catholic novel? It depends on what makes a Catholic Novel a Catholic Novel. I'd say it's a novel decorated with Catholicism, but not actually a Catholic novel.

It's certainly dressed in the physical details of Catholic life. Most of it is set in a deconsecrated convent. And like the convent most of the characters were, once upon a time, Catholic, but no longer practicing in any meaningful way. There are still the trappings of a Catholic life, but, with one exception, the spark of faith that makes those trappings alive has long left these people. At one point, one of the characters says, "We're meant to be Catholic..." and I think that's a good way of looking at it. Not, 'we are Catholic,' but 'we're meant to be Catholic.'

I'll take this one step farther with the actually Catholic character, a priest named Pete. In his own personal journey, I can see flashes of Catholic thought and ideas, but in the way he interacts with the other main characters, his best friend, Gabe, and his one time love, Maggie, there is nothing distinctly Catholic about his actions. When it comes to how he deals with his friends, he could have just as easily been a Pastor, and much more easily been a Rabbi.

In fact, besides Father Pete's sexual identity in relation to his faith, and the setting, there's nothing specifically Christian about this story, let alone Catholic. If there was anything in this book specifically relating to salvation by Jesus, I missed it. I'd say the only concrete theological idea espoused by this story is: where love is, there is God also. That's an idea that's not difficult to place in any given tradition.

For me, the question of the 'Catholicness', let alone Christianity, of this novel comes from the actions of the Father Pete. Pete is a compelling character, one I'd very much enjoy sitting down to dinner with, and not because he's described as the most gorgeous man in the history of maleness. Not to say I'd mind that, but I digress... He's a scholar, a dedicated servant of God, a man of intellectual depth and vibrancy, and a deep, deep well of compassion.

And, while his compassion feels very comforting, it underlies his devotion to his Lord, and if I correctly understand the hierarchical and rigid standards of Catholic theology, undermines it. Given a situation where his best friends are falling in love and committing adultery together, he is pleased for them. Gabe's wife is cheating on him. Maggie's husband is corporeal evil on two legs. Gabe and Maggie are just about perfect for each other. So, for most of us, being pleased at our friends' happiness would be an appropriate response. At least, if we weren't priests.

But Pete is a priest. This is a man who sees his two dearest friends, people he supposedly loves, throwing their souls into mortal peril, and he is pleased for them. Divorce and adultery are great big deals in Catholic theology. Marriage is a sacrament, and breaking that sacrament is a mortal sin. And while separation, and in some cases divorce, are allowable by Catholic doctrine, remarriage without an annulment is not. And, while it's true that in Catholic theology there's no such thing as a direct ticket to hell, moving in with your girlfriend while you're still married to your wife is skating awfully close to the edge of it.

Pete mentions his concern for their souls, once, but his actions: never suggesting Gabe seek marriage counseling or try to reconcile with his wife, let alone suggesting Gabe and Maggie have a chaste relationship, and being willing to officiate Gabe and Maggie's wedding once Gabe's divorce (Annulment is never mentioned either, just Gabe's divorce.) is finalized, shows that he's significantly less worried about their eternal souls than he is for their comfort in this fleeting life.

Beyond that, there is the fact that, by the end of the story we are shown that God clearly approves of all of this as well. If you believe that sex is integral to love, and that wherever love is, there is God, then this book is fine. That would be something that I personally believe. But that's not Catholic theology.

So, perhaps this is a gentle subversion of the Catholic Novel. It is a book that lovingly touches on the accoutrements of Catholicism, but they are only setting. It is a novel that creates an intensely sympathetic priest, who, while living up to the letter of his vows, places more value on this temporal life than the life eternal to come. A man who is more interested in his friends being happy than good. And there is a version of a God who gives laws, yet smiles when they are broken. I think Valentine's deconsecrated convent is a perfect metaphor for this story: it is beautiful, steeped in traditions and memories that those inside appreciate on an esthetic level, but have no intention of living by.

The Fantasy Sage Speaks: In The End

2012-01-28T13:38:00.000-05:00

We've talked about plot, and about the promises we make our readers when we publish a story. We've talked about magic and power balance, and how they contribute to the tension that keeps a story going. So now it's time for the end of the story.

Once again, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to call the major teams of a fantasy novel Team Good, lead by the Hero and Team Evil, lead by the Villain. I recognize that fantasy protagonists and antagonists come in a lot of different shades (Next Post: The Cast) but these terms will do the job for the sake of today's discussion.

Here's the claim that might get a lot of comments: in a straight fantasy, Team Good always wins. The readers do not want to spend however many hundreds, if not thousands, of pages watching Team Good get to the point where it can defeat Team Evil and then lose. Not in the final battle. If Return of the Jedi had ended with the Rebel Alliance being annihilated, and Darth tossing Luke off the bridge while the Emperor cackled in the background, fans would have rioted and Lucas would have never made another movie.

Now for the huge mess of caveats:

Team Good must win is not the same thing as the Hero has to come out alive, or that there is any guarantee of a happy ending for any individual member of Team Good. As long as Team Good wins, or the actions of Team Good assures a future win, you can kill every single member of Team Good and it's still a satisfying end. If you re-wrote the movie Glory and set it with a troop of Dwarves looking to be taken seriously as real members of Elven society, the ending where almost everyone dies, but the first spark of Dwarven equality bursts to light, then the ending works. Likewise, if your Hero comes out of the final battle wounded, disillusioned, broken, having lost everything but his ability to breathe, as long as whatever he was trying to accomplish gets done, all is good.

Team Good must win only applies for the final conflict. You can write a fifteen book series and have Team Evil happily torturing the Hero at the end of the first fourteen of them as long as the Hero triumphs at the end of the last book. Romances demand a Happily Ever After for each book in the series. Fantasy demands that Team Good has to win in the end.

Winning is entirely dependent on how you defined the problem. If the issue is Dark Lordenstein is big, bad, and EVIL, any end where Dark is no longer those things flies. Team Good can kill, convert, imprison, or do any other thing you can imagine to Dark, as long as Dark is out of the picture as the Villain in the end.

You'll probably notice that I'm dealing mostly with the man v. man version of fantasy. Now, while it is true that man v. nature and man v. society do happen in fantasy, they are almost always secondary plot lines or some level of meta problem that's being explored in a micro man v. man setting. But, if you've got it set where your protagonist is fighting all of society, or magic, or whatever external, non-person (using person loosely here, by this I mean a thinking creature, not necessarily human) problem he or his team still has to triumph in the end.

If the problem is societal, like racism, winning can be defined as any step that causes the society at large to seriously consider change, but does not require immediate change. If the fight is the main character versus his nature (he's a werewolf or vampire or whatever) whichever side you've set as the protagonist needs to take the day.

If you've written the sort of epic where there are seventeen main characters, no clear protagonist, and all of them are dingy shades of gray without a Team Good or Team Evil, more power to you, 'cause that's a bugger to write a satisfying ending to. No matter how you end that, someone is going to be pissed because his or her pet character didn't get the ending they were looking for.

Basically, the more clearly defined the problem is, the easier it is to write a good (once again, good is defined as the ability to satisfy the majority of readers) ending.

Okay, so here's the one big exception to this rule: tragedy is an acceptable version of fantasy. There are a few main variations on this where Team Good doesn't win and the readers don't mind.

Tragic Fall: call this Macbeth style fantasy. You're writing about the fall of someone who did something stupid. Usually in this case the Hero is very dark gray if not outright black, but he's still a compelling POV character. These are often morality tales about the love of power and how it destroys people. You can do any horrible thing you want to Hero, and the readers will appreciate it.

The Sacrifice: This is the story where the chance of Team Good winning was one in a million at the beginning of the tale, and it's still one in a million at the end. Call this Les Miserable style fantasy. Everyone knows from page one that this is not going to end well for Team Good, but that they're doing something that will get them all killed because it's important. The story here is about the struggle, character development, and then breaking the reader's hearts by crushing those characters. Usually this ends with the goals of Team Good getting more attention and the possibility of a future win for Team Good, but the immediate Team Good has failed and is dead.

The Anti-Happily Ever After: Romeo and Juliet style star-crossed lovers flies in fantasy as well. But this is usually a microplot. Team Good usually wins whatever it is that's going on in the metaplot, but doing so requires the star-crossed lovers to put each other aside/die. This is tragedy for whichever characters, but the greater Team Good still wins the day. If Romeo and Juliet both die, followed by the Montagues and Capulets immediately going to war and annihilating each other, your readers will feel cheated. The micro tragedy has to have a bigger meaning and value than the immediate characters.

Having read all that, you know what to do, right? Exactly, do not write the story where everything is going swimmingly, the odds are evening up, the final conflict is looming, and then slaughter all your characters, crushing their goals. If you are writing a tragedy, you need to let your readers know it's coming. By the midpoint of the story you should have several clues and a good bit of foreshadowing in place to let them know things are not going to end well for Team Good. In fact, though I'm not generally a huge fan of the preface/first chapter that shows how the story ended, if you've ever been tempted to use it, when you're writing a tragedy is the time.

Otherwise, set up the plot, even up the power balance, and to quote a wise man, "Have fun stormin' the castle!"

The Fantasy Sage Speaks: Power Balance

2012-01-21T09:52:00.000-05:00

In the last Fantasy Sage post, I wrote about the rules of magic in fantasy writing, and in that I mentioned that there was one very specific time when the To Thine Own Magic Be True rule could be broken, as the object of a High Quest, for the purpose of providing a decent power balance in the last conflict.

What is power balance? This is the odds of Team Good or Team Evil winning. This is one of the most important aspects of your novel, because a well done power balance provides the thing that keeps your readers turning pages: tension. Basically, if you stack the deck too far on one side or the other, the tension in your story is shot to pieces, and you end up with bored readers.

So, let's talk about our next rule for good fantasy writing: Thou Shall Balance Power Between Team Good and Team Evil. Though I'm playing fast and lose with Good and Evil here, Protagonist and Antagonist is probably more accurate, because lots of fantasy readers like a great Anti-Hero, gray Heroes, and darker gray Villains. But let's call them Team Good lead by the Hero and Team Evil lead by the Villain for the sake of amusement.

Now, at the beginning of the story Team Good can have a one-in-a-million shot of winning this thing, but it's got to have that shot. And by the end of the story, you've got to get things close to one to one. If it's still one in a million when you hit the final conflict, you're A: writing a tragedy (Which plays by it's own set of rules, but is an acceptable subset of fantasy. More on this in the In The End post.) or B: your readers will not believe it when Team Good wins.

Once again this is where plot wrangling comes in. Many fantasy novels, when broken down to the most basic plot level work something like this: Team Evil has the power. This is intolerable. Team Good decides to do something about it. Adventure allowing Team Good to make up most of the difference occurs here. Final conflict. Team Good fights hard, looks like all is lost, but triumphs in the end. (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, DragonLance, and on and on and on: they all follow this basic plan.)

The problem is that many writers forget how tension works in a fantasy story. A really bad Team Evil is a lot of fun to write. And many writers are a little too attached to Team Good and make them too strong. But, if the odds are too firmly stacked on either side, the story is boring. If Dark Lordenstein is not only a murderous-paranoid-psychopath, but psychic, with a doomsday weapon, no limits on his magic, and an army of loyal-unto-death Super Ninjas, and the Hero is played by the gangly thirteen-year-old Farm Boy, that's just not good reading. None of us are going to suspend our disbelief far enough to make that work. Likewise if Skippy Von Goodandstrong is playing the role of Hero, and he's well nigh invincible, in addition to handsome, kind to puppies, and just so perfectly perfect, he'll be labeled a Gary Stu before the third chapter is done, and the readers will depart shortly thereafter. In fact, the only way Dark or Skippy is even remotely interesting is if they're facing off against each other in a satire.

There are a lot of lessons we can all learn from Star Wars, here's the first one: Luke Skywalker V. Darth Vader isn't much fun to watch until Luke has his powers and Darth is weakened by doubt about his vocation. Luke V. Darth in Empire is fascinating as a character study, but it was terrifying as a fight. Anyone who was paying attention watched Luke go into that fight and felt their stomach drop. If Luke won the fight it was going to feel like a cheap shot, and if Darth won... Well, before seeing it for the first time, none of us wanted to think about what would happen if Darth won. Compare that to the time they face off in Jedi: the odds are still on Darth's side, but not so far on Darth's side that we cannot believe Luke can win. Which is why we sat on the edge of the chair, trying to see Luke in the gloom, wondering how he was going to best Vader.

So, by the time you get to writing that final conflict, I'd say you want no more than a ten to one shot against your Hero winning. That still allows for the underdog takes the game sort of sense, but isn't so far out in the realm of impossibility that your readers don't bother to finish the book.

Getting the ratio close(r) to one to one is usually where a lot of the story part of the story takes place. It's the entire point of the Hero's Journey. It's the reason why the farm boy comes into his powers, and the old mentor has to die/vanish before the final conflict can occur. If the mentor is still around, the power is too strongly stacked on Team Good's side.

In the High Quest variation of fantasy, some level of evening things up happens during the quest, and then the Object of the Quest finishes up the deal. If Dark Lordenstein is cackling away, rubbing his hands with glee, and summoning the Minions to destroy Farm Boy, then Farm Boy needs a real weapon to take to that fight. So this is the time where whipping out the +5 Holy Avenger of Villain Smiting is perfectly okay. If it comes out earlier in the plot, where Farm Boy is still fighting rats and ruffians, there's no tension in those fights. If Farm Boy never finds his super weapon, and Dark trips on his Minions, causing the doomsday weapon to fire upon himself, thus killing him, the reader is let down because there's no triumph for Farm Boy. (This is part of why Harry Potter, with the rebounding curse of doom, was less than perfectly satisfying. Voldie kills himself in the end is just sort of flat. It's not terrible, but it's not very rich, either.) But if Farm Boy finds that +5 Holy Avenger of Villain Smiting a chapter or two before going into the final conflict, then he's got just enough time to get a feel for it, but not enough time to become the absolute master of it, and we get to enjoy seeing him and Dark battle it out, with both sides powerful but not invincible.

In the tragic folly sort of fantasy plot, (this is where Dark Lordenstein is a major POV character, being set up to fall as a tragic figure) this is where his Minions are betraying him, getting killed off, etc... In this case it's not necessarily so much that Team Good is gaining power as that Team Evil is losing it.

And in many fantasy stories, there's a bit of all three going on, and probably a half dozen or so other templates, but they all work out to the same thing, when Team Good and Team Evil clash for the last time, it's a toss up as to who will win.

Who wins in the end? Team Good. This isn't as hard and fast as the Happily Ever After is for romance readers, and I'll go into the variations on it in the next post, but in the end, Team Good has to take the day.

Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Magic, Contract, Plot

SOPA

2012-01-18T11:28:00.000-05:00

So, I usually try to keep this a politics free place, but this one hits home.

I am a copyright holder. I've got one book out, and hopefully two more out in the next year, all in electronic format. And trust me, I want to get paid for those books. But here's the thing, there are better, easier, and more importantly, effective ways to battle copyright infringement.

SOPA is using a tank to battle a mosquito infestation. You blow the shit out of everything nearby and don't do a damn thing to the mosquitoes.

We are a representational democracy. Let your representatives know this isn't the way.

Indie Book Review: The Wars of Gods and Man

2012-01-14T09:16:00.000-05:00

I'd like you to imagine for a moment Macbeth blended with an Old Testament, henotheistic, my God-is-better-than-yours battle. Cool, yes? I thought so. And that's precisely what The Wars of Gods and Men delivers.

The Wars of Gods and Men follows three main characters, Eboric, Ayren, and Kolrig, through the creation of, destruction of, and re-creation of an empire, that mirrors a meta battle between warring Gods. If micro-scale political fantasy is your idea of "Oh yes! Give me more!" this is the book for you. If humans flailing about, unsure of their place in the winds of destiny makes you happy, pick this book up.

If you're familiar with Macbeth, you'll recognize one of the major plot threads, betrayal, destruction, and tragic endings for the traitors. But that's not all that's going on in here. The War of Men is but a micro version of the War of Gods, which we get hints and glimpses of, but never see in full. The tantalizing glimpses of what is going on beyond the human characters are well-rounded enough to keep the readers happy, but mysterious enough to maintain a nice tension to the tale.

Now, many of us are familiar with Christian fantasy, where the writer draws a made-up world with a Messianic figure and a message that looks awfully familiar to just about everyone raised in the West. The Wars of Gods and Men is a sort of twist on this. I'd call it Jewish fantasy, because the war of the Gods aspect looks a whole lot like the Old Testament. A Prophet foresees destruction of those who do not follow his God. He and those who believe with him are persecuted for their faith. Miracles abound as the Prophet puts those other godlings and their worshipers in their places. There's even a mist that kills everyone who happens to be outside of their tent when it creeps into camp. Cenred, the Prophet, might not be an exact match to any specific OT Prophet, but the parallels (down to his bald head) are certainly there.

I'll admit I was very pleased to see that. Pretty much, if there are five great influences on Western literature, the Bible and Shakespeare are, if not the top two, then definitely on the list. So, put them together, execute it with grace and dignity, and wrap it up with a spin on nation building, and well, I was a happy reader.

Speaking of grace and dignity, this was a tidy little book. Characters are rounded and three dimensional, their motivations clear, voices distinct, and actions true to their personalities. (I might have wanted just a tad more depth on Kolrig, but the somewhat brief moments of his inner life fit the character's lack of introspection nicely.) Though this is the first book in a series, it stands alone without any problems. The story arc is complete in and of itself, while still leaving room for continuing adventures. Description might be a little minimalist for some readers, but I'm not much of a visual processor, so the lack of intricately wrought description didn't bother me at all. I had a pretty good idea of what everything looked like, and I didn't need page upon page of description.

And, though it should go without saying, any book on the market should be competently proofread and formatted, but after reviewing so many in a row that weren't, I'd like to specifically mention that The Wars of Gods and Men is cleanly formatted, easy to read, and I didn't notice any major foul ups in the grammar or punctuation department. In a nutshell, it looks professional. And that was a very, very welcome change from some of my most recent reading experiences.

So, all in all, I was quite pleased with The Wars of Gods and Men. I'll happily recommend it to anyone who is looking for a twist on a familiar tale.

The Fantasy Sage Speaks: Magic

2012-01-07T13:32:00.007-05:00

A bit ago I wrote about the responsibilities of the fantasy writer to his readers: the unwritten contract between us and them. On one of the places I posted that article, I got a comment along the lines of the contract I had talked about was pretty generic and could stand in for almost any type of fiction.

So I'm back, with a series of issues specific to the fantasy writer. Now, none of this is written in stone. A great writer, or even a really good with the right attitude can get away with violating these "rules." But please, bear in mind, if you're going to break them, A: You will annoy a fairly large segment of your reading audience. B: Don't just stumble into it. Do it on purpose, knowing you're going to do it, and do it with style. Readers will be much more likely to forgive a breach of any of these if it doesn't look like sloppy writing.

That said, let's talk magic.

Think about this for a minute: why is there magic in your story? Put succinctly: the point of magic in your story is not to cover up sloppy writing. It is not your get-out-of-plot-holes-free ticket. It's there to add mystery, wow factor, to push your characters out of their comfort zones, add to the tension of the tale, and even up the power balance (more on power balance in a later post) between your protagonist and antagonist. It is there to color your world, and provide bounds to your reality.

And this is why it annoys people when you muck with that system. It's like reading a historical romance where the main character is constantly texting. You cheapen and violate the strength of the reality you've created when you mess with your magic. So, for the most part, don't do it.

This leads us to the number one, hard and fast, do-not-screw-with-this-if-you-want-happy-fantasy-readers rule: To Thine Own Magic Be True. Seriously. Tattoo this on the backs of both of your hands so that it's staring up at you while you write. Want to annoy your readers? Set up a multi-book series where you suddenly decide that the magical laws you spent so long creating no longer hold true.

Now, of course, there are exceptions to all rules, so there are ways you can muck with your magical system and have it work: Take your characters to a new world. All the rules can go out the window then. If the point of your story is to find some sort of universe altering magic, then the readers are unlikely to be annoyed if, when your characters find it, the magic changes. Or, any variation on the theme of your main character is Super-Duper Special, The One Whose Coming is Foretold, and part of what makes him super-duper special is that upon fully coming into his power, all the rules get tossed out, works as well. (Though there does seem to be Super-Duper Special Character Fatigue among certain segments of the fantasy reading world.)

Finally, there's Balogium. This is a special sort of magic, and though allowable, it's generally frowned upon. But, for the most part, you can get away with one a book, though readers would prefer closer to one a series. Balogium is a symptom of insufficient plot wrangling. It's a piece of magic that, if used logically, and to it's full extent, would blow your plot and magical system to hell and gone. It's the Time Turner in Harry Potter. Because of insufficient plot wrangling, your plot won't work without the Balogium, so you've got this magical thing in there to save your plot. There's a sort of unspoken agreement concerning Balgonium: you, the author will use it sparingly, and destroy it as soon as possible after it's use, so that it doesn't mess with the rest of your plot, and the reader will pretend not to notice your plot got away from you.

Those exceptions aside, if you can't summon food out of the ether in chapter five and suddenly you can in chapter forty-five, you will have annoyed readers. And, if you keep your plot in line, you won't find yourself in a situation where you have to use your magic as a rescue.

Rule number two: Be very, very careful with powerful magic. Very powerful magic is a really easy way to wreck a perfectly functional magical system and or plot. (And it almost always sets off the Baloginum sensors on high alert.) The most famous example of a bit of fantasy magic that the creators didn't properly think through, and that blew the power balance out of the water was the Teleporter in Star Trek. (I come down on the Star Trek is fantasy, not science fiction side of the debate.) The Teleporter is a nifty idea, and it looks really cool, and it does solve a real problem for the Trek verse, but it's so powerful that the Star Trek writers ended up having to make it malfunction or make whatever away mission the crew was on Teleporter-proof in just about every third episode, otherwise the solution to the problem is: Beam Me Up.

If your magic is so powerful that it's potentially the answer to any problem your characters run into, tone it down. Your story needs tension, and if you let the characters get too powerful, or create an easy answer to whatever problems they have, you'll have bored readers.

If you are happily writing away and are thinking of adding in a really cool +5 Holy Avenger of Evil Smiting and Bad Guy Destroying, think about it long and hard. You're probably better off without it. Because if you leave it in there, the likelihood is you're going to have to muck with your magical system or plot to compensate. In fact, there's only one reason a +5 Holy Avenger of Evil Smiting and Bad Guy Destroying (or any other ridiculously powerful magical artifact) should ever show up in a book, and that's as the object of a High Quest.

Now, the object of a High Quest can break any magical rule you've got and solve any problems your characters might have because it's there for an entirely different reason than the rest of your magical system. The Quest Object is about evening up the power balance for the final confrontation. Which I'll write about in more detail in the next installment: The Power Balance.

Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Contract, Plot, Power Balance

Indie Book Review: Beside the Still Waters

2011-12-31T09:55:00.000-05:00

I love a good family saga. I love historical fiction. I loved the gilded age, and the turn of the twentieth century. I'm a massive WWI wonk.

So, when Beside the Still Waters, a family saga set in 1904 to 1938 landed in my review pile, I was a happy little reader. Probably a little too happy, I was so excited to see it, I put it in the to review pile even after thinking the beginning was a little choppy and rough.

Let's take a minute and talk about what a historical family saga entails. There should be a huge, sweeping collection of deeply rounded characters, in a vibrantly alive piece of time. John Jakes and Herman Wouk wrote my two favorite sagas, and those tales are massive, fully alive and breathing pieces of interactive history. Basically, if the author is doing her job, you get to join a family and live with them through some fascinating bit of history.

There should be a main story arc, this is usually the sweep of the chunk of history the book is set in. On this plot line the characters or more or less acting like tour guides, giving us an intimate view of life during whenever the story is set. This is the plot line that ties everything together, and should be a meta image of the smaller individual conflicts going on in the secondary and tertiary plot lines.

The secondary plot line will be some level of specific conflict involving different members of the family. This is usually the motive plot for the 'story' and will usually involve breaking different bits of the family off into different camps. The historical aspect of the story is often the fault line that divides different bits of the family into different camps.

Tirtiary (and on and on, a real saga can have at least one main plot line per main character, and often side ones for the side characters and so and so forth. After all, it's a SAGA; no one's worried about it coming out too long.) plots involve romances, coming of age stories, individual conflicts for individual characters.

And, if it's not clear from the above, or the fact they're called sagas, a family saga should be long.

So, basically, when I read a historical family saga, I want a huge, complex, well-researched book, brimming with fascinating characters, in depth locales, plot twists and turns, that all wrap into some sweep of history and a satisfying conclusion for all surviving family members.

Besides the Still Waters is well researched. In fact, I would have very happily read a straight up history of the Quabbin Reservoir by Lynch.

It fell well short on all of my other criteria for a good family saga.

"A rift between two brothers, Eli and John Vaughn, at the turn of the 20th Century continues through to the next generation as John tries to use Jenny, Eli’s daughter, in a plot to regain the family farm from Alonzo, who now runs it, who is Jenny's love. John is broke and eager to sell the farm to the state, which is buying up area property for the coming reservoir. Both Alonzo and Eli refuse to sell their properties, and protest removal by eminent domain. Torn between loyalty to her family and heritage, and the allure of a future beyond the valley, Jenny refuses to remain powerless like the men she loves, but looks for a way to take control. A disastrous decision may prove fatal in a race against time."

That's the back of the book blurb. It's a little choppy, but promising, right? I thought so. Here's the problem: at fifty percent through, the plot, as stated in the blurb, is just, barely beginning to get rolling. To use a historical example that most people are familiar with: if the main plot of this book had been wrapped around the American Civil War, the story would have started with the writing of the Declaration of Independence to get us familiar with the fight over slavery. Jenny (who is identified as the main character earlier in the blurb) isn't even born for the first third of the story.

The antagonist, John, shows up for less than three pages of on screen time, and then vanishes for a third of the book. Once again, a family saga should be long and complex enough to follow the antagonist as he runs away, blows his fortune, and then take him back to the main swing of things, so that by the time we get to the conflict, we're deeply attached to both sides of the argument. A family saga needs the depth to follow multiple characters through their lives while still pushing the main plot line forward.

The writing style is choppy. I'd be reading away, getting a little plot and character development, then into straight history, and back to plot, and back to history. From what I can tell this is intentional, but instead of highlighting how the meta history compliments the individual lives of the characters it's jarring and breaks the flow.

The writing style is non-fiction. As I said, I'd happily read a straight history by Lynch, but I don't want to read fiction by her. In non-fiction it's perfectly acceptable to tell your reader what happened, showing them is nice, but usually not the goal. In fiction the idea is to show your readers what is going on. But, if you pick 3rd person omniscient as your point of view, (the narrator voice) it's very easy to slip into telling your reader what is going on. And tell she does. So much telling that it's actually pretty rare to run into a scene that really is showing something, but when one does occur, a chunk of straight history will show up in a page or so and stop it dead.

And, just to make me grit my teeth, the formatting is wonky. I just wrapped the beta version of my latest novel, and my hubby wanted a version for his Kindle. (He doesn't like reading on his computer, so no Word doc for him.) Anyway, I put the beta version through the Smashwords' Meatgrinder with no prep at all, and got precisely the same sort of wonky formatting Beside The Still Waters has. Basically, it looks fine, and then for no real reason it suddenly changes font, and changes back, and forth again, all through the book.

As I said in the email I sent off to my beta readers, the kindle version looks like it was formatted by drunk weasels, drunk weasels that like Courier. It's not illegible, but it is annoying. Deeply annoying. And maybe part of the reason it annoys me so much is that I know how much work it takes to fix this (about an hour-hour and a half), and how ridiculously lazy it is to just leave it that way.

So, all in all, I'm not impressed by Beside the Still Waters. I wish it had been a straight history of the Quabbin Reservoir. I think I would have enjoyed that quite a bit.

Indie Book Review: Snap

2011-12-24T21:43:00.002-05:00

Like every reader, I've got pet peeves. And due to my current run of sloppy books, I've developed some new ones regarding formatting and editing over the last few weeks. This is unfortunate for Mario Molinari, the author of Snap, because he decided to send me a book rife with my newest peeves.

To make matters worse, I know Mario can write. The reason I know this is because the first chapter of Snap absolutely rocks in the Mission Impossible, James Bond, glorious action galore tradition. I was really, really looking forward to this. The cover is beautiful. The first chapter is great. And then it falls to pieces. And on a scale of one to ten, my disappointment after that first chapter was at about sixteen.

Either Snap desperately needed a whole bunch of extra section breaks, or it desperately needed someone to explain that random POV/scene hopping is not appropriate. It often needed dialog tags. These are all the sorts of errors that having one or two other sets of eyes on the book would have taken care of. This book could have rocked. It should have rocked. But no, it's sitting firmly in the sad sack section because Molinari didn't bother to actually polish the damn thing!

The punctuation is rough, the sort of thing I expect from first draft by an okay writer. Not what I want to see in a published book. Word flow is okay, with occasional wonky word choices or missing words, the sort of thing a proof reader would have seen and fixed. (I write these reviews over the course of several days, and on one re-read I was wondering if I was being too harsh. So I opened Snap back up, and the first sentence I read had no period.) This is a published work that is available for SALE. I got my copy for free because I'm a reviewer, but Molinari expects everyone else to give him money for this, almost five dollars, and it's not good enough.

If you'll allow me to fully get into rant mode here, I am a self-published writer. Now, is my book free of errors and perfect in every way? No. Do I expect anyone else's book to be perfect. No. I don't expect perfect. I don't expect near perfect. But I do expect the book to have been edited, proof read, and gone over by the author, thoroughly, to make sure it's as good as can be. And I expect absolutely glaring errors to be taken care of before the book hits print.

I went to Amazon to see what other reviewers were thinking of Snap, and gosh, it's got twenty five star reviews, and though they are all fairly similar, none of them mention the formatting. So I begin to think that I've got a wonky ARC. That happens; a perfect polished version isn't always part of the review process. So I download a new copy for Kindle, and head over to Smashwords to see what's up there. The Smashwords HTML version looked okay. The line breaks were there, at least. Though the rest of the sloppiness is still visible. I start to calm down some.

Then I checked on the new Kindle version, and it's a mess. That's where I started to see red.

Here's an example: the plot is happily skipping along, tension is rising, and then we'd be, with no warning, in a new POV in a different scene, and then back to the first, and back to the second, and back to the first, and there's no scene breaks, and sometimes no dialog tags so you don't even know who's talking. ARGH! DID NO ONE ELSE EVER READ THIS? Since it's right in the Smashwords version, I know Molinari knows that there need to be section breaks, and that pisses me off even more. This is an author wasting my time and the money of anyone buying this by being so ridiculously lazy that he didn't bother to check his .mobi format before clicking on the publish button.

And maybe I could have gotten past this, except Snap hit another of my pet peeves. I do not enjoy watching non-psychopathic characters get other people killed like it's no big deal.

Spoiler territory here: Wade (the hero) is trying to rescue Sarah (female lead 1) and Brad (her soon to be ex-husband) from a hired psychopath. He's supposed to meet the psycho, alone, and trade himself for Sarah and Brad. So, instead of showing up alone, he hires 20 actors to look like they just happen to be having a party at the exact same time and location as the swap, dons body armor, and mingles with the actors. Purposely using them as human shields. (The idea being psychopathic killer will decide he can't take the shot and go to the hostages. I guess. This is where the plot was starting to get loose. The plan was really fuzzy, and Wade is packed into as much body armor, including a helmet, as he can get. Obviously he expects bullets to fly. And no, none of the actors know they're risking their lives for fifty bucks and all the alcohol they can drink.) Amazingly enough, one of the actors is killed, because psycho-guy is not even remotely bothered by trying to take a shot through someone else. And then Wade just leaves like it's no big deal.

I gave up. I don't need my good guys sparkly clean, but I don't want them thinking innocent human shields are appropriate either. And I'm really not willing to trudge through bad formatting and clunky mechanical issues for a character I don't love. With that scene there, any chance I was going to love Wade died, just like the unnamed red-shirt in the above scene.

12/25/11 After reading the review Mario Molinari has pulled the .mobi version of Snap for re-editing and re-formatting. He tells me the hard copy (from which most of his reviews come) looks great. I wish him much luck in getting this story into the shape it wants to be in.

The Indie Book Review: Catalyst The Passage of Hellsfire

2011-12-17T11:04:00.001-05:00

There are, maybe, seven basic fantasy plots. The readers know this. They know that just about every fantasy they open will be a variation on one or another beloved theme. This is not a shock to them. So, when a fantasy reader says a plot is predictable, they don't mean: I've seen a variation on this before (because we all have) they mean the author didn't do a good job making an old plot interesting, setting it in a well crafted world, or giving us fantastic characters to adventure along with.

Catalyst: The Passage of Hellsfire, was predictable. It's not bad, but it's also not really engaging. Hellsfire, yes, that's the name of the main character, reads like a hybrid of Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter. He's a boy with a destiny and a special power. He's also bit flat. Not obnoxious, but not fully rounded in any meaningful way either.

In fact, the whole book reads like a hybrid of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings. The Hero is young, stupid, and The One Whose Coming Was Foretold. The Wizard is old and wise, and takes him under his wing for training. The Princess is beautiful, spunky, handy with a sword, but still in need of rescuing. The Good King is being taken advantage of by his Evil Adviser. The Evil Adviser has plans to find the magical ~~plot device~~ artifact and use it to take over the world. You've read this story before. I've read this story before, and both of us turned each page with bated breath when it was populated with fantastic characters in an expertly built world.

And, alas, this is not an expertly built world, either. Quick example: The Wizard is explaining how magic works in their world, how each person has six sorts of mana (Okay, how many of you immediately flashed into gamer mode there? It gets worse.) and each mana has a different color: white for life magic, black for death magic, red for fire, blue for air, blue-green for water, green for earth. Sigh. I played that game, I don't need to read it.

On top of that, Catalyst sorely needed a proof-reader. The punctuation is rough. Missing/wrong words pop up at least once or twice a chapter. It was often enough, and bad enough, to toss me out of the story on several occasions. Wonky descriptions showed up just as often. Another example: We finally get to a combat scene, and it's going well, I'm liking it, but then one of the fighters uses his "sword like a snake." Now, I get that not every sentence in a book should be read literally, but even on a figurative level this doesn't make much sense. Snakes don't use swords. And if you were holding a snake by the tail, and attacking with it, you'd be using it like a whip, not a sword. I think, from context, he meant something along the lines of: his sword flicked quickly, like the tongue of a snake... but he didn't write that, and using the sword like a snake really tossed me out of the story to figure out what was going on. (My immediate mental image of the character holding the sword in his mouth, arms and legs pressed to his sides, as he wriggled on the ground, made absolutely no sense.)

It also needed a beta reader. In the above scene, Hellsfire, who's been warned to use his magic sparingly and not tell people he's a wizard, uses his magic to burn his way out of a net, uses his magic to blow the head off an ogre, hands a stabilizing potion to a wounded man, and then thinks that he shouldn't mention he's a magic user. He wouldn't want to tip his new companions off. Apparently his companions are massively stupid and didn't notice the fire flashing about, or even though he's describing everything in glowing red flames, the magic is somehow, unbeknownst to us, invisible. Between that and the snake sword, I had a really hard time with that scene. And it's not the only one.

So, as I said, Hellsfire isn't terrible. It's rough. It's very familiar. By halfway through I was skimming along, hoping to find something to get my attention. At three quarters of the way through, I still hadn't found anything that kept my attention for more than five minutes at a time. My guess is, if you've read very little fantasy, or are quite young (The Catalyst is technically a YA book, but I'd be more interested in aiming it at the six-to-eight-year-old market. You'd have to read it to them, but I think they'd like it.) this book might be a lot of fun. But it wasn't doing it for me. I gave up without finishing it.

The Indie Book Review: The Death of Torberta Torchin

2011-12-10T13:36:00.000-05:00

I don't usually review YA books. About one in seven of the submissions I get are YA, and usually, before I even get to the sample, the general plot line has turned me off. See, I didn't enjoy being a kid. I got done with it as soon as I could. So, getting to spend more time in high school or junior high isn't my idea of fun. Add in two of the main YA tropes, angst for the sake of angst, and brainless first love, and well, it's just really not my genre.

So, The Death of Torberta Turchin just about got tossed out of the to be read list without getting much of a hearing. But... Well, the cover is pretty cool, and very much not the usual YA cover art. So I read the back. No angst for the sake of angst. No mention of romance. Hmmm... I began reading the sample.

The Death of Torberta Turchin opens with a fourteen-year-old girl, Torberta, who lives in a boarding school for psychologically disturbed kids, discussing the balancing act the students go through with the doctor. St. Christopher's is a pretty sweet gig, and if you want to stay there you've got to walk a tightrope. Look like you're making too much progress, ie: get better, and you get sent home. Not sufficiently crazy, ie: faking it, and you get sent home. Act too crazy, and they put you on drugs and send you to a higher security place. So, if you want to stay at St. Christopher's you've got to be just disturbed enough to make your family want you away, but not so crazy you're a danger to the world around you.

Reading those first few pages was like reading the first bit of Ender's Game. I knew this book involved a character I'd sympathize with and want to spend time with.

Torberta is in St. Christopher's because she hears voices. The voices say they're ghosts. And, while she can hear them without anyone else hearing them, she has to respond out loud. Talking to voices no one else can hear is embarrassing and troubling to a family that loves you dearly, but Torberta is an orphan raised by people who barely tolerate her. They packed her off as soon as they could.

I love the fact that is book is paranormal, but there is some genuine doubt as to what Torberta is hearing. One of the things that often puts me off paranormal stories is that they're supposed to be set in the real world, but everyone acts like the paranormal aspects are just no big deal. So, even though Torberta is pretty sure what she's hearing really are ghosts, she does have moments of doubt, and to me that's a very realistic, very welcome touch.

I love a good romance, that's not a secret. But in many YA novels a good romance is nowhere to be seen. Sad, abusive, obsessive, unhealthy romances are scattered about like glitter at a drag convention. Romances that make no sense (The world is about to end, monsters are eating my family, but all I can think about is how much I lurve the hot boy who may or may not be the cause of the monsters...) at all are even more common. The sorts of relationships you think might actually go somewhere are usually pretty scarce. My sense is we see so many of these 'relationships' because they add easy drama, and because many writers have a hard time writing girls without defining them by how they relate to boys.

There's no romance in Torberta, and I was thrilled to see it. It's deeply satisfying to see a story where the focus of a fourteen-year-old girl's life isn't some boy. Even more welcome to see a story where romance isn't some sort of magical elixir that makes all the problems go away.

The angst level is minimal, and what angst Torberta has, she certainly deserves. Her parents are dead, the family that's taking care of her considers her a massive embarrassment, and everyone, even her friends at St. Christopher's, think she's insane because she hears voices. This is a girl who deserves a little self-pity. And while she does get a little angsty, she never gets whiny. (Have I mentioned that I love this character? I do, I really do!)

My only quibble with this story was at the end. Let me make it clear, this is just a personal preference, Mawhiny set up the ending properly. She laid all the groundwork, so the ending is a surprise, but not from out in left field. But it's a tad rushed and a little too much coincidence all in one place. Torberta talking to ghosts was a lot easier for me to believe than the timing of the actual incident that killed her.

Still, on the whole I really liked this book and loved Torberta. I'd say it's appropriate reading for anyone over the age of ten. (Maybe eight if you've got a good reader able to handle ideas on mental issues.) The main character is a girl, but there's nothing particularly girly about the book, so it shouldn't put boys off. Like Harry Potter and Ender, Torberta will appeal to both sexes.

This is a solid four star book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loved Ender or girl characters with their heads on straight.

Indie Book Review: For the Sake of the Future

2011-12-03T11:45:00.000-05:00

And, after a rather long delay, the Indie Book Review is back! (I know all three of you were waiting with baited breath for the next installment.) Today we're going to look at For the Sake of the Future.

One of the online communities of writers I hang out at has been bouncing around the idea of whether or not you should hold onto an idea if you don't think you're a good enough writer to tackle it yet. Now, I'm a big fan of not waiting. I think you'll lose a lot of what you want with the idea if you just set it on the shelf. At the same time, I don't think you should publish that work until you are a good enough writer to do it proper justice.

Why is this relevant? For the Sake of the Future is a great idea. I wish I had come up with the plot for this story, it's so good. Val Panesar unfortunately is not a good enough writer to do it justice, yet.

The plot: The Big Bad wants to change the world. He's gotten a hold of eight people right after they died, The Undying, and offered them the chance to go back in time and rewrite the world, to make human existence 'meaningful' by going to war and making sure the 'right' people die. Apparently his main characters are a little stupid, and a little shook up from just having died, so they all agree. They start changing the past. From there we get twists, turns, crosses, double crosses, paradoxes, and the fun that time travel allows.

I really wish I had thought of this plot. And that I was or knew a really good graphic artist. For the Sake of the Future would have made an incredible graphic novel. There's action galore, and the main character, Neelam Lochan, is a huge manga fan. Starting this plot off in a fairly realistic drawing style and slowly morphing it into a manga style would have worked really well.

I liked the characters. Neelam is engaging and pleasant. Greg, Sean, and Marid, back up characters, are all interesting. As I mentioned above, the characters are a little dull, but unlike a lot of writers who indicate their characters are the smartest thing ever, and then they start doing stupid things, Panesar never tries to sell us on the idea that his characters are brilliant. They're regular guys (sort of, this would be one of the twists mentioned above) dropped into an extraordinary circumstance, and it takes them a while to realize this is not a good plan.

So, that's the good points.

The bad part is that this book desperately needed both an editor and a proofreader.

An editor was necessary to reign in the point of view hopping, chronology hopping, and chop about a quarter of the story out. Now, I don't hate head hopping in a book, as long as it's not done mid-scene. One point of view per scene takes care of the job nicely. And I understand that parts of this book are supposed to be confusing, but randomly hopping about in the chronology, swapping POVs only makes the confusion worse. The idea is to write the story so that the confusion of the characters shines through, not to write the story so that the reader is scratching her head going, "What just happened there?" On top of that this is a long (and trust me, I write long books, I know long.) book, and it doesn't need to be quite that long.

A proofreader needed to go through and fix up the grammar, typos, and formatting issues. Now, I'm not going to be winning any awards for Grammarian of the Year. On top of that, I don't much care about grammar mistakes that don't jump off the page. But there were enough issues with For the Sake of the Future that I was irked by them.

Basically it's a rough draft. It's a rough draft of something that could become a good book. On Goodreads two stars means the book was okay, one star means I didn't like it. Neither of those options really work. This book isn't okay; it's not well enough written to get an okay. But I did like it. I'd really like to see what it might look like after Panesar takes a few years to really study how a story hangs together and gets a good editor. So, no stars for For the Sake of the Future, just a review.

The Fantasy Sage Speaks: The Contract

2011-11-26T13:59:00.004-05:00

So, last week I started talking about the bits and pieces I've picked up on how to keep readers happy. Since I'm not all that much closer to finishing the current book on the review list (For the Sake of the Future. It's big. I'm liking it. Hopefully review next week!) I shall now lay down the wisdom on tip number two: The Contract.

You're writing a book. You are the master of your own world. Inside the realm of your word processor you are a GOD! You are accountable to no one but your own whims and desires. You can make everything precisely the way you like it, take the tale anywhere, make your characters do anything! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Hmmm... Well, okay, this is true, sort of. Or I should say, if you strive to be a good (and by good I mean able to satisfy readers) writer, you stuff the part of your mind that's cackling like an evil scientist into the closet, lock it in there, and throw away the key.

See, there is an unspoken, unwritten contract between you and the reader. You set the tone of this contract by how you begin your story. By the time you've introduced all the characters and laid out the major plot points your readers expect you to follow through on those plot points and keep those characters in character. This is not to say you can't introduce new plot points or that your characters can't change. You can do both, but you have to satisfy the contract with your readers, which means finishing up those original points and doing the work necessary to take the reader along with the character when they change, if you want to keep happy readers.

In the last Fantasy Sage column I wrote about plot, and how JK Rowling did a fantastic job with building her plot so that by the time the last book came out she had a ravening horde of readers ready to jump over the corpses of their friends just to lay hands on the book. (Or maybe that was just me...*whistles innocently*)

Anyway, what she didn't do was fulfill the contract she set with her readers. By the end of Half Blood Prince, the readers were expecting a good versus evil showdown wrapped around a high quest fantasy and a final clash between Harry and Voldie. She did give us the final clash: a muddy,convoluted, confusing, and anti-climactic final showdown, but it was indeed there. The high quest fantasy, in the hands of even a marginally competent fantasy writer (which I think as of that point in time we all assumed she was) should have been an absolute blast. Instead she gave us moping and camping, filled with bad writing, and worse logic. As for the good versus evil showdown, it's just not there. In an effort to make sure there's no clear good or evil, she purposely makes sure that Harry's casting the only magic ever defined as Dark Arts by the middle of the book.

From my own take on the book, and from several critical reviews I agreed with, I'd have to say the issue was by the time Rowling got to Deathly Hallows she wanted to write one thing (a treatise on the acceptance of the inevitability of death) instead of what she told us she was going to write (a good versus evil battle to the end). Her part of the contract was not fulfilled, and, though kids still love Harry Potter, she lost a lot of the grown-ups with that book.

Another great example of I-promised-to-write-you-something-and-decided-to-write-something-else-altogether is The His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. The first two books were great, but by the time he got 'round to book three he forgot he'd set up an epic clash of faith versus science and decided that introducing a completely new plot point involving unicycling mutant elephants (at least that's how I pictured them) was in order.

Result: unhappy readers.

So my author friends, how do we work with this? How do we not make the same mistakes? Well, if you took the advice of the first column and figured out your plot before you started writing (or at the very least, before you published), you've probably got half the battle taken care of.

Keep that plot in line. If you go astray, and you certainly may decide to do so, give it a really, really careful look, especially if you've already published books in the series. And if you do go astray, wrap up the loose points, no matter what. And do them proper justice. Just because you've gotten bored with the your original set up does not mean your readers have. They want to see the action. Single biggest complaint about The Amber Spyglass: the big battle everyone was waiting for happens off-screen.

Here's the other advantage of keeping your plot in line: if you do a good job plot wrangling, you're much less likely to find yourself in a situation where you have to dumb down your characters, make them start doing things they wouldn't ordinarily do, or mucking about with them in any other way. Readers will often forgive a wonky plot. They rarely forgive having a favorite character lobotomized and turned into an idiot puppet by the author. The most recent example I can think of for this is Dragons of the Hourglass Mage, where for reasons that I can only assume rhyme with honey, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman decided to resurrect Raistlin, yet again, took the story back twenty years, and tried to fill in a part of Dragons of Spring Dawning that had been kept silent.

And they bombed at it. If, when they wrote Spring Dawning, they had any idea of how Raistlin got to where he was, it was pretty obvious that by the time they wrote Hourglass Mage they had forgotten it. So they started from scratch, apparently deciding that the fans wanted a new, softer, less-sarcastic version of Rasitlin, and they killed his character.

Once again this resulted in unhappy fans.

So, be careful with your set up, be aware of the promises you are making your readers, and fulfill them. If you're lucky enough to have fans who review your books and discuss them, pay attention to what your fans are expecting. Sure, you don't have to give them what they want, but if you know what they expect, what they think you've promised to tell them, you can do a much better job of keeping them happy.

If you find yourself in love with a totally cool idea, write it down, play with it, but if it doesn't fulfill your contract to your readers, put it in the drawer for the next series. There's always time to write new books with new adventures and new promises later on down the line. Once again, it's much easier to get a happy fan to go and buy that new book and new adventure than it is to woo one back later who you annoyed when you didn't tell him the story you said you would.

Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Magic, Plot, Power Balance

The Fantasy Sage Speaks: Plot

2011-11-19T09:56:00.010-05:00

In addition to being a writer, I'm also a reader. (Yes, I know you are all deeply shocked, what with the book reviews and all.) However, I'm also a reader of book reviews. I hang out on discussion boards where people talk about books. Over the years I feel like I've sucked up some points about what readers, fantasy readers especially, like, what makes them keep coming back, and what annoys them. Which, since I'm nowhere near finishing the next book for review, I, the newly christened Fantasy Sage, shall share with you.

So, here it is, in all it's glory, the first tip: If you want the sort of fans that are begging for your next book to come out, make sure you've got a set plot arc.

What do I mean by this? Fans like knowing there is a set beginning, middle, and end to the story. Harry Potter and the..., Twilight, Harry Dresden, and Game of Thrones: the thing these books all have in common, besides legions of adoring fans, is the author set up an overarching plot, then wrote each installment in a way that furthered that plot, but also opened up more questions about what would come next. None of these stories are/were written with the I'll-just-wing-it-and-see-where-the-characters-take-me method.

I know a lot of authors like to sort of just go with it, write whatever comes to mind, and keep the story going forever. But, if you read reviews of The Wheel of Time, Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, or The Southern Vampire Mysteries, you'll notice that many of the bad ones center on a theme of the author has lost the plot, that the later books don't have the same heart, magic, feel, ect... of the first few.

If you'll allow me a bit of comparison... Fans were lining up in droves, spending hours debating what would happen and how for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. By the time we got to that last book all the main players were in place, the epic battle ready to start, and a new quest set to begin. Many of the old threads had been wrapped up or almost wrapped up. The high quest for the Horcruxes and the final Harry V. Voldie fight was the promised end of the series. No matter what you thought of how J.K. Rowling handled Deathly Hallows, the set up for it had fans salivating over copies of the last book. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was the highest selling opening of a book, ever.

Now, we're two books away from the end of the Sookie Sackhouse (Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood) books. If I understand how the series worked, originally it was a three book deal, then a ten book deal, and now a twelve book deal. And it shows. The first three were very solid. They were mysteries, with a decent twist on a pretty basic arc. Then it was a ten book deal, and Harris got lost. 'Round about book seven it became pretty clear that Harris didn't have a larger story she was trying to tell, and worse, she had forgotten she was a mystery writer using fantasy tropes, not a fantasy writer using mysteries to build tension. She lost control of her plot. By book ten, where everything should have come to a fairly natural end, she was resurrecting dead plot points in an effort to keep it going for two more books. Unless she's a vastly better writer than we've seen in the last few books, the likelihood is the only question left by the time we get to book twelve is who Sookie ends up with. I know, having read the first ten, I've got no real interest in what happens in eleven, and I'm fairly sure I can skip it without too much damage in my ability to understand twelve. And if you read the negative reviews of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, you'll see I'm not the only one who feels this way.

So, how can we as fantasy writers take advantage of this? Plan your story arc! Or more precisely, know when and where your story ends, and then end it! We aren't serial mystery writers. (They play by a different set of rules.) Our readers want complete, or at least completable, story lines. They want to anticipate what comes next. They want clues, foreshadowing, the ability to look back and feel clever because they caught the clues and had figured out what was coming next.

If you know where your story is going, you can use foreshadowing, parallels, and symbolism to the fullest. You can build the necessary foundation so you're not whipping out McGuffins or Balognium (Thanks, Red Hen) when you've written yourself into a corner. (If you've got your plot properly wrangled, you aren't writing yourself into corners in the first place.) You can write each novel so that you reveal necessary information and leave some questions dangling to get your reader to come back for the next story. And that's what readers want. That's how writing careers are made. It is vastly easier to get someone to read your next book than it is to get someone to find you in the first place, so make sure that first book hooks them on your story.

Now, this isn't to say you can't use the I'll-wing-it-and-let-the-characters-lead-wherever technique while you are writing, but, if that's what you're going to do, don't publish until you've finished the whole tale. The thing to bear in mind is there's a huge difference between writing a story and publishing a story. When you are writing, you're doing it just for you. When you publish, you are making a promise to tell your reader a certain sort of story (more on this in the next post: The Contract). So, write however you like, but don't publish until you can give your readers the set story arc they desire.

So sayeth the Fantasy Sage. Now, go write! ;)

Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Magic, Contract, Power Balance

Guest Review: Nevermore

2011-11-12T11:25:00.000-05:00

Today on To Publish or Not To, we've got a guest reviewer. Cambria Herbert, author of the upcoming Before. She's treating us to a review of Nevermore.

Title: Nevermore

Author: Kelly Creagh

Publisher: Atheneum, August 31, 2010

Genre: Young Adult paranormal/fantasy

Format: Paperback, hardback, Ebook

ISBN: 1442402008

Isobel is a cheerleader, perky and blond, who is paired with a dark haired “goth” guy for an English assignment. At first she is horrified that she has to work with him. Even more horrified when she tries to talk to him and he is cold and aloof. Then he writes his phone number on her hand in purple ink.

That one act seemed to have sealed their fate.

Even long after Isobel washed away the purple, she still felt the mark. And the more she gets to know Varen, the more drawn into his world she becomes. Unfortunately for Varen that puts a target on his back. Isobel’s possessive (and big fat jerk) boyfriend decided to make Varen’s life hell.

It doesn’t get any better when Isobel breaks up with the jerk. But Varen and Isobel are drawn to one another, despite the worlds they come from. One day, Isobel peaks inside the journal Varen carries with him and finds herself staring into a dream world that he has created.

When strange things begin to happen and things appear that only Isobel can see her world begins to unravel…

And she begins to realize that the power of a dream and written word are far more than she could ever have known. As Varen is slowly consumed by nightmares of his making Isobel must find a way to save him…or lose him forever.

I had heard some good things about this book before I picked it up. The cover art is stunning and I loved the purple writing (which I loved even more after I put the book down). I didn’t know what this book was about when I began reading, I figured I would read and be surprised as I went. I will admit, I really was expecting a vampire book.

I was wrong. There are no vamps in this book. (Yes, a relief to many of you who are sick of the vampire craze). It was a plot like no other I have read. It is an original idea that I could tell the author put a lot of thought and time into.

I really enjoyed this book for that reason. It took me into a whole new world to explore, with characters that were new. Okay, mainly Varen was new to me. The whole cheerleader and football player thing has been done before, but that’s okay, they were still good characters. Anyway, I liked Varen because I thought it was cool that a not so “OMG, that guy is soo hot” guy caught the eye of a “She is so hot” cheerleader”. A lot of the YA books that I read are outcast girl gets hot guy not the other way around. So props to the author for that.

I will say Varen didn’t have me swooning over him, but I did like him. He was a likable character, once given the chance to get to know him. I liked the juxtaposition of him being a goth and also working at a ice cream shop and spooning up flavors like pineapple. He doesn’t seem like a pineapple kind of guy to me. He also drove a cool car.

Nevermore is a long book (over 500 pages), which I like, because it really gave me time to enjoy the book and get into the story. Although, about half way through I started getting antsy to know what the story was, what the book was all about. Up to that point it had mostly been about how Isobel and Varen grew closer and how her ex, Brad, bullied Varen.

The one thing that seemed to bother me was that I felt like I didn’t really know what the book was about. It seemed that Varen held all the answers and he never gave Isobel any. It bothered me. I was reading and reading waiting for his explanations that never came. Now, another character in the book explained a lot of things, and some things Isobel was left to figure out on her own…which I can see how that might be good, because as a reader I really felt like Isobel, identified with her, because I was trying to figure it out alongside her. On the other hand, as a reader, I want to know! I want to discover things, things that maybe even the heroine doesn’t know that way I can gasp then await for his/her reaction upon discovering what was really going on.

In the end I knew what the book was about, I knew what Varen’s “ability” was (for lack of a better term) but I never got to hear his side of the story. If I had been Isobel I would really be angry. Here she is in love with a guy who has one hell of a hobby that she got drug into. A little explanation please??

And to be honest, some things still feel left unexplained, left unsaid.

Yes, there is another book to come out in 2012. Yes, by the end of Nevermore you have a clear picture of what the next book will be about, but still I wanted to know more.

Will I read the next book? Yes. For sure. It is a good story line, unique and I want to know what happens. I am hoping those answers that I look for will be given in book two.

I recommend this book to anyone who likes YA paranormal or fantasy and maybe wants something different, something without vampires and werewolves (why anyone wouldn’t want a werewolf- I will never know).

So there you have it. My opinion.

This review is written by Cambria Hebert, author of the upcoming novella Before. If' you'd like to learn more about Cambria and her other writings, head over to http://www.cambriahebert.com/.

Indie Book Review: A Heart In Sun and Shadow

2011-11-05T18:49:00.000-04:00

I'd like to make a confession. Previous to reading this book I had never had a genuine WTF?!? moment. Oh, I've run into things that made absolutely no sense to me. I'd had experiences where, when talking about them later, I described them as a WTF moment. But, previous to reading this book, I had never, ever run into something where upon reading it, I actually said, out loud, What the fuck?

Then I read A Heart In Sun and Shadow.

Imagine if you will: I'm sitting in a very crowded Panera, enjoying a lunch of French Onion soup and a baguette. It's so busy I'm sharing my table with a very sweet old lady. We've had a bit of nice conversation about my netbook, and how I read books on it to review. I'm happily reading along, not a single clue that this bomb is coming at me, and then I get to the part where the book turns upside down. Then: What the fuck? And, I say it, out loud. I didn't realize I had done it until the very sweet old lady begs my pardon. I blush, swallow my tongue, apologize, and then explain what I just read. I get the sense she didn't disagree with my assessment, even if she wasn't a fan of my language.

Before I hit the WTF moment, the review I had been writing in my head looked something like this: A Heart in Sun and Shadow is a sweet, gentle romance set in an ancient Wales that never was. It's the tale of Aine, a wisewoman who falls in love with cursed twin brothers and sets off to free them. Her adventures deepen her love of them and tests her resolve. I was planning on writing about how I wasn't entirely sure if this was a YA book or not. How the writing was a easy and a bit shallow, but the love story is unconventional enough that it's not an easy YA fit. I was planning on discussing fantasy romance and the tradition of the lovers quest.

That's what I had been planning on writing.

The sweet and gentle nature of this story is part of why the WTF moment was so shocking. The fact that it's not even remotely foreshadowed is another reason.

Now, I'm going to tread into major spoiler territory here. Aine is a wisewoman. Think of her as a traveling witch/healer. Her entire code of ethics is help when and where you can and do no harm. She hunts down the Fairy that cursed her lovers. Upon finding her, Seren, the Fairy, sends Aine on a series of increasingly difficult tasks in order to collect the tidbits necessary to break the enchantment. On her travels Aine gets an iron blade that can kill Fey folk, and she learns that she can break a curse by killing the person who cast it. She also learns that Seren is bound to her grove, and cannot leave it for long periods of time.

She returns to Seren, blade among her things, and allows Seren sends her on one last task. She has to collect the tears of a tree. The only way to make the tree cry is to kill it's children. No, not baby trees. Child sprites dancing about in the forest. Child sprites that heal her wounds. Child sprites that invite her to dance with her. Imagine three perfect magical symbols of innocence.

So, here's the moment of truth. Murder the kiddies, collect the tears, give them to the Lady that cursed her lovers, and hope that she really does free them. (And hope it is, because none of us are certain if Seren is on the up and up.) Kill the Lady, free her lovers, but if she does that she cannot leave the Fey realm for any extended length of time. Or go home, tell her loves she tried, but couldn't do it, and live with them.

So, I'm expecting her to kill the Lady, tell her boys what happened, and the three of them live happily ever after in the realm of the Fey. I'm expecting this because it's in character. I'm expecting this because the moral framework Aine embraces would lead her in this direction. Which is why, when she murders the sleeping child sprites, I said, "What the fuck?" out loud.

Sloppy moral thinking is my number one pet peeve in a book. Breaking character is a close runner up. This one nailed both. It's not like there was a gradual, creeping acceptance of moral compromise here. It's not like she's slowly inching toward this decision. It's not like she's in an absolute frothing rage when she does it. She didn't just suddenly find out the children killed her mother or something like that. She's dancing with them. They get tired and go to sleep. While they slumber, she decides dead fairy kids are worth her getting to go back to her boys for a bit of happily ever after, so she slits their throats.

She bought her happiness with three child corpses.

And at that point I lost any sympathy or interest in Aine. I finished the book. There was only 20% of it left, but I was deeply tempted to just put it down. The hope that there would be some sort of justice or comeuppance or something kept me reading. It's not there.

Aine and one of the twins turn out to be utterly despicable. This is not a cute and sweet little romance. These are deeply greedy people, willing to destroy anyone around them to secure their own happiness. And they get to ride off into the sunset of happily ever after. Yeah, maybe in real life you can step over the corpses of the innocent to a life of joy, but part of why people read fiction is because they want some sort of justice. This was an infuriating and deeply unsatisfying read, all the more so because the first 80% of it is just fine. A little light maybe, but the story works, is interesting, and fun to read. Then it suddenly goes way off the rails and I was left wanting to smack Aine upside the head with a two by four.

On Goodreads one star means did not like it. I'll leave it there. Though I hated what the characters did and became, most of the book is soundly written, so I can't say I hated the book. But I really didn't like it.

Indie Book Review: Blood of Requiem

2011-10-29T10:34:00.000-04:00

I really, really wanted to like Blood of Requiem. Really. I respect Daniel Arenson and sort of know him through different online indie writer communities. His books have gorgeous cover art, and from his comments, I know he's a consummate professional.

Burt, beyond that, Blood of Requiem has weredragons. Seriously, how cool is that?

So, I was looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, it really wasn't my cup of tea. I prefer character driven novels with a certain realism to them. That wasn't Blood of Requiem.

There's a lot of action in Blood of Requiem. I got about sixty percent of the way through it, and I'm going to guess seventy percent of that is a battle, a chase, or the lead bad guy remembering raping/torturing or actually raping/torturing someone. Character and plot development are rather thin on the ground.

The lead bad guy, Dies Irae, is EVIL! And in case we didn't get the idea when we found out he's personally responsible for the almost eradication of an entire species, he's also a serial raping sadist. And we get to spend some time in his head, enjoying the rape and torture of innocents. They are distinctly uncomfortable scenes. Very well written scenes, evocative of pure evil, but not exactly comfortable reading. Not to say that they are especially graphic, this isn't The Human Centipede, but it's still a lot more rape than I want to deal with in my fiction.

I like my bad guys at least vaguely realistic. In the case of evil overlords, that means the evil overlord has to provide some level of value to his people, or else he doesn't get to be the evil overlord for very long. Absolute psychopaths can only rule by fear alone for so long (history seems to indicate this is about three years) before someone kills them. Dies Irae has been ruling for ten years, and it doesn't look like he's going anywhere anytime soon.

Put more plainly: if you want to maintain control, you've got to keep the nobles happy. Keeping them so afraid that they won't look you in the eye for fear of being eaten alive by baby griffins (No, that's not hyperbole; that scene is in the book.) is unlikely to produce happy nobles. What it's likely to produce is poison in your cup, a troop of 'loyal' soldiers who put blades in your back, and if that doesn't work, outright insurrection.

Irae came to power through a civil war, which begs another question: how bad were things before? The 'good guys' were the previous rulers. They, for obvious reasons, have a very romantic view of their past life, but still, part of running a successful coup involves making sure that your nobles are better off now than they were before. With constant rape, indiscriminate torture, and years of bloody war, unless things were really bad before, I'm not seeing the nobles going along with this.

I also like it when the characters don't heal up like Wile E. Coyote. With all the action in this book, obviously people get hurt: often and badly. But, within a matter of minutes (occasionally hours) they're back up and fighting. And while I can understand that once or twice in extreme circumstances, this happens over and over. Maybe, at some point in the book after I stopped reading, we learn that there's a horde of clerics casting healing spells, but as of the point where I stopped, I had to assume that everyone involved had Wolverine-level healing powers, but no one mentions it as out of the ordinary. The main characters are all Vir Requis (weredragons) so maybe the super healing speed is part of that, but since all but these six Vir Requis were slaughtered in combat, apparently super speedy healing is not a race trait.

So, Blood of Requiem didn't do it for me. It's well written in a visual sense. If you want to know what everything looks like, this is a great book. If you love action-packed books with absolutely despicable villains, this one might be for you. But by half-way in, I had to give up. I didn't want to spend anymore time in Dies Irae's head. It's too dark, too painful a place. I didn't want to go on another chase. I'd already been on more than I could count. I didn't want to watch another rape. One would have been more than enough, and I was way past one by sixty percent in. I skimmed ahead to the end, reading bits and pieces, and saw that the book wasn't going to change. It wasn't suddenly going to become character driven or realistic. So, I put it aside.

The Trad Book Review: A Dirty Job

2011-10-22T12:55:00.000-04:00

I'd like to link to one of The Oatmeal comics to start this review of A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore. Warning, it contains adult language. (So does A Dirty Job. In fact, if you find the comic too offensive, just cross A Dirty Job off of your reading list.) Just scroll down to the part where it says How British Accents Sound to Americans.

Back? Great. Does that seem like a random link? Let me explain: Christopher Moore has a writing style I'd call Terry Pratchettesque: third person omni POV, somewhat random bits of character and background information, genuinely funny situations, a complicated plot that gets all tied up in a nice bow in the end, with a slightly flat finish. But here's the thing: Terry is British. Chris is an American.

So, A Dirty Job is a lot rougher than anything Pratchett writes. If Pratchett writes PG work, Moore writes R. Adult language, casual racism and sexism, sexual themes: all of that's in A Dirty Job.

So, you're all warned; no matter how the cover looks, this is not a cute little book.

But it is funny and witty, at times deeply tender and respectful and at times frustratingly coarse.

Here's how reading it went for me: I'd be happily cruising along, deeply enjoying the story, and then the main character would suddenly lay down this out-of-the-blue bomb of racial insensitivity, that frankly felt way out of character.

While I'm not a fan of racism as a character trait, if its been well written, if the writer has done his work properly and it fully integrated into the character, it doesn't bother me. There's an Asian character in the book who isn't a huge fan of white people. She's that way through the entire book. Her calling the anglos 'white devils' and considering them all insane was in character. Charlie, the main character, however acts like the average upper-middle class liberal white guy. Until he suddenly develops what appears to be some sort of racial Tourettes syndrome and begins spouting cringe worthy things.

I fear I'm making this sound worse that it is. It's not that the things he says are particularly hateful. They're just horrendously socially awkward and inappropriate. Maybe that's the point, Charlie isn't the smoothest of operators, but still, it sounded way off to me.

That aside, I really enjoyed the book. If less than a page and a half of bits of dialog were edited out, this would have been a four star story for me.

The plot: a story of a 'beta male' who is suddenly widowed and left not only with a brand new baby daughter but a new destiny as a collector of souls, was tight, clever, and unique. Charlie (once again, minus that page of dialog) is a genuinely likeable character. Moore's treatment of death, dying, and especially hospice workers, is gentle and respectful. His side plot of all the old Gods of death converging on San Fransisco as Capital D Death rises was well done.

I just really wish he had restrained himself a bit on the racial commentary.

So, if you've got a thicker skin than I do, or if you want a snappy and fun look death and rebirth and don't mind some coarseness, then have at it. You'll probably enjoy A Dirty Job. Otherwise, give it a wide berth, and get some Terry Pratchett.

The Indie Book Review: The Father's Child

2011-10-15T09:00:00.032-04:00

I've wrapped up The Father's Child by Mark Adair, and even a few days later, I'm not sure what precisely I'm feeling about it. There were parts that were very, very good. There were parts where the writing got choppy and problematic. It hit one of my personal pet peeves, and not in a good way. It hit one of my best loves, in a very good way.

So, let's start at the very beginning. What is it about?

A lot of things. On one level it's a secret society thriller. Go a little deeper and it's a treatises on power and the use thereof. It's a study of love: romantic and platonic. It's a story of friendship.

I don't usually try to describe the plot of a book in a review. Usually, I try to avoid spoilers, but I'll have a hard time getting into what I really liked, and didn't, without going into the plot. So if you wish to avoid spoilers, now's the time to skip to the next review.

In a nutshell John Eris Truman is a technological wunderkind. He's got brains oozing out his ears. He's also shy and not very good with people. His best friend, Paul Eastman, is the yang to his yin. He's outgoing, good with people, and not stupid, but not John's style of hyper-analytical either. The story opens with their third buddy, George, being kidnapped by a group of exceptionally competent professionals at their bi-annual mid-term bash. Fast forward two years, and the FBI still has no clue what happened to George. Paul and John wrap up college and head west, starting anew amid the sunshine and beaches of California.

Then things start to get a bit weird. John starts to remember details about what happened right before George was kidnapped. Those details get them noticed by a mysterious organization. John gets 'kidnapped' and then 'rescued' and spends a few months in the care of his new friend, Sam, his 'rescuer.' They spend hours talking about the fate of the world. We learn how John has always felt a deep need to make the world a better place, a deep responsibility to better humanity. And throughout this he's having some sort of religious/psychic visions (daymares he calls them).

Meanwhile, Paul is looking for his friend. He's aided in this endeavor by Julia; an ex-CIA member, hired by Susan's (more on her in a bit) father as head of his security, in charge with fighting the mysterious organization, called The New Dawn; and Susan, long time girlfriend/love of John. Julia explains to them the New Dawn is a super-secret cabal with tentacles in every echelon of power. They have a vision of the good that they will do whatever is necessary to achieve. Susan's dad has been fighting them, and in retaliation, they kidnap kids dear to him, like George, and now that he's found out about it, John, and as soon as they can get their hands on him, Paul.

Eventually, of course, Paul finds John, and it turns out the New Dawn is behind all of it. Julia's a member. (It's hinted Susan's Dad is, too.) And once a mystical/technological ceremony; involving not just implanting a computer chip into John's brain, but a necromancer, three-hundred-year-old-blood, and a computer system that can rule the world; takes place, John will find himself a shadow king of Earth with Paul, Julia, and Susan as his highest counsel.

Over the course of this, we learn that The New Dawn is not all puppies and sunshine. Once John takes over he really will have the power to make the world a better place. But some absolutely horrific things had to happen to get him that power. If you can, imagine a hybrid of the Bene Gesserit, The Illuminati (Wilson and Shea's version), and a smattering of Cthulu, you'll have something that sort of gives you an idea of The New Dawn.

So, with that set up, we run into my pet peeve: sloppy moral thinking. Adair tells us that John really will have the power to make the world a better place. We aren't talking Hope and Change here, where the words sound good, but very little actually happens. We're talking about eradicating poverty and disease. We're talking end of war. Adair also tells us that John and The New Dawn will become one organism. So, even if horrible things had to happen to get John the power to make the world a better place, they do not have to continue happening because John, by will alone, can wield this power, and there's no reason he has to continue in those plans.

Basically, this is the Spiderman moment: with great power comes... Nothing. With an immensely powerful organization capable of changing the world, John, Paul and Susan decide to destroy it. Sure, they could have saved the lives of billions of people, destroyed hunger, ended disease, stopped war, but The New Dawn was involved in some horrific things to get them that power, so they used John's access to kill it.

Basically Peter Parker, upon noticing the research facility that created the spider was also doing absolutely evil genetic research, decided to set fire to it, stay a college student, majoring in journalism, and eventually became an investigative reporter. The web slinger never sees the light of day.

And this is where I, as a reader, start banging my head against the wall. I get the point of where Adair was going. I understand his play on turning away from the corrupting influence of almost infinite power. The problem is, he didn't set up the New Dawn or John in such a way that the reader comes away impressed and relieved that John stepped back from the power. Yes, the New Dawn is immensely creepy. But John is an immensely good character. A character who, with almost limitless power and in an absolute frothing rage, gives the man who made him that angry a black eye, and then stalks off in a huff. John is basically a Paladin. And he has complete and utter control over The New Dawn. So instead of Darth Vader being seduced by the power of the dark side and turning away from it, all I was left with was a sense of the immense loss of opportunity. Basically, John needed to be a whole lot darker for this plot to work convincingly.

Since we're already on the negative side, let me talk a little about the writing as well. For the most part the story is well written. Then we get to the climax of the book.

As an author there are two parts of the book you want to absolutely nail. The beginning because that's where you attract your reader, and the climax because, well, it's the climax. Adair did a fine job with the first 90ish percent of the story, then we get to the climax and the writing begins to feel rushed. He starts bounding over details that would have been nice to see, though he does have John remember some of them later in a flashback. Which is remarkably unsatisfying. He begins switching point of view rapidly, which isn't necessarily a deal breaker for me. It's a good technique for building tension and giving us both story lines, but both of his POV characters are in first person. Now, most of the time this isn't an issue. Adair has done a good job of giving both characters very distinct voices, so figuring out who is who takes maybe a sentence or two tops. But when you're flipping back and forth every few paragraphs, and it takes a line or two to figure out whose head you're in, it's more distracting than entrancing.

Then, right as the climax is drawing near, he tosses in a twist that I was expecting, but hoping he'd restrain himself from doing. He didn't set it up properly to have the sort of punch it needed, so it fizzled. Like with the decision to destroy New Dawn, I could see what he was trying to do, but it needed a few extra pages of background and tension building to really pull off.

Okay, enough of the stuff I didn't like, let's talk about the good stuff.

Character voice: Adair absolutely nailed it. John and Paul have distinct voices, both of which flow naturally, use words convincingly, and make me like the characters. I'd be happy to have both Paul and John as friends. They are fully rounded, vibrant characters.

Humor: once again Adair does a great job with this element of the story. The Father's Child could have been soul-suckingly grim, but it wasn't because of how well Paul is written. He's funny, occasionally goofy, but not so much that you want to slap him. He's a bit of a light-weight as a thinker, but it's an element this story badly needed. If you've ever seen NCIS, he'll put you in mind of DiNozzo.

The relationship between John and Paul. This is something I love to see in a book: a well-written, convincing, deep male friendship. Usually in thrillers men relate to each other in terms of killing one another or partnering up for the duration of the mission. Sometimes there's a sidekick as well, whose main purpose is to provide comic relief. Now, while it is true that Paul is there for comic relief, he's way past the 'sidekick' role. He's a fully defined protagonist in his own right. And between them is a relationship worth exploring. A friendship that feels real, intimate, yet fully masculine as well.

Lastly, Adair is handy with his visual imagery. While in Paul's head he's funny and witty, in John's he's intensely visual, seeing and describing things in detailed shades of beautiful language.

All of which is why, five days after finishing the book, I'm still not sure if I liked it or disliked it. I know I'm frustrated. I know Adair can write. I saw him do it. I read it. But then the climax hits and the prose goes all wonky, and the penultimate scene of the book doesn't happen until a flashback at the end. Which made me a very unhappy reader. But it's got a great friendship, and some wonderful characters, and I really liked the use of visual imagery. Which made me a very happy reader.

On Goodreads.com, two stars equals it's okay. And I think that's where I'm going to leave The Father's Child. I have high hopes that Mark Adair's further adventures with the written word will be excellent.

The Indie Book Review: The Society of Pirates

2011-10-08T14:46:00.000-04:00

Let me start this review by getting something out in the open. I know David Twiddy. We're Facebook friends. He graduated college the year before I got there, and we have several friends in common. So, although I've never met David in person, I like him. I have a feeling that, had I gotten to college a year sooner or had he stuck around a year later, we probably would have been friends. I should probably also add that he did not ask me to review his book.

So, I may not be perfectly objective in this review. But I will be honest.

And honestly, I really enjoyed The Society of Pirates.

The Society of Pirates is somewhere between a swashbuckling yarn and historical fiction. It pays more attention to the realities of life among the pirates and the attitudes of the times than the traditional swashbuckling tale, and is a little lighter on the details of geography and culture than a traditional historical fiction. The plot is a somewhat basic pirate story: head off in search of buried treasure and deal with the black-hatted (or in this case lipped) nemesis before he deals with you. The details: a hull full of Jesuits, a safe haven with a natural philosopher and his trained monkeys, and Spanish-nobleman pirate hunters, are all new.

In relation to the plot the story is a bit loose. In a tight story each aspect of the story moves the plot forward. Bits of Society fill in character, give us depth of world, but don't necessarily move the storyline forward. Though I don't think a sequel is in the offing, it does read quite a bit like the first story in a series. Basically, there's a lot of good world and character building here, probably a bit more than was strictly necessary for the first book, but it's a good foundation for series of tales.

I'm often frustrated by the division between YA and adult fiction. Usually the dividing line is the age of the main character; an adult main character means a book isn't YA fiction. All of the characters in The Society of Pirates are adults. Yet with a snappy storyline, fun characters, minimal adult language, minimal explicit violence, and no sex, I'd be more than comfortable giving this book to any ten-year-old who likes pirates and wants to stretch his reading skills.

The history hit a sweet spot for me. Dave explored on the rift between the Catholics and Protestants, Spain and England, and the freebooting multi-culture of the pirate world. One of the things modern Americans often forget is that once upon a time 'white' was meaningless in regards to race and Christian meant very little in terms of religious harmony. I'm always happy to see a realistic treatment of race and religion, especially in stories where it's not vitally important to the plot. It shows the author was paying attention and doing a good job of setting the scene.

Dialog. I've said it before. I'm sure I'll say it again. I'm a sucker for a great dialog. And not only is the dialog tight and witty, it's in dialect and well done. Well done dialect is one of the most difficult skills for a writer to develop. Most of us have a hard enough time just getting distinct voices for our characters, let alone trying to capture the phonetic spellings of the different speech patterns of our characters. Dave didn't just write dialect. He didn't just do it well. He did four distinct dialects. Pirate English, Scots, Spanish, and the traditional American English of the narrator. My mind boggles at the work involved in pulling that off. I know I couldn't do it, and I've seen very, very few other writers do it well.

So, all in all, I'm very pleased with The Society of Pirates. Go give it a read, or get a copy for the pirate-loving-ten-year-old in your life, and spend a little while in the company of pirates.

DAZ for Cover Art

2011-09-24T12:01:00.000-04:00

In my never-ending quest to write about interesting tools available to the self-published author, I'd like to spend a little time talking 3d rendering software.

Specifically, I'd like to talk about DAZ3D. DAZ is 3D rendering software that gives people like me (who can barely draw competent stick figures) the ability to make art like this.

Wood Elves by Maraich

Sort of. See, here's the thing, Daz has what we shall nicely call "a steep learning curve." Or maybe, I should say art in general has a steep learning curve. Though both of these ideas go hand in hand. Daz is equipped to allow you to make any little change you need to for successful art, so it's complicated software.

The premise is deeply seductive. You see images like the one to the left, and they're beautiful. You watch the intro video and see how Daz works. It's 3d rendering software with props. It's like the ultimate dress up game. You buy the dolls (characters) you like, and the clothing you want them in, and the props around them, and then arrange them however you like. Almost everything is practically infinitely customizable. You can take their base objects and make your characters, places, and scenes come to life.

It's brilliant. If you're anything like me, you can barely produce legible handwriting, let alone draw anything. But with Daz, all you need is the ability to move sliders left and right. I can do that! You can do that! And if you're like me, upon seeing what was possible, and looking at your cover art, which isn't terrible, but you'd like to spiff it up, your credit card leapt out of your wallet and began entering the numbers all by itself. (The basic software is free, the characters, props, clothing, etc, all costs money.)

So, I bought characters, I bought clothing, I messed around with sliders, and produced...

Graveyard 1 by Keryl Raist

Well, it's not precisely Revenge of the Sims, but it's not good either. And I'm not alone in doing this. So have a lot of other self published authors. Complaints about atrocious CGI (computer generated image) cover art isn't precisely rare in our field.

See, there are things you learn while you learn to draw that a lot of us who aren't artists don't know much about. Shadows for example. The software handles the shadows, but you fine tune them. So for example, the shadows on the clothing look fine, but Sarah's (the girl character's name) hair looks off. Likewise something weird is happening with the shadows on the ground.

If you can actually draw you probably know something about posture, poses, and facial expressions. I've had problems with the shoulders. Chris' (the guy character) shoulders are too stiff. He's supposed to be relaxed and comforting. Sarah's supposed to look like she's about to spring up and attack something that's scaring her.

As my husband said, it looks stiff and cartoonish.

But this is all fixable. (Hence the steep learning curve comment.) After many hours online reading more about how 3d renders work, and more hours spent adjusting sliders, I got to this.

Graveyard 2 by Keryl Raist

Better. The ground still has some odd shadowing, but the background lighting now clearly says, "Sunset." Chris looks a bit less stiff, but I've got the camera so you can't really see his face anymore. His clothing looks better, but still isn't perfect. Sarah looks like she's about to burst into tears, and that's just not right. She's supposed to be scared, not sad. Amazing what a 15% change in the curve of the lips will do. Her hair no longer has those weird lines, but the reflection is a bit too sharp.

The big issue right now is posture. Sarah's shoulders are doing a better job of conveying 'scared' but her arms are wrong, and in real life, the knife would fall to the ground if she was holding it that loosely.

Real artists use life studies. There's a reason for this. It wasn't until I actually held a knife that I realized how tight the fist needed to be or that the thumb was way off. Meanwhile, if you're so scared you're about to attack, that sort of bent arm/fist just isn't happening. On top of that (though you can't see it in the picture) I had the weight on her legs wrong, which adds to her looking 'off.' I'm taking a picture of my husband holding a staff soon, because Chris' grip looks better from shot one to two, but I have a feeling the arm is off.

Graveyard 3 by Keryl Raist

And so the changes continue. Chris' shirt looks better, but the lighting makes it look a bit shiny. Sarah's hair still isn't quite there. Her facial expression is better, but not quite right yet either. The hand holding the knife is better, so is the arm with the fist, but the actual fisted hand still needs a little adjustment on the bend. I'll probably end up messing with Chris' arm holding the staff a bit more, too.

Then I'll probably re-light the whole thing three or four more times to just see how different combinations work.

So, do I recommend DAZ? Yes. Doing this is a whole lot of fun. But it's not easy. And it's not quick. When it comes down to it, we see so many thousands of tiny details that we never really notice, until we run into an image where they don't look right. Then we still don't notice them, but we do realize the image isn't right.

I'm not ready to start publishing my images as cover art yet. But I'm pretty sure one of these days I'll get it down. I will learn to really see the details. In the meantime, I look at the images others have created with Daz and feel hopeful that one of these days I too will produce something worth putting on the cover of my book. One of these days, I'll get to the point where I can do things like this:

Spirit Quest DS Version by Maraich

The Indie Short Story Review: Celebrity Space

2011-09-17T13:49:00.001-04:00

What to say about Alain Gomez' Celebrity Space? It's short. I liked it. It's creepy. I wanted more.

That about sums it up in as few words as possible, but you aren't reading this for the teeny-tiny book review. So, lets see about adding some meat to those descriptions.

It is short. At about 3000 words, it's lunch or coffee break reading, depending on how fast you read.

There is an issue the short story author has that a novelist doesn't, and that's the need to pack a lot of punch into very few words. Celebrity Space is about as long as most novel authors spend on describing the base location and the first meeting of the main character. And in that space it has to introduce six characters, set up a plot arc, and build a climax.

And it's okay at all of those things. Though I think they could have been done significantly better with about twice as many words (and still would have been a very short story.) Or done just as well with the same number of words if Gomez had spent less time on the extraneous characters.

Mostly I would have liked to have seen more focus on the creep factor, on the visceral reaction of the main character, Dan, to the first hint that something unsavory is going to happen, Dr. Fleischer, an experimental geneticist with a reputation for unethical work.

Also, on the short theme, there is this: Celebrity Space doesn't feel finished. It ends at a logical point, and a bit of a cliffhanger at that. Now, in a novel, you can do that and leave the reader feeling like they read a whole story, and now it's time to move onto a new story. With as short as CS is, you don't get the feeling that you've read a whole story. It feels like you've read the first chapter of a larger story. Since CS is now out as part of a collection of short stories, my guess is that it really is just the first chapter in a longer story.

On the "I liked it" theme: it's a solid little set up for a larger story. There's enough going on to get you interested. It's not terribly deep or meaningful, but it's quick and entertaining, sort of the literary equivalent of a potato chip. Tasty, but you want more than one.

As for creepy, the write up doesn't really do the story justice. I'd say it's much closer to the thriller end of the sci-fi spectrum than the adventure side, and from the write up it's hard to tell that. Even more foreshadowing would have been nice, but given the length, it's a solid effort.

There are three other stories in the series. I haven't read them, yet. (My to be reviewed list is longer than my arm, so I'm trying to get through more of it fast.) So, it does look like Gomez has taken care of that issue. Right now Celebrity Space is free on Amazon, so if you're interested in a crunchy little bit of story goodness, go give it a shot.

The Indie Book Review: The Eternal Messiah: Jesus of K'Turia

2011-09-11T11:43:00.000-04:00

I'd like to start this review with two related thoughts. First off, it takes a lot of guts to write about Jesus. Almost everyone, and all Christians, has an ideal of Jesus, a set of mindsets and actions, and any deviation by the author is likely to annoy some readers.

Secondly, though I have a degree in Religious Studies with a focus in Christian History and Theology, I'm not actually a Christian.

Which I guess is my way of saying, I'm well versed in the ideas this story deals with, but I have no dog in the fight.

So, what is this story about? The title would seem to indicate a hybrid of the Gospels and Star Trek. And I'll admit that was what I was expecting to read as I got into the book. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find an elegant and gentle treatment of the transformative power of faith.

The theology is clean and simple. Anyone who possesses a faith and works mindset should be pleased. Anyone who is a fan of Paul's criticisms of the Law will probably enjoy this as well. If you too believe the Law is old and dead, and the heart of the Christian message is drop everything, love your fellows, and follow Jesus, then you'll probably like this book, and be sold on it's main premise: that that message can immediately change, heal a man.

But I'm not sold on that message, so I would have liked to seen a bit more emotional depth of transformation. The main characters find Jesus, literally, and are changed. They see Him in action, feel the healing balm of His presence, and in less than two days, are ready to completely change their lives. Now, perhaps that's the point, interaction with the real Jesus is so powerful, it immediately changes you. But it didn't feel real to me.

There is a phenomena with hard core Star Trek fans. If you ask them what happened in any given episode, they can tell you not only what happened on the screen, but they also fill in extra bits of story that weren't really there. Parts that are emotionally meaningful to them are amplified, more detail added, occasionally entire extra scenes or bits of dialog take place. The result is a much rounder, more fulfilling story than the actual TV show on the screen.

I have a feeling actual Christians will have a similar response to The Eternal Messiah. People who already believe the message, who already have felt the power of Jesus in their own lives will likely have no problem connecting the dots of this story and adding in the extra bits of depth necessary to make it great. People like me, on the outside looking in, will likely find the transformation a bit shallow.

Which is not to say it's badly written. It's a solid B effort. But it's not the sort of change where you slide effortlessly into the characters and accept what is going on. This isn't Michael Corleone joining the dark side.

I would have liked to have seen a more defined climax to the story. I know when the plot is character change that a major, well-defined climax is problematic, but this story ended almost tentatively. Yes, it wraps at a logical point, but it feels like the first book in a series.

All in all, I liked The Eternal Messiah. I enjoyed reading it, and wanted to know what came next. There are shades of Dune as well as Star Trek in this story, and I appreciate a bit of sci-fi in my theology.

Indie Book Review: McCarty Griffin

2011-09-03T10:52:00.000-04:00

In thinking about this review, I've got the music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in my head. Before anyone thinks I'm calling any of these books bad or ugly, let me say what I mean.

The Good: The Tribe is a sweet story about a group of feral cats and the humans who move onto their farm.

The Bad: Monster Story is a "Good Lord! By all that's good and holy, DON'T GO INTO THE WOODS!" sort of tale.

The Ugly: Half Inch is a story of a battered woman planning to and murdering her ex-husband.

So, it's on the level of choice of topics is where these terms fit.

The Tribe brings us into the minds of a collection of feral cats left to their own devices on a farm, and their adventures with the humans who decide to move there. It's cute. It's sweet. It's begging to be made into a live action movie for the 5-10 year old crowd.

I think The Tribe is technically a book for adults, (none of the characters are children) but I'd highly suggest it for reading with your kids. Especially if they're old enough to be begging for pets. This would be a great start to conversations about what it means to take care of an animal, about how they aren't just furry toys, and how to respect the small, fuzzy lives around us.

I'll have to admit that I didn't finish Monster Story, but not because it was low quality. For personal reasons I've been in a place where horror just isn't settling well with me. The set up was strong. The creepy factor was ramping up. Horribly dead people were being found, well, pieces of them, and I hit the point where Monster Story was just too much.

I'm not usually a wuss when it comes to horror, so I'll probably take a stab at it again later. But for the third of it I read, I was impressed, so impressed I didn't want to know what happened next.

And then comes Half-Inch, which was one of the most wonderfully ugly stories I've read in a long time.

I've always felt the true horror of Silence of the Lambs comes from the fact that Hannibal Lecter seems so reasonable. You read the books, hear him speak, and suddenly you're thinking murder as art doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Pammy (Half-Inch's main character) might not have the same motivations as Lecter, but as you steep in the story the reasonableness of her actions grows and grows. Toward the end you're sitting there, nodding along, more or less thinking, 'Yep, he had it coming.' and that's when you pull back and realize exactly how ugly this story is.

All in all, I'm quite impressed by the range McCarty Griffin was able to pull off. Besides basic setting, these three stories have very little in common, yet they are all very believable. She understands the mechanisms of thriller, horror, and non-genre fiction. Stephen King is the only other author I can think of who's managed to pull off all three convincingly, and he's not bad company for an author to keep.

Indie Book Review: The Egyptian

2011-08-27T09:11:00.001-04:00

I'm about to make a pretty bold statement here. Layton Green's The Egyptian is the strongest, best written indie book I've ever read. Now, it's not my favorite indie book, I prefer a bit more humor in a book, but the basis of pure technical writing skill, on the ability to craft a story and have it hang together, The Egyptian is the best one I've seen so far.

What makes the Egyptian so great?

Let's start with the characters. Dominic Grey, the leading man, is back from The Summoner, older, and a bit wiser, and ready to start on something new. He's working for Viktor now as a full time investigator of situations where religion/cults and the real world mix in unfortunate ways. And, while Dominic isn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination, he is, in this partnership with Viktor, the muscle man. He does the legwork, the investigation that involves going to scary places and dealing with creepy people, and occasionally showing us that Jason Stratham has nothing on him when it comes to martial arts. Which brings us to Viktor, who is still my favorite of the crew, who is for lack of a better term, the brains. Viktor is the Religious Phenomenologist, the guy who actually knows what they're looking for. Dominic finds the pieces, Viktor puts them together. New to The Egyptian we get to meet Veronica, who is basically a Bond Girl. If you've ever read/seen a James Bond story, you will understand her role in the book. (Look good, move the plot along, have sex with the hero). Lastly, Jax, also new to the cast, adds an extra layer of brightness to the story with his jaded character and devil may care attitude. (He put me in mind of a mercenary version of Han Solo.) These four very different characters are expertly balanced throughout the story to keep the plot running, the tension high, and the reader caring about what happens next. Getting to spend time with them is a joy.

From there we go to the plot. The Egyptian is solid. Each aspect of the book makes sense, each scene flows into the next, there are no moments of wishing someone with a delete button had gotten a hold of certain bits, and no sudden wondering what happened in a given scene. I had a small complaint with The Summoner, where on occasion it was a little too obvious that the characters were doing things because Green needed them to to keep the plot going. That never happens in the Egyptian. All the action, all the motivation, it all flows naturally. You never see the hand of the author in this story. The groundwork is properly laid, the middle adds new interests and possibilities, the climax takes care of business, and then we wrap up with a tidy ending.

Wait, you actually want to know what that plot is? Okay. On the surface level, it's about returning some stolen property. Deeper in, that stolen property is a vial of the water of life, a serum that stops people from aging. Who are the thieves? An anti-aging biotech firm. Who lost the vial? An Egyptian eternal-life cult complete with mummies, who also happens to be an anti-aging biotech firm. And they're willing to do anything to get it back. Who are the bad guys? That's one of the great twists in this story. And this story has twists, it has turns, and mummies, and a hunchback, and... I mentioned James Bond earlier. Well, if James Bond and the X-Files had a love child, this book would be it.

The romance is once again a guy's romance. But it's a guy's romance with a bit more introspection than I've usually seen in guy oriented books. I like the fact that Grey is still dealing with the emotional fall out of The Summoner, but willing to move on to new things as well. It's realistic in a very good way. (It's also realistic in a way that some women might find exasperating, but that has more to do with how they deal with men, than anything about the book.)

Dialog is well done, competent, but not outstanding. Call it a B+. And honestly that just might be a matter of my own taste in the matter. There's a sort of balance between wit, snark, and stoic (think NCIS) I'm especially fond of, and this book didn't have that. But what it did have is dialog that works for each character. There's never a second spent thinking, 'Huh? Why did he say that?' There's not a single phrase in the entire book that drags you out of character. And with characters as different as these four, plus the villains, that's a marvelous job.

Like The Summoner, this is a serious book with some dark topics, and Jax was a much needed glimmer of light. In my previous review I equated The Summoner with 90% cocoa chocolate, very dark, very bitter. And sometimes you want dark and bitter. But you can't make it your entire diet. The Egyptian, were it dark chocolate, would probably come in around 60%. And for me, at least, this is a welcome change. I can only deal with so much terrible darkness in a series before it gets too depressing to continue on. The Egyptian not only gives the characters a break, but it gives the reader one as well.

I am extremely pleased that Layton Green asked me to review The Egyptian. I look forward to seeing his further works.

The Indie Book Review: The Days and Months We Were First Born

2011-08-13T11:38:00.000-04:00

"It's the end of the world as we know it... And I feel fine..."

Okay, not literally, but close enough. I like apocalyptic fiction, and with a mysterious plague, people dying in droves, and society falling apart almost as fast as a roller coaster on the down slide, The Days and Months We Were First Born: The Unraveling certainly qualifies.

I liked The Days and Months We Were First Born: The Unraveling, but I didn't love it. To some degree it felt like a sketch of a book I could have loved: rough and in need of focus.

The Unraveling is a quick read. It comes in at about 150 pages, making it a very short novel or a novella. In serial fiction the job of the author is to make sure each book has a complete plot arc, but at the same time the book moves the larger story arc forward. Jim Butcher's Dresden Files is excellent at this. Burn Notice (a TV show) is fantastic at it. With The Unraveling, I'm just not sure where the larger arc is going. Though we get the sense that Martin, the main character, is telling us the story from a vantage point later in time, we don't get enough sense of that later point to have a good idea of what the larger focus of the series is.

The Unraveling could just as easily be called: Escape From New York, because that seems to be the main plot. We get the set up: almost everyone dies horribly. We get the baby plot arc: adapt to the new world. We know there has to be a larger plot arc because it's book one in a series, but beyond Martin survives long enough to tell his story, we don't have much of an idea of what it might be. I think, if Hunter had stayed with just that arc, and left the reader with only the information that Martin could get for himself, this story would have been a lot stronger.

But he didn't leave it there. About half way through the story we suddenly break away from Martin and start following a group of scientists. Why? I have no idea. Let me get into spoiler territory here, by the end of the story New York City will be blown up in a nuclear blast. Now, there is no way for Martin to know why this has happened. So Hunter breaks off from Martin's tale, half way into the story, to start adding the second plot line. And it's not that either plot line is bad; it's just that there's no real reason for it. There doesn't seem to be any reason for NYC to blow up. Ninety percent of the population is dead, more is dying, everything else is devolving into chaos, there's no reason for a spectacular boom. If it was important to the larger plot arc, we need more information to help us find that.

From a technical aspect of putting words together, Hunter's writing ranges from quite good to shaky. Martin is telling us the story, and he's alone in a lot of it. There's a lot of telling. I like Martin's voice so that's not too much of an issue, but I found myself thinking a bit more showing and less telling would be nice.

When the plot line suddenly jumps away from Martin to follow the scientists, the story gets quite confusing. Who is telling us this? Is Martin recounting something he saw? How? Do we suddenly have a new omniscient narrator? Who is the newscaster? How do they have the power to broadcast and run a helicopter? (Electric power is almost gone, people are living off batteries. If power is that precious, why are you using it to do newscasts?) To add to the confusion the scientists are almost interchangeable, so keeping track of which one is which is tricky. Then throw battle scenes on top of that. Wrap that all up in the fact that there seems to be no reason to know what is going on, and I ended up thinking diverging away from Martin is just bizarre.

Maybe the problem is that Hunter wasn't quite sure if he was writing an apocalyptic thriller or literary fiction. If we had stayed with just Martin, this would have been a lot closer to the lit fic side of the spectrum. If we had met the scientists from the beginning of the book, and a reason for why we were learning what was going on had been there, it would have been a lot closer to apocalyptic thriller. But the story with how it turned out doesn't have a snappy enough plot for an apocalyptic thriller, and the writing and emotional development isn't strong enough for lit fic.

Which is another off aspect of dealing with Martin. There's a certain detachment to his tale which seems a bit incongruous with how he tells the tale. He's too in touch with himself and his emotions to be shocked into numbness, yet his emotional response is too flat for someone experiencing what he's going through. I'd believe this was Martin telling his father's story. A story he had grown up with, but didn't personally experience, more than it's Martin telling his own story.

On Goodreads.com a two star rating means, "It's okay." And that's where I am with The Days and Months We Were Born: The Unraveling. It was okay. It had the bones to be great, but didn't make it there.

Trad Book Review: Glass Houses: The Morganville Vampires 1

2011-08-09T20:38:00.000-04:00

So let's talk a little about young adult paranormal fiction. Let's talk a little about suspension of disbelief.

For the fantasy writer, suspension of disbelief is your best friend. Your job as an author is to do such a good job creating your world so your reader thinks, "Vampires, werewolves, things that go bump in the night, sure, I buy it!"

There are lots of ways to go about doing this, but part of the bedrock of a good set up is that it's completely believable. Part of what makes good horror, good fantasy so compelling is that the non-fantastic parts feel real.

So, the introduction to your world has to have an internal and consistent logic. It has to make sense. If you toss the reader out of the reality of your world before you even get to the fantastic/spooky stuff, you've achieved EPIC FAIL.

For example: try to imagine the first episode of the X-files with a twenty-two-year-old, gum snapping, blonde in five inch heels and a tiny tank top instead of the lovely Gillian Anderson in the role of Scully. Most of us would stop watching there, because we can't suspend our disbelief far enough to wrap our minds around the idea of that woman as a doctor/FBI agent.

And now to tie this to Glass Houses. Claire, our main character, is a sixteen-year-old wunderkind, who whipped through high school in two years (Although she tells us she got there a year early and ended a year soon, which adds up to three years of high school and two years of middle school, but hey, who's counting? Oh yeah, Claire, who told us she did it in two years... how smart is this girl again?) and is now in college.

Alas, because her parents are criminally stupid (and apparently enjoy setting fire to money) they sent her to Texas Prairie University, after allowing her to apply to MIT, Yale, Harvard, (and a slew of other high power schools) and getting her acceptance letters to said schools. Apparently they want to keep their sixteen-year-old baby close to home, but living in the dorm of a notorious party school.

See at this point I'm already out of the story. I did finish high school a year early. Guess what, you can't do that without mommy and daddy's help, which means mom and dad have to be on board with this whole getting a good education thing. Here's another thing, mom and dad are not going to pay the money ($75 for an application to Harvard alone) to apply to all those schools if they have no intention of letting their little girl attend those schools. And lets wrap this up with this idea: if you want your baby to be close because you're feeling protective of her, you are not going to send her to live in a creepy party dorm!

In the modern world, if mom and dad want you close after you've graduated high school, they can do this wonderful thing known as let you live at home and take courses online. The entire MIT catalog is available online. If mom and dad think you're too young for college, Harvard has this wonderful program that lets you get accepted to school and then defer your attendance for a year. Schools will work with prodigies and their parents to make life easier for them. The thing that doesn't happen in the real world these days is mom and dad decide to send their precious little genius to Party U for a few years because it's close to home.

Here's where the discussion of YA fiction comes into play. There's a problem almost all YA books have to deal with: how to get a young person into situations of danger and adventure without mom and dad jumping into play to keep them safe. In real life, most kids have the sort of parents who are actually trying to do well by them. In the YA world there are gobs of orphans, boarding schools, and criminally absent parents because they're needed to make the plot work.

So, the author wants a plot where Claire has to deal with human adversaries and supernatural ones. For whatever reason the author wants Claire to be sixteen. Sending her off to college early was an interesting twist on boarding school, and opens the potential for living off campus and getting into more contact with the supernatural baddies. She made Claire super smart because that increases friction with the human baddies.

This book was written around 2008. It appears to be set around 2008 as well. The level of bullying Claire takes at both high school and college would easily get both institutions sued into bankruptcy. And in the post Columbine/Virginia Tech world, one might think that possibly, if you are being assaulted by the other students, the kind of violence that involves being tossed down a flight of stairs and left unconscious, that possibly someone would call the cops. Just maybe.

But of course, no one does anything like that, giving Claire the motivation to move out of the dorm, and into her new home with her new roommates.

We didn't even get to the vampires, and I already don't believe this story. In fact, unless they're pink and sparkly (which I've heard isn't true about this book) I believe the vampires more than I do the set up for this book. The entire set up is a series of glowing neon plot devices for the purpose of putting the main character into the situation author wants her in. There is nothing subtle or elegant about the first few chapters of this book. Nothing that shows any real desire to engage in serious world building on the part of the author. In short, it's lazy, and has done nothing to make me want to learn more about what comes next.

And so, Congratulations Glass House! Welcome to your shiny new spot on my Did Not Finish List.

Indie Book Review: Thaloc Has A Body

2011-07-30T10:39:00.001-04:00

Anyone who read the review I did of Death Has A Name knows that I'm a Brodie Wade fan. He's that perfectly adorable combination of vulnerable, unstable, wounded, and sweet that just makes you want to take him home, clean him up, and make sure he's safe and protected forever. Basically, if you've got even the tiniest bit of Florence Nightingale in you, you're going to love Brodie.

So, I was immensely pleased to see him come back for Thaloc Has A Body. In Thaloc Brodie's got a whole new set of mysteries to figure out. Phil Dawson, his friend the police detective, is stumped. People are getting killed. Heaping piles of evidence point to the murderers, but it just doesn't feel right. Those people are acting innocent and have no motives. Then the final straw, one of the killers is a dead man. Phil calls in Brodie, and the two of them start chasing down a killer who can look like anyone, leave hair, fingerprint, and clothing evidence, and is on a killing streak. Meanwhile, The Truth, Brodie's link to the paranormal, has been pretty well behaved in the wake of Death Has A Body, but well behaved isn't the same thing as silent. It's telling Brodie his wife and death, who are one in the same, are approaching.

There were some issues I had with Death, lack of back story, rushed ending, slightly flat secondary characters, all of which I was hoping to see improve in the next book. And in most of these issues Hanel delivered. Thaloc takes care of the back story issues. How did Brodie and Phil get together? Why are they friends? What kind of guy is Phil? All answered beautifully. Jamie Stanton, who was briefly introduced in Death comes back as well, and she's also nicely rounded out in this one. Brodie, as always, is a glittering diamond of a character. And, because the Truth is backing off a bit, we're getting to see what a functional Brodie, a man who's just starting to trust that maybe the world isn't going to explode around him in the next five minutes, looks like. I like functional Brodie just as much as messed up Brodie.

Pacing is still pretty quick. Hanel has taken the mantra "Do Not Bore The Reader" to heart. There is no wasted time in this plot. If something is happening in the story, it's important. Pacing is also fast in the sense of how quickly characters developed. Personally, I'd like to see the character development slow down a little. But, I'm guessing the target audience for this book will be fine with things fast.

Once again, the ending seems a bit rushed. Hanel writes a big climax and then sort of skimps on denouement. There are two major bombs thrown at us at the end of the story and a little time to see Brodie deal with them would be nice.

We get some romance in this installment which I enjoyed. I like seeing Brodie happy. And for most people happy involves more in the way of companionship than a cat. Granted, I would have expected him to be a bit more shut off, but the romance wasn't totally out of left field. It is (as I eluded to before) fast. But not ridiculously fast, no one is declaring undying love on day two of the romance. And, I'd like to give Jerry some serious points for this, from everything we can tell Brodie is a virgin, which fits his character perfectly. There is nothing I find more off-putting than running into a socially awkward, emotionally wounded character who as soon as he gets into the bedroom turns into Mr. All-The-Right-Moves-Sex-God!

There was one note in this story that rang false to me. Phil is the sort of character who's had a very, very bad time with religion in the past and it's left him hostile to the idea of God. And he's so deeply uncomfortable with the idea of God that it threatens to wedge a rift between him and Brodie. But he has a sort of no-atheists-in-foxholes moment toward the end of the book. Now, I know some pretty hardcore atheists, some of whom have been in foxholes, and they tend to get annoyed at the portrayal of when the chips are down they start praying just like everyone else. Given Phil's back story, and the way he reacted to Brodie and Jamie talking about God, his sudden prayer struck me as more Jerry making a point, than something Phil would genuinely do.

But as quibbles go, that's a pretty minor one. Once again I fully enjoyed spending time with Brodie. Once again I can't wait to see what's coming next for him. The end of Thaloc left a lot of interesting possibilities for our leading man, and I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes.

The Indie Book Review: Freedom's Sword

2011-07-09T21:27:00.003-04:00

I like historical fiction. I like military history. I like Scotland. So I was pretty sure I'd like Freedom's Sword, and as I turned off my kindle after reading the last word, I sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed my visit to the first Scottish War of Independence.

A little background: Scotland was once upon a time a completely free and independent entity from England. But back in the 1200's a squabble between potential claimants to the throne ended up with Edward I deciding he was in charge. This sparked the first Scottish War of Independence. Most Americans are vaguely familiar with this because we've seen Braveheart. Unlike Freedom's Sword, Braveheart played pretty fast and loose with the facts to make a romantic, compelling story. Tomlin thought the truth was compelling enough, and from what I can tell stuck pretty closely to it. Personally, I agree with her.

So, as the tale opens we meet Andrew Moray, brand new knight about to go off on his first battle. It goes horribly, he's taken captive, and after months of torment in an English dungeon and a breath-taking escape, he returns to Scotland with a burning desire to reconquer his homeland. From there we follow him as he rounds up a force of like minded men and retakes northern Scotland from the English.

It's a good story. And I read most of it over the Forth of July weekend, so a tale of booting out the English seemed especially resonant. Battle scenes are vibrant without being overblown. Details of place are in enough depth to give an image of what is happening, but not so dense that you need to hack through them with a machete to find the plot. Most of the secondary characters are well enough defined that you won't confuse them with each other. The history is well researched and alive. It's what moves the story along as opposed to being scenery.

If I wanted anything from Freedom's Sword, it was actually more history on what exactly was happening and why. I'm well versed on medieval history, weaponry, and tactics, so I was following along pretty well, but a bit more on how Edward I ended up in charge, why they were rebelling against him in the first place, how things were different under Toom Tabard, why Robert the Bruce was a natural claimant to the throne, and how the Scottish political system worked would have been useful. With Tomlin's obvious love of the subject and deft writing, I would have been well pleased by another fifty pages of background.

There was one jarring aspect of Freedom's Sword. For some reason it suddenly shifts point of view (POV) to Caitrina, Andrew's Lady. And while I thought more or less everything involving Andrew was interesting, I rapidly lost interest when the story shifted to Caitrina. (Fortunately it didn't happen too often.) It's not that her story was badly written, nor was it boring per se; it just didn't have a lot to do with the rest of the plot. There's nothing that happens from Caitrina's POV that couldn't be dealt with in a few lines of dialog with her talking to Andrew. There's nothing added by hopping to her head. She's so tangentially related to the plot that at one point twenty-seven chapters go by without a mention of her. It almost feels like there was a plan to do a secondary story line of life on the home front, but somehow it didn't make it into the final story. Personally I would have liked to have seen that sort of a storyline. I think Tomlin could have done many fine things with it, but that will have to remain in the wish stage.

Beyond that my only other complaint was the lack of idea of when thing happen. We get one date stamp in the beginning of the tale and another at the very end. Some in between would have made it easier to keep track of what was going on.

All in all I enjoyed Freedom's Sword quiet a bit, and look forward to seeing what else Tomlin will come up with.

The Not Even Remotely Indie Book Review Strikes Back: Storm Front

2011-07-05T19:21:00.001-04:00

I know, I know, I'm late to the party. It's 2011 and I'm just getting to know Harry Dresden. But, as they say, better late than never, and in this case, it's much better late.

I read for characters. That and dialog are my things. Give me a fantastic character with a great voice and I'll forgive a lot of writing sins. So, as you can probably guess Harry Dresden was right up my alley, and Jim Butcher is a good enough writer there weren't many sins I needed to forgive.

Oh, and I should probably mention I'm a massive James Marsters fan, and he's the guy reading the audio version of the book I was listening to. Even if I wasn't a raving Spike fan, I would have considered this an extremely well read audio book.

Harry is a perfect combination of gallows humor, never-give-up tenacity, snarky-wit, and anti-authoritarian attitude. Basically, he's almost exactly what I want in a leading man. James Marsters does a fantastic job of bringing that to life. It is a deeply satisfying combination.

I love a well-thought-out, detailed system of magic. And Jim wrote it for me. Wrote it beautifully with hints of way more going on beyond the surface than is specifically told to us. Wrote it with enough detail so that the mythos feels real and works. And though I haven't read books 2-12 I'm quite hopeful that he's not done such a good job setting this up to then turn it on it's head and throw the laws out when they become inconvenient.

As for those sins I mentioned earlier, really there was only one, too much going over the same turf again and again and again. Quick example: Butcher wrote a scene where Harry's shield bracelet got slagged, he then had Harry tell me it was destroyed two, four, and seven pages later. (I'm guessing on the pages since I was listening to the book, but you get my drift.) I doubt Jim Butcher will ever read this, so I'll address this advice to other writers: if you show us something important happening, you do not then need to tell us it happened over and over. Occasional reminders might be nice, once a large chunk of story has gone by. Your reader is smart enough to remember details for more than five hundred words.

All in all, I was greatly pleased by this addition to my slowly growing collection of trad published books. Fool Moon is definitely on my to be read list.

To Tag or Not To Tag:

2011-07-02T11:49:00.000-04:00

That is the question.
'Tis nobler to suffer the finger cramps of furious clicking
And the wasted time of promoting others
Or stand against the waves of popular wisdom
And proclaim a tag free strategy?

So, I'm very obviously not Shakespeare. (On the off chance that being female, a novelist, and alive didn't already tip you off to that.) But I do think I know something about tagging on Amazon and would like to pass it along.

For those of you out of the loop, tags are those little notes you can attach to any product on Amazon to make it easier to find. Products usually have some tags already, and if you agree with them, you can click on them driving the tag numbers up, or you can add your own.

If you click on the box below, you'll get to my book. Scroll down past the publisher info, blurb, and reviews, and you'll find the tags. I've got over 200 votes on my most popular tags. I got them by the fairly common technique among writers whereby we swap tags. You tag mine, I'll tag yours, and we're all happy in the end. I have spent, literally, over an entire day tagging other people's books so they would tag mine.

Now, Amazon has requested on the CreateSpace page that authors not swap tags. That they do not approve of gaming the system. I can understand that. After all, the tags are supposed to be for the customers to help them find things other customers thought fit in certain categories.

I know this is bothering some writers, but I'm supremely non-plussed. (And not just because I've already got a lot of tags.) See, I've come to the conclusion that tags are not a wildly useful way to spend your promotional time.

Why? Well, first off let's talk about what a tag isn't. They aren't keywords. They also aren't a way to boost your book higher on the main search page. If you go to Amazon's main page, and type in a search term, the first zillion items are ones that have that term in the title.

If you refine your search by going to the advanced search options, you can search by keywords. You cannot search by tags. If you search by keyword, what pops up are books that have the keyword in question.   Having a lot of tags can help a bit here, but not in a direct way. If the person doing the keyword search clicks on an item, and then scrolls all the way down to the bottom of the product page, items with similar tags will pop up.

If you want to search by tag, you have to click on a product, scroll down to where the tags are, and then click on the search by tag feature.

So, we'll start off with the fact that tags are not the most easily accessible search tool on Amazon. And, because of that, they are likely also not the most used search feature on Amazon.   People who know and regularly shop on Amazon may use them, but the casual user is unlikely to be finding your book by it's tags.

Then, there's also the fact that tagging takes time. If you want a lot of tags, you've got to give a lot of tags. Given how handy and easy to use tags are for the average person searching for your book, I'd say there are a lot of better ways to use your promotional time. My 200+ tag votes took me at least thirty hours of tagging other people to get.   At this point in my career I've got the number one book for Justice, Fate, number two for True Love, and similarly high numbers for most of my other tags. I'm not burning up the bestseller list, and having done a very quick audit of the other books at the tops of those categories with me, neither are they.

So, thirty hours spent dominating categories no one is searching... or thirty hours spent getting to know people online, reading books to review, tweeting, posting on the blog, or any other promotional opportunity? I know for a fact people have bought my book because of time I spent engaging with them online and writing blog posts. I don't know that anyone besides me has even seen my book based on it's tags, let along bought it.   And judging by the sales numbers of the other books at the tops of the tag heaps I checked, it's not helping them either.

I'm not saying tags are useless. I am saying that if you've got any other way you can spend that time that might attract readers to you, do it instead.

Ye Gods II: Outskirts Press Responds

2011-06-28T19:30:00.000-04:00

So, a while ago I wrote a post instructing authors to run screaming away from Outskirts Press. They just noticed I wrote it and responded. Now, for some reason I'm not seeing their comment on the original post, so I thought I'd copy it and respond directly here:

Keryl, You're right, our pricing is much different from CreateSpace. If you look deeper, you'll discover that our fee-based services are actually lower than the fee-based services offered by CreateSpace. Please feel free to re-examine their service fees on their website and then perhaps post an update to your blog that more accurately reflects our value. We're happy to help you do that by providing some some details below for your convenience:

CreateSpace offers something similar to our Ruby ($699) or Diamond ($999) packages for $785 and you can see those details on the CreateSpace website at https://www.createspace.com/Services/TotalDesignFreedomStandard.jsp

Although this service doesn't include some the inclusions of our Ruby or Diamond packages.

When you examine CreateSpace's service fees, you may notice that their a la carte prices are actually quite a bit higher than ours. For instance, they charge $499 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/UniqueBookCover.jsp) for the same custom cover design that we charge $299 for.

Their copyediting service is $0.019 cents per word (https://www.createspace.com/Services/ComprehensiveCopyediting.jsp), whereas ours is $0.014 cents per word. For an average 60,000 word document, that equates to a difference of $300 less with Outskirts Press at http://outskirtspress.com/p/editing

As for marketing services, their prices are actually quite a bit more expensive than ours. Their press release with distribution service is $598 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/PressReleaseWithDistribution.jsp ) compared with ours for $219 at http://outskirtspress.com/p/customrelease (and if you published with us, it's even less).

Their book video service is $1,249 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/VideoBookTrailers.jsp

) compared with ours at $799, and our authors save 50% off that price! As a CreateSpace author, is CreateSpace offering you a 50% discount on their "egregious" book video fees? Want a less expensive one than you can get anywhere else? http://outskirtspress.com/p/videotrailer

Speaking of not free, CreateSpace even charges $199 for Sell Sheets (https://www.createspace.com/Services/SellSheets.jsp), whereas Outskirts Press authors can print (and even create/modify) their Sell Sheets within their Publishing Center freely whenever they want.

It's true CreateSpace doesn't offer the Amazon Extreme services, although based upon their prices above, if they did, you can bet their prices would be more than ours.

All that, PLUS you get your paperback on Barnes & Noble. The good news for CreateSpace authors is that even if you publish with CreateSpace, you can benefit from affordable Outskirts Press marketing options at http://outskirtspress.com/marketing

Sincerely,

Outskirts Press

Now, everything they've got posted there may be true, but, that was not the point of my original post. I compared what it costs to get a book printed with Outskirts to what it costs to get a book printed with CreateSpace and with Lulu.com. I did this with a professional author, someone who is trying to make a living selling books, in mind. They didn't mention Lulu in the response, so I'll skip it as well.

To make a physical book, with an ISBN, barcode, distribution to major retailers (including Barnes and Noble and Amazon), and a customizable cover costs $39.00 on CreateSpace. That $39.00 gets you the option of something like 15 book sizes, more than 20 customizable covers, and two paper colors.

Outskirts' least expensive option is $199.99. They take your MS and turn it into a book. There is no barcode, no ISBN, no distribution. You have the option of one size, one paper grade, and one of two customizable covers. They then give you one "free" copy.

You've got an MS. You want to sell it. Which of those two options looks better?

Now, let me go a bit further. Outskirts does not appear to make the bulk of their money printing books. They appear to make their money selling services to authors. They may or may not have better prices that CreateSpace, but here's the thing, I don't recommend using any of the a la carte services of any of the DIY publishers. They are, for the most part, a waste of money. Go find places where other indies hang out, make friends, and you can find those same services for a much better price. Better yet, learn how to do a lot of them yourself.

There was one service Outskirts offered that really pissed me off, and it's mentioned briefly in the response above: The Amazon Extreme Service. It cost $299.00 and gets you three things, a Kindle version of your book, the Look Inside feature for your book on Amazon, and ten tags. Words are insufficient to explain how big of a rip off this is. This is taking advantage of people who don't know how CreateSpace or Amazon DTP works and robbing them blind. So, let me take a minute here to explain in detail what sort of work you'd have to do to get these things for yourself.

A: Go to CreateSpace and set up a book.

B: There will be an option that says something like: Amazon Look Inside: yes or no?

C: Check the yes square.

You are now signed up for Look Inside. Depending on how fast with a mouse you are, that took you less than one second.

D: Once your book is up live on Amazon, scroll down your product page.

E: Find the tags section.

F: Type in the tags you want. (Outskirts will type in ten tags. Amazon lets any user add up to fifteen.)

To further hammer home exactly how blindingly easy the tag thing is, authors routinely do tag swaps. I click on your tags, you click on mine, both of our books are a little easier to find. And (this is something I'll go into more detail on in a later post) it's also not all that useful. Tag is not a synonym for keyword (which is an impression Outskirts tries to create) so the only way a lot of tags makes it easier for someone to find your book is if they specifically search tags. I've got over 200 votes on the tag "true love" for Sylvianna, which means Sylvianna is in second or third place for total "true love" tags. If you search keyword, true love, books I didn't write pop up. How many tags of true love does the number one book on the list have? Zero. So, not only are they selling you a service that anyone can do for free, it's not even terribly useful.

But what about getting your book up on Kindle. That's hard and scary and requires a lot of technical savvy, right? Um... no.

A: Fill out forms (Outskirts sends you a copy of the forms, and you fill them out, then they reenter the data.)

B: Copy and paste all the information (category, back cover blurb, etc...) from the print version into the kindle version.

C: Upload your .jpeg cover image

D: Upload your .doc text.

Congratulations! In two or three days you've got a Kindle book. (Or, according to Outskirts: four weeks.) From the way they describe what they do, it looks like someone at Outskirts signs you up with Amazon DTP. Which, once again, you can do for yourself for free.

All told, it took me less than half an hour do to all three of these things, and less than a minute for the first two. I'm not a computer wizard. But I can read, and I can follow simple directions, and I sure as hell don't need to pay someone close to three hundred dollars to do that for me! You don't either. As I said in my previous post, if you want someone else to do this, go find someone charging about fifteen dollars, which is a decent price for the amount of work involved in doing this.

Once upon a time services that catered to self-published authors were called vanity presses. They were called this because, by the time you were done, you had a book to stick on your shelf at home, sell to a few friends, and that was about it. If selling your books is your career, if you want to make a living at this, if you want something beyond your name on the cover of a book, Outskirts is a bad choice. They charge too much. Here's how my 424 page, 9x6 novel does at a $14.99 price point with about a 40% author discount: CreateSpace, I make $3.03 per book sold. Outskirts, I end up owing them $2.27 for each book printed. I have to jack the price up to $16.95, and then I only make $0.42 per book. If you sign with Outskirts you cannot price your book low enough to compete with the hordes of people publishing on CreateSpace. And that, more than any other reason, is why you should run away from Outskirts.

Indie Book Review: Black Earth The End of the Innocence.

2011-06-26T14:32:00.000-04:00

I started Black Earth: End of the Innocence with a lot of hope. I did my usual pre-review routine of reading the blurb and the first chapter. Both of them looked good. The first chapter is arresting and sets up the promise of a really interesting story. I was happy to agree to review Black Earth.

Unfortunately Black Earth starts going downhill from there pretty swiftly.

This is a big book, and it's the first in a series with, I think, thirteen point of view characters. It's entirely possible I've forgotten a few. On the upside I rarely found myself confusing them with each other. On the downside the whole book is more or less character introductions, a little back story, and a tiny bit of plot. I read the kindle version, so I'm guessing here, but this is probably a 400+ page story where by the end of it we're just starting to get a feel for what might be going on.

What is going on? It's hard to tell. The world is falling apart. Meteorites are crashing into the planet. Aliens or demons, possibly alien demons, are ramping up for war against God. Teenagers with superpowers are fumbling around trying to figure out what is going on. The President of the United States appears to be the Anti-Christ, or working for the Anti-Christ, it's fuzzy. There's some sort of time-travel-fix-the-future, and counter-time-travel-keep-the-future-the-way-it-is angle. Other planets have been destroyed by Legion (the alien demons). There's something about getting humans off of Earth to a new planet (which may have been destroyed in the future, by Legion) so they can evolve and avoid the destruction of Earth. There are bad guys galore (more on this later), and absolute scads of purposeless violence. Any one of these threads could have been a book by itself, but they're all scattered together, and none of them developed enough to do more than give the reader a glimpse of a building story. Basically, we get to read the first third of something like six books.

And then it just stops. Part of how a series is supposed to be built is that each part is a story of its own. Look at Harry Potter, each of the novels has a complete story arc while building up the larger arc of the series. It's possible one of the arcs this story began with ended. All the rest of them are left dangling. If there is an overarching theme of this book, it's everything falling apart, and that's well and truly going gangbusters by the time Black Earth has ended.

There's a saying: a book is only as good as its bad guys. And while that isn't always true, clunky, melodramatic villains will just kill a book. Unfortunately Black Earth has a lot of them. There's Evanescence, Witch Queen of the Damned (something like a Super Satan), The President of the United States (the Anti-Christ?), Mr. Silver (misogynistic, super-rich-corporate-tycoon-James-Bond-style-villain), Alpha 1 (psychopathic killer working for Mr. Silver), Theresa (counter time travel sociopath), and a few other random psychopaths. And all of them need mustaches to twirl. There is not a single subtle, sane bad guy in the lot. Be prepared for clunky dialog; psychopathic musings; megalomaniacs; ice-cold, stone-hard killers, who can be distracted and overpowered by untrained victims; random, useless violence; and monologues that give the good guys the chance to escape.

Good dialog makes me want to sing the praises of a book. Bad dialog makes me want to cry. This book is riddled with stilted and stiff dialog, mostly coming from the mouths of the bad guys. On top of that most of the characters use the same basic vocabulary. Quick example: things are falling out of the sky and crashing into Earth. With the exception of one NASA scientist, everyone calls them falling stars: not meteors, meteorites, comets, shooting stars, or anything else. All of the characters have precisely the same internal vocabulary for this event, even the ones who come from another planet. Here's another example: no one curses. At first I thought this was a young adult book, but no, it has a not-suitable-for-under-17 note on it, so there's no reason that no one ever utters 'shit' or 'fuck.' There are some seriously scuzzy people in this book and one rough teenager, and none of them ever says anything beyond a PG rated word. Not to say I'm a fan of profanity for profanity's sake, but I am a fan of realistic dialog, and at the very least, the kind of teen girl who sets up her own sex club in high school is likely to mutter something untoward upon finding she's been drugged and raped.

And that leads into another aspect of this book, it's Christian fiction. (Not that you can find this out by reading the description or the genre. Why this isn't mentioned in the description or genre is puzzling.) I think this is why no one curses, even though it would be in character for at least a few of them to be doing it. This might also explain the fact that there is only one gray character and everyone else is fully a black hat or white hat.

I like eschatology, and while there's a lot of creative work going on in this version of the end times, it's heavy handed. The President is a bad guy. How do we learn that at first? We find out she's had the "under God" bit removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. As a work of theology goes, this one isn't sophisticated. There's plenty of room for theodicy in this story, but either his characters or Alderman isn't up to it. Instead of spending some real time on what it means that an all powerful God allows evil and suffering, we get the tired tropes of 'it makes us stronger' or 'keep the faith.'

Then there's writing as a technical aspect of putting words together. Parts of this book are eloquent and graceful. Parts feel like a car with a shot suspension driving over a pitted, rocky, country road. Word choice was problematic. Alderman often uses a word that sounds similar to the one he wants, but isn't it: equitable for equal or correlating for corresponding. Likewise he comes up with sentences that sound good, but don't actually mean what I think he was trying to convey. Point of view is also an issue. He's either writing third person omniscient badly, or head hopping from one third person limited to another. Either way it's distracting. You think you're in one character's head, next thing you know there's an info dump involving stuff the character shouldn't know, then you're in another character's head. Top this off with many scenes ending in a cliff hanger, and when next we see those characters they've suddenly gotten off of the cliff, without Alderman bothering to tell us how it happened.

All of this is excruciatingly disappointing because the first few chapters are good. Alderman can write decent teenagers (adults and children not so much). The first chapter has stunningly beautiful imagery and makes you want to read more. The first few chapters that follow were good enough I kept working out so I could read more. (And I'm not what anyone would call a fan of the elliptical machine. Reading the beginning, my normal twenty minutes grew to thirty before I hit the first rough patch.) Then suddenly, it all goes awry and we're stuck in the land of stilted dialog and insane bad-guys. I'm giving it two stars, and wishing the promises of the first chapters could have been fulfilled.

Indie Book Review: Optical Delusions In Deadwood

2011-06-18T11:47:00.004-04:00

Deadwood Violet is back in Optical Delusions, and she's brought along all the things I loved about Nearly Departed. Witty writing, killer dialog, red-hot sex scenes, a corker of a mystery, and a tinge of paranormal that leaves the reader wondering if the supernatural is really happening or not have all come back for Ann Charles' sophomore offering.

In the wake of the action in Nearly Departed, Violet's developed something of a reputation as the local spook finder. All the more ironic because Violet still doesn't really believe in ghosties and ghoulies. But, setting fire to the "haunted" residence of the local psychopathic killer will get you that sort of reputation. Newly minted reputation in hand, Violet gets approached by a small, mousy woman in need of a realtor. In a matter of minutes, Violet knows why she was picked, the house, in addition to having a reputation for being haunted, was also the location of a murder-suicide a few months earlier.

On the good news front, the house is perfect. On the better news front, the Sturgis Harley Davidson convention is on, and Deadwood is packed with out-of-towners, some of whom are looking for real estate. On the downside, something just isn't right about the owners, and that triggers Violet's need to get down to the bottom of what is going on. She's thinking it's a simple matter of a not-all-there mother being taken advantage by her daughter and almost daughter-in-law. But of course, it's so much more than that. Next thing Violet knows she's got witches, demons, and spooks in her life again, and she'd really prefer they weren't.

If that was all the plot this story had, it'd be a great read. But it's not all the plot, the Deadwood mysteries are romances as well as who/what-done-its. I'll admit to being a bit disappointed in the romance for Optical Delusions. When we left Nearly Departed, Doc and Violet were heading toward happily ever after. There were some big obstacles in the way, and I wanted to see how they would deal with them. Two weeks later we begin Optical Delusions and apparently during the intervening time Doc's character got a personality transplant and went skittering into hiding because he's oh-so-scared of a real relationship. So, for all practical purposes Doc and Violet go back to square one and start over again in Optical Delusions.

Now, the actual romance plot line of: guy acts like jerk, guy decides he can't live without woman, guy does valiant things to get back into woman's good graces, forgiveness, and happy time is just fine. It holds together well and works. Charles handles it with grace and wit. But I was hoping to see the romance actually move forward, as opposed to end up in precisely the same place it was when we got done with Nearly Departed. None of the major issues facing Doc and Violet as a couple are any closer to resolved. He's still a psychic. She's still not sure she believes such things are real. Her best friend is still in love with Doc and she's not sure how to handle that.

And, while I wouldn't call that a minor issue with the book, it is one of personal taste. Optical Delusions is extremely well written. The characters are vibrant and spending time with them is a genuine joy. The mystery has twists, turns, red-herrings, and fully satisfying ending. Charles' ability to balance paranormal creepiness with the real world and leave the reader on the fence as to what is actually going on is reminiscent of the best episodes of the X-Files. Plot threads that were sprinkled into both Optical Delusions and Nearly Departed look like they'll get picked up in the third book. This is another carefully written, carefully plotted book. I want to know what happens next. I just hope it doesn't involve Doc and Violet heading back to square one again.

The Not Even Remotely Indie Book Review: Dragons of the Hourglass Mage

2011-06-11T09:11:00.000-04:00

Amazingly enough, I do actually read the occasional traditionally published book. Especially if it's a book by authors I like about a character I love.

Back in 2008 I found out that Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had come back, yet again, to DragonLance to do something called the Lost Chronicles. Basically, they were filling in the bits of the story that didn't make it into the first Chronicles. So I was pleased to see them. Then I started reading, and they were, well, blah. Apparently there was a reason those bits didn't make it into the story. They were boring.

But, hey, stories of Dwarven intrigue and Dragon Highlords in the midst of romantic angst were never my thing. But Raistlin, dark, hacking, anti-hero Raistlin, golden-skinned-outsider with the weak body and the Herculean mind, he was always my thing. (The particularly astute reader might notice a similarity between my name and his, and the serious DragonLance geek might get the entire reference.) So, it was with some hope of joy, I waited for summer 2008 and Dragons of the Hourglass Mage.

Summer came and no book was written. As the release date came and went word was there wasn't even a finished manuscript. And with that I more or less gave up, the first two books had been lame, and the one I was hoping for unwritten. With two kids, a book I was writing, and fan fic waiting to be read, I let hopes of Raistlin's further adventures go.

Fast forward three years, and I'm on Goodreads chatting with another reader about the comparative merits of DragonLance and Forgotten Realms. During that conversation it comes to my attention that Dragons of the Hourglass Mage had eventually gotten written and came out in 2009.

Twenty-four hours later I had finished it.

So, how did it look to a mad fan girl, now all grown up? Decent. The actual plot seemed solid, if improbable. It fills in the period between when Raistlin vanished with the Dragon Orb in the Maelstrom and then pops back up again during the final battle to make sure the Companions win it. Basically we're asked to believe that Raistlin joins the resistance, infiltrates the temple at Nerka, and more or less singlehandedly overthrows the Queen of Darkness (while getting Fistandantillus out of his head). It hangs together pretty well, but it wasn't what I was expecting. Having read it, I can say with assurance that Hickman and Weis had no idea whatsoever how it was Raistlin came to be on the platform in time to save Tanis, or if they did, they tossed those ideas to write this book. There was one plot hole that needed some patching, but nothing that caused me to want to toss the book aside in disgust.

Now, in the twenty plus years since I picked up Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I've changed. We all have. The problem is, Raistlin shouldn't have. Dragons of the Hourglass Mage supposedly takes place less than six months from the end of Autumn Twilight. His internal voice shouldn't have gone from high functioning sociopath (which was something I always loved about him) to a pretty well adjusted Objectivist Hero. (I defy anyone, having read Dragons of the Hourglass Mage to come up with a substantial difference between Raistlin and John Galt. What this says about Hickman and Weis and their ideas of what constitutes evil might make for an interesting discussion. But I digresss...) He's actually emotional, sad, scared, unsure, angry. Besides angry we didn't see much of that out of Raistlin before. And, while Hickman and Weis were always a little vague about what precisely it was that made Raistlin evil, they've gone from flat out vague to not evil at all. Seriously, the guy who would step over his brother's corpse to get to his goals is gone from this book.

I still enjoyed this latest installment of Raistlin, (I like Objectivist heroes.) but he's not the same man he was before. This new version is close, but not quite right. And while I enjoyed Dragons of the Hourglass Mage, I'm honestly not sure if I was happier not having read it.

You know what they say: you can't go home again. They're wrong. You can. The question is: should you? Hickman and Weis took me home again, and I found the furniture rearranged and the walls painted a new color. It looked okay, but it wasn't home.

Should You Self Publish-The Definitive Answer

2011-06-08T11:51:00.001-04:00

Should you self publish? It's a pretty hot question, and among writers can get the sorts of vitriolic responses usually reserved for devout Christians seeing the Piss Christ. If you read my blog regularly, you know I said yes. But and as much as I think it was the right answer, I know it was the right answer for me. Is it the right answer for you? Well, let's take a few minutes and find out.

Are you capable of being honest with yourself?   None of the rest of these questions are going to help if you don't answer them honestly. And by honest I mean not hyper-critical and not too easy on yourself. For women there's an easy test for how honest you are, look at your butt, how big is it compared to everyone else? Small, average, or big? Now look at your pants size. Average in the US is 12-14. You can do the rest of the math yourself.   If you're the kind of person who can look at your body and see what's really there, you're probably the kind of person who can look at your life and determine if self-publishing is a good fit for you.

How easily can you learn new skills? Being a self-publisher means you've got to run a business, deal with tax information, market and promote your work, format it, edit it, get art for it, set up an online presence, and really I'm just scratching the tip of the iceberg here. You can either hire out for these things or you can do them yourself. The more skills you can learn, the faster you can learn them, the more of your book budget can be moved from low priorities to high priorities.

Do you have money? Your book needs editing, cover art, a website, and distribution. This takes cash. How much is up to you, but at the least it requires some. I'd say a good rule of thumb is about $2,500 per book. For most books that's enough to get decent editing, a good cover, a website, plus whatever incidentals. Long books might take more, short books less, and if you've got mad skills or friends out the ears with useful skills, it might cost even less. But, if you want to make a go of this as a professional you will need at least some start up capital.

Can you read critically? What are the best selling works in your genre? Why? You need to be able to locate those books, read them, and understand why they sell. And by this I do not mean look at Twilight and say, "It sells because teens are idiots and vampires and werewolves are hot." It's because Bella has been so carefully crafted that basically any teen girl can immediately relate to her, and within the blink of an eye she has two ultra-alpha men hanging on her every word. She lets anyone who reads the series get to experience being immeasurably desirable.   Who finds being desired above everything else irresistible? Teen girls. You need to be able to understand what need a book fulfills and make your books fulfill that need.

Can you accept criticism? The single smartest thing the self-publisher can do is realize he doesn't know everything. If at all possible you want as many talented people you can find looking at your products and giving you their input. You certainly don't have to take the advice, but you need to know how to hear it and analyze it. To put it very bluntly, even Ayn Rand had an editor she listened to.

Are you shy? Do you consider talking up your own works unsavory? If either of these are true, run to traditional publishing. Most of the game of getting people to buy your book is about making connections with other people and making them want to get to know you or it better. If talking to strangers is your idea of hell, self-publishing it likely to be an exercise in torture.

Are you comfortable being the ultimate authority on your book? If you publish traditionally, you can blame someone else if your book has a bad cover, the formatting is off, the electronic version is riddled with OCRs, it still has typos when it went to press, and so on and so forth. Heck, depending on what sorts of edits they demanded you can even blame them if the book isn't as good as you wanted it to be. When you self publish it's all on you. The upside of absolute control is that everything ends up how you set it up, but that's also the downside.

Can you market? There are book, websites, seminars, and all sorts of information on how to market your book, so it's not a matter of can you learn it, it's a matter of can you do it. This takes time. Do you have the time to invest in this sort of work? It takes chutzpah. You've got to tell strangers you've got something they want. Can you keep at it, year after year, when the bad reviews come and the sales go flat? Many writers have said this is a marathon, not a sprint. With that in mind, can you run the marathon? It might take five or ten years to catch on. Can you keep plugging yourself as an author to get to the point where it finally takes off?

Are you a writer or an author? A writer writes. An author writes, edits, re-edits, makes a name for him or herself, writes more, edits more, and keeps at it. Writing is a hobby, being an author is a career. (Actually, this is a question you need to ask yourself if you want to self or trad publish.)

Lastly, did you write a good book? Why is this the last question? Honestly because this matters less than the above. If you can't do/won't do the above it doesn't matter if you wrote a brilliant book.   You may be the finest writer in the history of the written word, but if you don't have the discipline to do the work above, it won't matter.

So, hopefully that was a helpful checklist. Good luck to all of you out there debating your options.

Indie Book Review: Hungry For You

2011-06-04T14:15:00.000-04:00

A while back, I remember a friend joking about how there were vampire romances, werewolf romances, ghost romances, and finally after musing over the different shades of paranormal romance out there, he said, "What's next? Zombie romance?"

A.M. Harte's Hungry For You answers that question with a resounding yes. It's a collection of short zombie love stories and poems. The topics range from zombies in love, to humans in love with zombies, to humans in love with each other fighting off the zombies, to humans facing their loved ones slowly turning into zombies. If zombies and love can be worked into it, Harte's written about it.

As writing from the point of view of flow of words, elegant prose, and vivid description, these stories were quite lovely. As writing from the point of view of world building and taking an old classic trope, the zombie, and spiffing it up for the modern reader, they are very well done. In fact, my only real complaint about this book is that it's a collection of short stories and not a novel.

There are so many intriguing questions raised by this collection: How did the zombie plague start? How did it end? Why? What happened to the zombies when it was over? and on and on, all of which I would have been very happy to know more about. It's high praise to tell a writer that you wanted more, but this collection was a bit like going to a really good restaurant, getting a plate covered in little tidbits, some are plate licking good, some are just tasty, but in the end, as you're staring at that empty plate, you're still hungry.

As with any collection of short stories, some of the tales were stronger than others. The first few in particular didn't seem like complete stories to me. I kept expecting the book to go back to those characters and tell me more about what happened. But they were left in eternal literary limbo. Once past them, I lost the sense of "Huh? That's it?" and enjoyed the stories that came next immensely.

So, if you'd like to expand your paranormal romance horizons, go grab a copy. It's well worth the money and time. And, maybe, if enough of us buy Hungry For You, we'll encourage A.M. Harte to write the full story of her version of the zombie plague.

Indie Book Review: Hard Day's Knight

2011-05-21T08:38:00.001-04:00

"I hate waking up in an unfamiliar place. I’ve slept in pretty much the same bed for the past fifteen years, so when I wake up someplace new, it really throws me off. When that someplace is tied to a metal folding chair in the center of an abandoned warehouse that reeks of stale cigarette smoke, diesel fuel and axle grease - well, that really started my night off on a sparkling note."

Thus starts Hard Day's Knight, first book in the Black Knight Chronicles. I love this book. It makes me happy in a way that hasn't happened in a long, long time. Now, this is not lofty literature here, this is Jay and Silent Bob get turned into vampires, grow up a bit, and decide to become private eyes.   It's cute. It's fun. It's insanely well written.   If it were food, it would be a perfect chocolate chip cookie with just enough milk. The kind of thing that makes you feel good after you've eaten it.

The plot is what you might expect if Keven Smith were to write an episode of Angel. Jimmy Black, and his sidekick/partner Greg Knightwood (The Black Knight of their detective agency and the title.) have a problem. The client pissed off a witch big time, and needs help so his whole family isn't killed. They go in thinking this will be an easy little case of use the vamp mojo to scare the witch and all will be fine. But it's never that easy. Turns out the problem isn't a witch, she's a possessed little girl. And, in the meantime, kids have been disappearing, and the demon's got something to do with it. What started out as a quick little job turns into a full on forces of hell in the black hats versus Jimmy, Greg, their best friend who's a priest, and a fallen Angel in the white hats.

The characters may not be breathtakingly original, but once again, they're perfectly done. Just like the chocolate chip cookie, it doesn't have to be original to make you happy, it has to be good.

John Hartness' strength is great dialog, and he compounds that strength by telling the story from Jimmy's point of view. Jimmy is literally telling us the story, which means John gets to use his best skill through the entire tale.    And once again, someone who's really good at a skill, using that skill, makes me very happy.

I'll leave one final bit of praise here, before I go from enthusiastic reviewer to mad fan girl: Dad, the priest, is actually a good guy. Lately it seems like every third paranormal book has an evil priest in it, like the whole point of being Catholic and joining the priesthood is to rain terror and unholy pain down on innocents everywhere. So, I'm pretty happy when I see a book that shows a man of faith using that faith to make the world a better place.

Hard Day's Knight is my first five star review of 2011, and it's well earned it.

So,You Want to Write Like A Yank

2011-05-20T14:51:00.000-04:00

Hello Luvvies!

Today's post is for the Brits out there who'd like to do a convincing job of writing American (from the United States) characters. Now, while in depth writing that will fool most Americans takes a lot of work and research, here are five quick tips so that your character doesn't scream British! every time he/she opens his/her mouth.

1) The only curse word Americans use that starts with a B is bitch. (Okay, we do say bastard, but it's rare.) If you find yourself tempted to write bugger, bollocks, or bloody, don't do it. Lord knows there are times when one of those words seems like the only one that'll fit, but nothing will convince an American that the character they're being asked to read isn't American faster than any of those three words popping out of the mouth of a character.

2) We say and write dates: month, day, and then year. The Fourth of July is the big exception to this. If your character says something like, "First January, 2011," it will sound very odd to us.

3) Keep dialog sentences pretty short. We usually don't speak in long sentences. Granted some are fine (keep your character in mind), but less than fifteen words is pretty normal for most spoken sentences.

4) If most of your experience in hearing American speech is from TV keep this in mind: most TV characters speak like New Yorkers or Californians. If your character comes from one of those two places he'll sound a lot more realistic than if he's from Georgia or Iowa. (Or God forbid, Texas. There are more bad Texas accents written from people all over the world than from anywhere else in the US. Gobs of Americans write bad Texas accents, too.) Think of it this way, if you were going to suggest where a British character written by an American should live, based on how most Brits speak on television, would you suggest London or a tiny town on the Welsh border?

5) Watch House MD. Seriously. Hugh Laurie does a flawless American accent that's fairly generic. He could come from almost anywhere in the United States. Study how he speaks. If Dr. House would say it, it's probably an okay sentence.

Okay, so that's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek list. But truly, if you do want to write convincing American characters the single most important thing you can do is get an American or two to read your work and suggest substitutions. We all speak English, but we use it differently, and it's easy to get tripped up on things you'd never even think of being issues. (My own crowning moment of attempted Brit writing glory was a story where the hero sat down on the bedspread and then talked about the view out the counterpane. I thought it was a synonym for window.) Good luck and happy writing!

Fotolia for Cover Art

2011-05-14T10:28:00.001-04:00

Spooky Haunted House

Recently I received an email from a lovely lady at Fotolia.com. She wanted to know if I'd be interested in a free trial subscription to Fotolia so I could blog about it here. After I spent a moment doing my happy dance, I responded with a polite yes.

See, one of the most troublesome aspects of Indie Writerhood is that we have to do it all ourselves or hire out for it. And while many of us can master basic programming, how to format our novels for digital and print publication, and social networking, most of us are not visual artists. We may have an idea of what we want our covers to look like, but we rarely have the skills to make that image come to life.

Erotica

But there are wonderful places, like Fotolia, online that sell something called stock photos. And stock photos makes life a lot easier for the Indie writer. We no longer have to become master artists or photographers. We can buy images and either using what talent we currently have, or hiring out for someone who knows graphic design, get a good cover.

Bond, Jane Bond

Fotolia works on two different options, you can buy credits (I'm not sure why you buy credits instead of paying straight off the bat, but, well, I don't really need to understand either.) or you can buy a subscription. For most Indies looking at setting up maybe one or two covers at a time, I'd say the credit plan is probably your best bet. If you're looking at producing a lot of covers, either as a cover artist yourself, or because you've got a ton of work that you want to get ready for publication, the subscription plan may be a better deal. (And by a lot, I mean you need more than $200 worth of art in a one month period.) When you use credits a standard sized image (about what you'll want for a straight electronic copy) runs a few dollars. For a large image (what you'd probably want for a physical book cover) prices generally seemed to run from ten to fifteen dollars.

Fairy Forest

Besides the change in size, what does that money buy you? The standard license gives you the right to make derivative works (mess around with the image, take a bit from this picture here, a bit from that one there, and put them together) for all print and electronic media. You can't resell the original. You can't give it to your buddies. If you want to upgrade your license and spend a bit more than $100 for the image, you can use the image for goods for resale. So if you want to go on a major marketing campaign with your cover art, use it on t-shirts, mugs, refrigerator magnets, then you'll need the upgrade. If you just want a book cover and images for your website, the standard license will do.

The White Queen

How about selection? Well, as you can see from just these samples, they've got a wide array of styles and themes. (And these are the merest tip of the iceberg of pictures I liked.) There are millions of them on the site. I tried all sorts of off the wall search queries, and the only thing that didn't bring up any hits was "Scottish Laird." (Though Highlander turned up over 100 results.)

So, if you've got a complicated image in your mind. Like say a male, red-haired, light-blue skinned elf with a celtic knot in ivy vines down his left arm, they probably don't have it. But you'd also probably be amazed at how close you can get. The White Queen looks a lot like one of my main characters. Crop the image properly and she's dead on. And if you're looking for something a tad less specific than my red-haired elf, you should have many, many options to work with.

Go check it out, see if they've got the pictures you need to make your dream cover.

Indie Book Review: The Judas Syndrome

2011-05-07T08:52:00.000-04:00

Okay, so supposedly, when you see a bad review, it's a case of the book not living up to the expectations of whomever purchased it. That makes sense. You rarely see reviews that state something like, "I absolutely loathe horror stories. So in a masochistic fit I picked up Seven Co-eds Get Horribly Murdered In A Haunted House. It was a horror story. I hated it." (And if you do write that review, you deserve to be smacked upside the back of the head Gibb's style.)

No, usually bad reviews go something like this: "I purchased Seven Co-eds Get Horribly Murdered In A Haunted House because I love horror stories, and there were a bunch of great reviews. Then I cracked it open. I don't know what the other reviewers were smoking while they read it, but it didn't live up to the hype."

So, you see a book, you read the write up, you check out and the reviews and develop expectations. You read the sample and develop more depth to your expectations. Having done that, I expected The Judas Syndrome to be Red Dawn redone with a whole bunch of teen stoners.

Unlike the potential negative reviewer, I was very pleased to see my expectations were not met.

I'd say the first quarter of the book followed the traditional post-nuclear Armageddon script pretty closely. We meet the main characters and the secondary characters. We see them party and do a ton of drugs. They come home and find the world has been blown to smithereens. They huddle together for survival. Up until this point it looks like a sophisticated version of many teen fantasies of life hiding out with your buddies, an unlimited supply of drugs, no parents to kill the buzz, and enough danger to keep everything interesting.

And then the story begins to shift. We move from teen fantasy mode into metaphysical questioning mode. We go from nothing deeper than getting laid and the next joint to an in depth exploration of a psyche at the breaking point.

This is not a light fluffy read with a happy ending. The title, which I barely paid any attention to when I was thinking about the book before I read it, is a warning about how it's going to work out. Joel, is a frighteningly well done psychological profile of a man slowly burning out and arising from the ashes not a phoenix, but a devil. The world is gone. Family and most friends have died horribly. As the seven month course of the book continues, more friends die. This is more stress than most people could possibly handle, add in the paranoia inducing effects of large quantities of cannabis, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

It's a compelling read, heartbreaking, but emotionally very, very real.

There are however, aspects of the story I found jarring and out of place. Joel and his friends are too young. They're high school seniors, seventeen or eighteen years old. And while I do not subscribe to the belief that all teens are twits, I can say that all the teens I've personally met who were as interested in drugs and partying as these kids were twits. They needed more time to grow up. College seniors would have worked better, post-grad students, better yet. Basically, I just ignored how old they were supposed to be, and mentally advanced them to twenty-six ish, it made the story work a lot better.

What actually happened seemed quite fuzzy, too. We know the terrorist mastermind had nukes. We learn he had a lot more than anyone thought he did. We know Joel and his buddies live in some middle of nowhere farming community, 200 miles from the nearest big city. When they get back from their camping party weekend, they find town destroyed, sort of. People are dead, some of them. Some look like they died peacefully in their sleep. Some are covered in burns. Some are running around looting. Some places the buildings have burned and cars are toppled. Some are just fine. What happened? Is this some sort of fall out from a bomb over 200 miles away? Did the terrorist have enough weaponry to go after little, middle of nowhere farming communities? And why didn't any of Joel's group come down with radiation sickness?

Joel's home and a nearby barn are perfectly set up for surviving the apocalypse it turns out. And while I get Poetl didn't want to spend too much time dealing with the physical hows of survival, the set up was just a bit too convenient. It's not only that everything is already set up with generators, but that they also manage to find a tanker truck filled with gasoline so they could run those generators.

What Poetl did want to spend time on was ripping away everything Joel knew or believed about himself. He built his character up, turned him from a lay about stoner into a leader, and then as stress piled on stress, turned him into a paranoid addict. And from there things only get worse. As I said earlier, not a light and fluffy read.

Joel is the only fully developed character of the lot. And I'm not sure if this is intentional or not. We get the story from Joel's POV. So are two dimensional secondary characters an indicator of lazy writing or of Joel's inability to really see and understand the people around him? Part of the reason I'm not sure if this is intentional or not is that the writing as a technical matter of grammar and construction ranges from great to error prone. When I see technical mastery of prose, I assume that things like the shallow secondary characters when told with first person POV is intentional. When it's not, I'm not sure if it's another indicator of sloppy writing or an indicator of deep writing with limited technical skills.

Voice, assuming you pretend Joel is twenty-six, is well done. Action scenes are believably chaotic. (Though, as others have indicated, the sudden military prowess of a crew of high school seniors wasn't.) Joel's descent into self-destructive madness was extremely well done. You almost don't notice he's slipping away because he doesn't notice he's slipping away. The ending isn't much of a shock. Once you realize the title isn't kidding, and the last line of the description really isn't kidding, you know how this is going to end. And while not a shock, it still evokes the pain of losing a character you wanted more and better for.

More careful editing, and more attention to making the setting/characters match the gravity of what happened, and this would have been a five star book. As it is, I'm comfortable calling this four stars.

Devil In The Details: Smashwords V. BookBaby

2011-04-30T19:28:00.000-04:00

After my first go round with BookBaby I got a lot of comments and discussions, so here we are back again looking more closely.

For those of you who didn't read the first article, BookBaby is a new option on the market for self publishers. Basically, they're a one stop location to get your book into the hands of a decent number of stores. Smashwords does this as well. For BookBaby you pay up front. For Smashwords you pay a percentage of each sale.

After my first overview, I had come to the conclusion that BookBaby was a legitimate way for an author who sells enough books (defined as enough to cover the cost of your set up fee) to make money. And, while that conclusion is still true, a deeper look at the numbers shows that any author who takes this route has to sell A LOT of books at one store.

With BookBaby you get 100% of your royalties. With Smashwords they take 10% (or 15% if you are selling on their site). With BookBaby you pay $99.00 (on sale now, usually $149.00) for them to take your .doc and turn it into an ebook. Smashwords does it for free, and then gets paid based on what you sell. With that sort of model, if you sell enough books, you'll do better on BookBaby then you will on Smashwords. Which is where I left it last time. Unfortunately that's more truthy than true.

Let's get deeper into the numbers (These numbers represent how much of the cover price of your novel you get to keep):

On the iBookstore:
BookBaby: 70%
Smashwords: 60%

Barnes and Noble:
BookBaby: 50%
Smashwords: 60%

Sony Ebookstore:
BookBaby: 50%
Smashwords: 60%

It's not that BookBaby is secretly keeping some of the cash. It just hasn't managed to negotiate as good a deal with it's distributors as Smashwords has. So, as it was pointed out to me, and I'll now point out to you, you've got to sell a lot of books, on the iBookstore, to make more money with BookBaby than you would with Smashwords. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? No, not really.

One other advantage in BookBaby's court, they will upload to Amazon for you. Smashwords currently has the options listed, but apparently that option doesn't actually do anything. If you do Amazon with BookBaby, you get exactly the same deal you would if you went straight to Amazon. And while uploading to Amazon is nice, if you have the skills to upload your document to BookBaby, you've got the skills to upload it on Amazon for yourself and save $99.00.

Now, let me add a little more shine to Smashwords. A: Smashwords has it's own sales platform as well as distribution channels. B: Free coupons. You can do them on Smashwords and they are great for publicity and getting copies of your book to reviewers. C: Smashwords distributes to Diesel and Kobo on top of everywhere BookBaby does except Amazon.

So, until BookBaby manages to negotiate some better royalty rates with it's non-iBookstore distributors, I'd suggest sticking with Smashwords.

Indie Book Review: Nearly Departed In Deadwood

2011-04-22T00:01:00.002-04:00

Nearly Departed in Deadwood was not what I was expecting. Between the cover, the title, and the paranormal tags, I was expecting zombies and some sort of mad necromancer tied into a mystery with missing kids. And with the early set up of the crusty, old guy who lives way out of town in a farm house with a huge pile of shot guns, hearing odd sounds coming from out behind his barn, I was planning out how the main characters were going to end up holing up there, with the huge arsenal and blasting the hell out of the zombies.

But, title, cover, and tags aside, this is a romantic mystery. Violet Parker has returned to Deadwood, SD. She's starting life over again, got her realtor's license, and moved herself and her kids in with her aunt. And so far, this new life is none too rosy. She's got an absolute asshole co-worker, who rapidly jumps up to the top of everyone's better off dead list, (I was looking forward to seeing the zombies eat him, alas, no zombies.) a completely empty appointment book, and if she doesn't sell a house in three weeks, she'll get fired. On top of it, little girls are going missing. Three of them in the last year. And they all look a whole lot like her daughter. In a town as small as Deadwood, Violet's worried for her own daughter's safety.

Then, within one day, things start to look up. Men (and real estate clients) start pouring from the sky. The aforementioned crusty, old guy from out on the plains is looking to sell. One of the richest men in town walks into Calamity Jane Real Estate, asking for her to sell his house. He's tall, blonde, gorgeous, and runs a jewelry store that makes its own pieces. Basically, he's perfect. Alas, the house is not. It's old, decrepit, spooky, rumored to be haunted, and before she can even start to see about fixing it up to sell, she's got weeks' worth of paperwork to do with the town because it's a protected historic building. The tall, dark, and handsome mystery man from the store next door decides he's in the market for a house, too. And then, on top of all of that, she starts getting mystery presents from a secret admirer. A really creepy secret admirer.

So, all the characters are in play. The two main plotlines, tall, dark, and handsome or tall, blond, and gorgeous, and what is happening to the little girls get running and twist together. Like any good mystery we get some red herrings, and, of course, the real herring is wearing a tuna costume, so you can't tell he's the one until the last possible second.

If you want a mystery you could possibly solve on your own, this isn't it. At all. Obviously, because of the way it's set up, Violet is going to figure out who is kidnapping the girls, which means it has to be someone else we meet along the way. But beyond knowing it's got to be one of the characters, the reader is left in the dark.

The romance swims along prettily. Tension builds nicely. Jewelry designer or mystery man? Ahh... to have such options. The sex was erotic and well written: no clichés, anatomical impossibilities, or off putting euphemisms. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of it, but given the time frame of the story and nature of the characters, the amount we got was just right.

The writing and dialog runs the gamut of competent to exemplary. The plot had at least one more thread than was necessary, but it might come into play in the next book of the series. Characters are especially well developed, with even the secondary and tertiary characters being fully drawn and alive. And for the serious romance fans it has to be a happily for now instead of happily ever after because this is book one of a series. For the most part, I was very satisfied by this story.

My main complaint, and this probably won't continue onto the next book in the series, is it's not really paranormal. It's not enough to have a paranormal aspect of the book; it has to actually do something with the plot. The expectation of paranormal lends a tension to the story that is never brought to fruition. Now, since this is book one, this is probably just the set up round, and it will come into play more heavily in the next books, but for this one, the psychic ability of the one character isn't really necessary. The fact that he can talk to dead people is entirely extraneous for the plot of this story. That he can do this being kept hidden for so long is also not necessary.

But if you like romantic mysteries with a tinge of paranormal creepiness, this one is well worth your time.

Indie Book Review; Expert Assistance

2011-04-16T11:03:00.001-04:00

Sit back and imagine, if you will, a story where Lazarus Long, Hannah Montanna, and Marvin the Paranoid Android on prozac get together to liberate a planet. Got that image in your head? Sounds like fun doesn't it? Yep. Reading it was fun, too.

Jake, the main character is something of a cross between Han Solo and Lazarus Long. Like Han he's in financial trouble. Like Lazarus he seems to have seen and done everything at least once. And like both of them he exudes a sense of fond grouchiness at the naive-cute-and-fuzzy-puppy types that keep tripping through his life.

Like Lazarus, Jake has a sentient computer/spaceship with a brain the size of a planet. This one is not depressed, but does seem to have a dry sense of humor and irony sensors on overdrive. Odin, in addition to knowing basically everything that ever was recorded, also has teleporter technology, can build almost anything, and crack basically any code. As you can imagine, Odin is a very good friend to have. Odin was built as a military vessel. He became sentient and decided he did not want to be a warship. Jake found him floating abandoned in the middle of space, probably bought him some fuel, and the two have been together since.

And now, looking for some fast money, Jake has a new job. Two new jobs really. One is shuttling Evvie Martini (Hannah Montanna, down to her dyed hair) from gig to gig. The other is helping the people of Antioch Two throw off Sordius Maxi, the owner of their planet.

Of course, eventually Evvie finds out about the revolution, gets involved, and a cute little tale that can be described as "Yay Liberty!" ensues. The story is more or less the fictional equivalent of kettle corn. It's sweet, crunchy, yummy, but not exactly nutritious.

Here's why. In the past I've mentioned something called power balance. So, let's talk a little more about plot and power balance. For a plot to work, the good guys and the bad guys need a shot at winning. It can be a one in a million shot, that's good reading, too. But unless you want to study some sort of human emotion, (ie lit fic) the guys on one side can't so completely overpower the guys on the other to the point where the guys on the other have absolutely no shot at winning. Sure the struggle of David V. Goliath is good reading, but the struggle between Goliath and the quadriplegic toddler isn't. The toddler has no chance at all.

Maxi never had a shot. Odin isn't so much taking a gun to a knife fight as taking a tank and making sure that Omniscient God Almighty is driving it. Maxi was so far out gunned by that computer it wasn't funny. And to throw the power balance off even further, Maxi is a lot more like Fredo Corleone than Michael.

There's no tension to this plot, because there's no real danger. There's no chance the revolution won't work. There's no possibility of any of the main characters being in any danger. Because of that, none of the main characters experience any real change. And why would they? Nothing was really risked. Evvie is just a childish at the beginning of the revolution as she is in the end. The rebels are just as clueless; they never had to learn anything. Odin, well, he's already the pinnacle of intellectual evolution, so there was nowhere for him to go. Jake has no deeper understanding of anything because he knew it all to begin with.

If you'll forgive the comparison, this is not Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It's not even close.

When discussing revolution it's hard to avoid politics. This was a fairly innocuous screed against commercialism, without being insulting or annoying. I'm about as far off on my side of the political spectrum as it's possible to get, and I didn't find the political content too bothersome. I doubt anyone else who can still claim to be somewhere on the rational scale would either.

So, if you want a cute and safe read, an adventure where you know everyone comes home just peachy and the good guys are guaranteed to win, this one's for you.

Self Publish With BookBaby

2011-04-09T10:13:00.000-04:00

So, a new player on the self-publish ebook market is up. Lets take a moment to see how BookBaby works.

The basic lay out is fairly similar to Smashwords, you upload a document, they turn it into an .epub, and send it off to the Apple Store, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Reader (Sony store.)

Now, here's the difference, you pay BookBaby $99.00 (on sale right now, usually $149.00) upfront. Then each additional year you pay them $19. And you've got to pay them $19 for an ISBN (unless you already own one). Then you get 100% of your sales (minus Amazon's, B&N, Apple's, or Reader's cut). With Smashwords you pay 0 upfront, have no upkeep fees, and get a free ISBN. You keep 85% of your sales (once again, minus the seller's cut). So, using some really simple math here, if you make one dollar per sale, you've got to sell one hundred and eighteen books before you break even on BookBaby. But once you've sold those 118 books, all your income is profit.

Meanwhile, if you make $1.00 per book, and Smashwords takes their fifteen cents, you have to sell six hundred and sixty books before you've paid Smashwords $99 in royalties. Then you have to sell and additional 127 copies in each additional year to even the $19 maintenance fee. And another 127 to cover the cost of the ISBN.

So, here goes. You sell one hundred books for a dollar a piece. On Bookbaby, you've made one dollar. On Smashwords, you've made 85. For the next hundred books on BookBaby, you're at 101 dollars, on Smashwords you're at 170. For the next hundred you get to 201 and 255. Next hundred 301 and 340, and on and on, the number gets closer and closer until BookBaby pulls ahead.

So, the question is, what's the value of money in your hands versus potential money? It's entirely possible that you'll sell those kinds of numbers if you've written a good book and put the work into promoting it. (And, of course the more you sell your book for, the fewer books you have to sell to break even.) If you've already got a half decent following, this may be a great way to go. At the same time, especially if you're just breaking into the ebook market, you might want to go with Smashwords first. At least that way you aren't paying for distribution out of hand.

BookBaby also charges you to add images, charts, graphs, and more than thirty interactive chapters to your table of contents. Things like that feel nickle and dimey to me. (All are free on Smashwords.) But the prices aren't outrageous, and if you're banging your head against a wall trying to get the Smashwords Meatgrinder to work, spending an extra $100 for picture formatting might not seem like a big deal.

This is another calculation you need to do, which is worth more, your time or your money? It took me three hours to get my Word .doc all set for the Meatgrinder. With BookBaby I would have skipped most of that (You do have to do some of your own format fixing for BookBaby, and if your copy is really messed up, they do charge you to get in into shape.) and just sent them $99, and they would have done it. Depending on what you'd normally make in an hour, you may save money by sending your manuscript off to BookBaby.

Unlike Smashwords they offer ebook cover design for $99 or $199 depending on how fancy you want to get. The covers on the gallery looked fine, and that's a decent, but not fantastic, price for the offerings. Or you can upload your own for free.

All in all, I'd say BookBaby looks like a valuable new option on the ebookery front.

Three Things You (Well I) Didn't Know About Advances

2011-04-02T10:24:00.003-04:00

In the great Indie v. Trad debate one thing that always comes up in the pro column for the Traditional Method is the author's advance. And really, who's going to argue about that? You get a publisher interested in your book, and then he gives you a pile of money. It's Yog's Law's perfect application.

Except... And of course you know there has to be an except...

First off, you don't get all that money at once. You get paid in installments, often three, one chunk when the project is accepted, one when you finish it, and one when it hits stores. This makes sense; the publisher wants to make sure he gets an actual book out of you. But at the same time, you're probably looking at a year or two before you've gotten all the money. Even a six figure advance doesn't look like all that much if you realize that's your entire income for the two years until your book hits the shelves and however long it takes to earn out the advance. Say you get a 200k advance, once you paid your taxes on it (almost 20% in FICA and Medicare alone, plus whatever federal, state, and local) and divide that by say (optimistically) four years. It's not exactly vast riches.

Secondly, that money is not just what you're living on, it's what you're using to promote your book. It's possible that if you're a big name, the publisher will set up book tours, speaking appearances, and the like for you. But if you're the kind of person reading this, you aren't that big of a name. If you're the kind of writer reading this and you want a book tour, you're paying for it out of that advance.

Thirdly, that advance is often all the money you're ever going to see from that book. An advance is supposedly your earnings paid to you before you earn them. A loan, really. Now, in most cases, somewhere in that contract will be something saying that if you don't earn out (your book doesn't sell enough copies to make you the advance) in a certain time (say three years) they own the book. What does that mean? It means that if you don't make back the advance, you never see any additional royalties on your work. Basically, your book is the collateral on that loan, and if it's not repaid in time, they get to keep it. So, say your book is earning a few hundred a month, not enough to have earned out your advance in the time allotted, but still it's a steady stream of income. Would you rather that money be going into your pocket or theirs?

Now, money in your hand now is worth more than potential money later on. But, when you're debating Indie or Trad, you need to go in with your eyes open and understand what those dollars really mean.

The Indie Book Review: Asatru For Beginners

2011-03-26T10:39:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I got a new review query, this one had a book in it called Asatru For Beginners. Asatru is a recreated version of the ancient Norse religions. Now, I was a religious studies major in college. I've got friends in the Pagan and Wiccan communities. I'm pretty well versed in the various New Age magickal philosophies. I read fantasy. I write fantasy. I'm up to date on my European mythos. No one needed to point out to me who Wednesday was in American Gods. So this looked like a fine addition to the vast pile of religious information in my arsenal. I was happy to accept it for review.

Now, I'm not, by any stretch of anyone's imagination, an expert on Norse mythology. I can identify Odin, Freya, Midgard, Thor, etc... and because of my RS background concepts like a multipartite soul was already something I'd run into, but given all of that, I found Asatru For Beginners to be confusing.

First off, the formatting was doing nothing to make the reading easier. The Kindle sample I downloaded had real issues. On the most basic level, if you start the book off with a FAQ, doing something to differentiate the questions from the answers (indenting, starting them off with Q: or A:, putting the questions in bold or italic, anything) would have made the reading easier. Maybe post FAQ the formatting improved. But the author sent me a .doc version, so I don't know if the Kindle version improved.

Secondly, beginning with a FAQ was a bit odd. Not just because of the questions asked (Did the Vikings wear helmets with horns on their heads? Are all Asatuars white?) and not asked (Who are the main gods? What is Ragnarok?) but because if you really are a beginner a quick overview before getting into the FAQ would have been helpful. Beyond a FAQ, what this book very much needed was a glossary. For every question the FAQ answered there were at least three terms with no definition or a definition that occurred much later in the book. Likewise, a pronunciation guide would have come in handy. Terms like: Fjorgynn, Ljossalfheim, fylgia, have no sound in my mind. I have no idea how to pronounce them.

Thirdly, it is very clear this was written by someone who knows absolute scads of information on the subject, and has known scads of information for so long that she's forgotten what sorts of things a beginner doesn't know. For example: there's a section with a list of gods, in this section we learn of the god's hall and where the god has influence. Now, while I'm sure this information is useful to someone who already knows something about the subject, if you don't really know what a hall is or where these places are supposed to be, it's confusing. Likewise the term Ragnarok is used something like twenty times before it's defined. In effect this book would more correctly be called Asatru For Already Conversant with Norse Mythology, or Asatru For the Low Intermediate.

Fourthly, the organization of this book left a lot to be desired. It's laid out in sections: Frequently Asked Questions, History, The Gods, Other Beings, Beliefs and Morality, Rituals, The Three Kinds of Magic, and Resources. Now, as a logical flow goes this didn't flow all that well. There were often bits where I'd want more information, and that information would be in a later section. As I understand a religion it's the beliefs that are the core. I would have started there, moved into rituals (as we learn in the beliefs section Asatru is a religion of actions, not belief), then gods and other beings, slid from there into history, finished up with magic, and then wrapped up the book with the FAQ, Glossary, and list of resources.

So, now that we've gotten the book as a device for the transmittal of information out of the way, how about the quality of that information? Now, as I said earlier I'm not an expert on this subject, but from the very brief bit of independent research I did, everything in the book looked fine. Other Asatruas might have different opinions on the subject, but to an outsider it appeared to be complete. The writing was engaging and fairly easy to follow. It was a quick and pleasant two hour read with a good deal of information I had never run into before.

As a religion Asatru had things I appreciated, and bits I was less than thrilled with. I'm a fan of religions based on actions rather than beliefs, and Asatru is a religion of action. You do not have to believe in literal land spirits to be an Asatruar, but you do have keep the folkways. Likewise the idea that works of both men and women is of value held appeal. And the very intense affection for freedom struck a resonant chord. However, as a moral framework, Asatru did nothing for me. But, as the author pointed out, it's the morality of a pirate culture. These were not pacifistic farmers living in harmony tilling the soil. This is a recreated version of the faith of the Vikings, and the Vikings were not known as easy neighbors. There appears to be no idea that a human is of value because he is a human. Anything that improves the lot of the (family, clan, tribe, country, the unit gets bigger as populations grow) is good, anything that harms that is evil. Rape, murder, theft, those are all fine and dandy, as long as not done to members of your group, meanwhile oath breaking is considered just as bad as killing a member of your group. And, while I'm a massive fan of keeping your pledges, I'm also a fan of the idea that humans are of value, and harming outsiders for personal gain is not appropriate.

In effect Asatru is a religion where the actions of the Nazis can be seen as honorable. They were, after all, out conquering their neighbors to improve the lot of their own (narrowly defined) group. The Jews, gays, politicals, mental and physical defectives were all defined as "others." They weren't part of the master race. Killing them and confiscating their goods to enrich the race is, by Asatru thinking, a moral good. The great irony here being that the Asatruars were also rounded up, classified as politicals, and killed by the Nazis. Now, the author points out that she personally considers fascism evil, but she also points out that's her own personal interpretation of their morality, and that others disagree. Obviously, I may be missing some of the subtleties of the religion, and I'm going off of just the one book here, but I'm not seeing anything besides a sense of personal disgust that would condemn the Nazis or any other group before or since that decided to destroy the "other" to enrich itself.

At the same time, there is an elegant and unapologetic simplicity to the morality of Asatru. The rules are exceptionally easy to follow. There is no existential angst, no worries as to the nature of salvation or forgiveness. Sin is a matter of breaking the law, and the laws are few and far between. Live well, enrich you and yours, keep your word, die fighting your enemies, and you too shall dwell in the halls of your gods, feasting and practicing combat until the end times come and you once again pick up your sword and fight for your kind.

All in all, if you really are a beginner, I'd suggest heading over to Wikipedia and searching Asatru. Not only will you get about the same amount of information (about 20k words) but the Wiki article is easier to understand and better organized. Then, once you've read that, go get Asatru For Beginners to start filling in the holes and rounding out the picture.

Blog Tour: Elements of the Soul

2011-03-24T00:01:00.007-04:00

This week I'm hosting a blog tour by Walker Author Toursfor Elements of the Soul. Here is a collection of questions/answers by the authors of the various short stories in the collection.

How has having a book published changed your life?

When you tell people you are a writer they always ask if you have anything published. If you don't they give you a skeptical look and patronizing smile. Having a book published adds credibility to my writing. Having a book published means being able to actually hold my dream in my hand. It allows me to hand that dream to those who supported me and tell them, "Look, you helped me create this, this is my dream." It is a wonderful way of saying thank you. – Rissa Watkins

Is there an established writer you admire and emulate in your own writing? Do you have a writing mentor?

While I don’t really emulate his writing, my mentor has been Timothy Westmoreland. I was lucky enough to have him as a professor for a couple of creative writing classes during my undergraduate days, and he did more towards helping polish and refine my writing than I had even guessed was possible. – Thor Gunnin

It's rare today to find an author who does nothing but write for a living. Do you have a 'real' job other than writing, and if so, what is it? What are some other jobs you've had in your life?

I actually do write full time, although I also teach ballroom dancing on the side. I do freelance work through Walker Writing Services, where I write anything people need—press releases, website content, or articles. I just started a new company called Your Document Professionals (www.yourdocumentpros.com) to provide writing services to small and medium businesses. – Jennifer Walker

Have you ever won any writing awards? If so, what?

As a reporter, the writing and reporting are sort of tied together, so the writing awards I have received were all called reporting awards. In 1988, I was named journalist of the year for the Rocky Mountain College Press Association for a combination of feature, editorial and hard news writing. The contest is conducted at the annual conference for the RMCPA. I also won various awards for my content while writing for my college newspaper. – Lucinda Gunnin

How did you feel the day you learned you would be published?

I was on cloud nine! There’s really an amazing feeling to know that your name will be on a book, and that people might buy it and read it. I have received so much support from my friends, family and many strangers who read and loved my stories. It’s a huge amount of satisfaction. – Jennifer Walker

The main characters of your stories - do you find that you put a little of yourself into each of them or do you create them to be completely different from you?

How can you not put some of you into your characters? I don’t do it consciously, but if there is no deep connection, nothing you can look at and say, “I feel that. I understand,” I’m not sure how you can write believable characters. M. Lori Motley

What compelled you to start writing?

I have always loved writing. As a child, I would come up with stories and plays and perform them for my family. Of course, I had grandiose ideas of sets, costumes, and charging for tickets to the production, but unfortunately the product wasn't quite worth the price of admission. Books played a large part in influencing my love of writing. I constantly had my nose in a book, and was always fascinated when a book held me so captive that I felt as though I was the main character of the story. – Lindsay Maddox

The main characters of your stories - do you find that you put a little of yourself into each of them or do you create them to be completely different from you?

Yes, I find I put myself and other people into stories but I tweak the characters to better fit the storyline. – George Kramer

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

Since I was old enough to realize that there were people behind the books that I loved to read, that they didn't just appear on shelves, I have wanted to write. That is what I wanted to do. I wanted to create those worlds of words for people to get lost in...if only for a short time. – Susan Weaver Sosbe

Do you have any pets? What are they? Tell us about them.

I have a dog; Mocha is a Chow/Shepherd mix. I adopted him from an animal rescue that I was writing an article about. I saw his face and had to have him. He is my writing companion during the day and follows me everywhere I go. – Rissa Watkins

Indie Book Review: Death Has A Name

2011-03-20T20:34:00.000-04:00

Death Has a Name by Jerry Hannel is a lovely bit paranormal mystery. Several other reviewers of this book claimed they couldn't put it down, and while that wasn't literally true for me, it was as close to being true as I ever get with a book.

So, what is so wonderful about this little gem? Brodie Wade.

There's a term from fan fiction that has crept into the world of original fiction: Mary Sue (or if male, Gary Stu). A Mary Sue is a character that can do anything. She's got amazing powers, gorgeous looks, a winning personality, there's no problem she can't solve, and she's probably kind to animals as well. She's just perfect. And, she's annoying as hell. Unfortunately she has a tendency to show up a lot in fantasy because it's just too easy to write a story where Mary Sue has the magical power that just saves the day. Now, in good storytelling, if a character has some sort of great power, it also has to have some sort of flaws or weaknesses. Brodie is an example of good storytelling.

He is described as a psychic. The Truth (not an Obi Wan Kenobi-your-point-of-view-my-point-of-view-truth, but the literal, Platonic Ideal, imagine it standing next to the rest of Neil Gaiman's Endless, TRUTH) is real and wants people to know it. Brodie, for whatever reason, can see the Truth, and it can see him. It's very insistent about getting its message across. To the point of beating it into Brodie when need be, and it defines need as pretty much whenever Brodie doesn't immediately hop to and do whatever it wants. So, Brodie has great power; he knows what's really going on, even when he doesn't want to. He knows he's sane. He knows what he sees is real. But he's jumpy, nervous, and constantly on the edge of institutionalization. Every day of his life is a struggle to hold onto a thin veneer of normal. And, of course, as a result of this, he doesn't exactly have a booming social life.

Characters like that make me especially happy. When I see real world set paranormal/fantasy I want to see characters struggling with the fact that the rest of the world doesn't believe in what they see. I want to see a cost to great power. Brodie is a broken mess of a man, but he's a very appealing mess. The kind of character that encourages a desire to take him home, clean him up, and try to protect him from the big, bad world. If Hannel had marketed this to the YA world, Brodie would have a huge collection of devoted teen girls swooning over him.

Okay, before I get too far into fan-girl-mad-crush squeeing, let me get back to being a critical reviewer. In addition to Brodie, is Detective Phil Dawson. Brodie uses his skills to freelance investigate cold cases. Detective Phil is actually a member of the LAPD. We don't get a lot of backstory, (Actually, we get no backstory on this.) but somehow these two are friends. Maybe they worked a case together and just clicked. Maybe Phil also finds Brodie's mess of a life appealing. For whatever reason, Phil actually likes Brodie; believes, as much as he can, in Brodie's talents; and supports him. Phil is the guy Brodie calls when he's missing his cat and jonesing for a cigarette to deal with the stress. (Brodie is very attached to his cat. If he's got a love of his life, it's the cat. Hear that sound? It's a thousand teen girls sighing.)

Brodie wakes up in the middle of the night, his cat is covered in blood, and the Truth wants him to investigate a murder. The next morning, Phil gets a call: a horrible murder has just happened. And thus the plot is set in motion, because, of course, those cases are one in the same.

The pacing is quick, hence the 'couldn't put it down' reviews, and the dialog is sharp. Without dialog tags you can tell Phil from Brodie. The plot is interesting, but not overwhelmingly complex, which also aids in keeping the pacing quick. Though this isn't the greatest comparison, not the least because they spend no time in a lab, this book reads a lot like an episode of CSI. There's not a ton of background on the characters, the case is the primary motive aspect of the plot, and the writing is tight.

The lack of background is my main quibble with this story. I would have liked to have seen a deeper backstory. I would have liked to know why Phil believes in Brodie. I would have liked more information about The Apprentice (the bad guy), Contego Veritas (the mysterious organization protecting the world from Death), how the whole Death thing worked (Death is trapped in a box kept safe by Contego Veritas, and trying to get The Apprentice to get him out.) You've probably seen someone say a book is only as good as its villain? Well, that's not necessarily true. This is a good book, but the villain is very sketchy. An extra fifty pages spent following him, showing us how he got to where he was, what was motivating him, how he was finding his victims, all would have been welcome. More than welcome, that would have made this very good book a great one.

Brodie is the only character we get any real backstory on. I would have liked to know more about him as well, but I think the level we got was appropriate. There are mysteries left to solve and quirks left to discover for later novels.

My other quibble with the book was the ending seemed rushed. Phil's storyline gets dropped. We leave him hanging, having to prove his case is right under penalty of losing his job. The reader knows he's correct, but we never find out if he's able to convince his supervisor he was right, soon enough to not get fired. I understand why it was left out, after all, we already know how the story ended, but a bit of extra wrap up on him would have been nice. Likewise Brodie's storyline also felt a little rushed. Not bad, but very quick. All the plot lines converged in a matter of minutes (literally, in story time the climax takes maybe fifteen minutes tops) into the climax of the story.

All in all Death Has a Name made me very happy. I'll call it an extremely well recommended four star. Brodie will be back soon, and I'm looking forward to it.