"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.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
So,You Want to Write Like A Yank
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!
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!
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Fotolia for Cover Art
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| Spooky Haunted House |
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.
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| Erotica |
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| Bond, Jane Bond |
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| Fairy Forest |
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| 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.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Indie Book Review: The Judas Syndrome
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.
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.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Devil In The Details: Smashwords V. BookBaby
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.
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.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Indie Book Review: Nearly Departed In Deadwood
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.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Indie Book Review; Expert Assistance
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.
If you'll forgive the comparison, this is not Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It's not even close.
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.
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.
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