Great Writing/Not Much Story: Osprey Island by Thisbe Nissen

It is generally accepted that novels are either plot driven or character driven – the best novels merge the two. By those standards I am being generous in giving Thisbe Nissen's Osprey Island three stars instead of two but it is beautifully written. The problem is, as the saying goes, there is no “there” there. Ms Nissen writes beautifully, she has an eye for detail and her passages about the osprey – plus the inclusion of selections from Roger Tory Peterson's books – are just great. However, that's where the positive side of this book ends.

I was attracted to the story by the description of an island full of secrets, the rescuing of a small boy from a cruel father, and the possibility of romance. After enduring ±300 pages, the secrets are boring, the child's fate is ambiguous, and the romance is pitiful. There is not much in the way of plot here which is sad because the book was rich with potential for it, and the characters were the most dislikable bunch of people you could ask for. 


Bud, a skinflint, corner-cutting drip, and his lazy hypochondriac wife Nancy run an inn on the beautiful Osprey Island. Every summer they hire as maids a bunch of young women from Ireland – only two of whom we meet in the story, a nymphomaniac and a shy girl who waits until her shift is over before reporting an incident of child abuse. They also hire some college boys as waiters whose main job it is to drive the Irish girls places for various reasons. Also working for Bud and Nancy are Lorna and Lance, a couple of drunks who shamefully neglect and abuse their small son Squee.  Bud and Nancy are also the parents of Suzy, a teacher who returns to the inn for the summer with her little daughter Mia in tow. Suzy, who is not married, admits she thought about an abortion when she discovered she was pregnant but decided to have Mia, and spends the rest of the story dumping Mia on the Irish girls so she can go off and screw Roddy, the inn's handyman.


For awhile I had hopes for Roddy – I really wanted to like him but he turned out to be so passive and lacking any kind of backbone that I also lost interest in him. There are also a lot of forgettable secondary characters.


It's too bad because Ms Nissen writes beautifully with some genuinely memorable prose – just no memorable characters or story. I loved the concept, I loved the setting and I very much loved the osprey but, please, Ms Nissen, next time give us some story and at least one or two likeable characters.


Maybe I should take that back – I did very much like Margery and Lorraine, but they are a couple of chickens so, well, draw your own conclusions. Also, for a book published by Knopf, it sure could use an editor! Lots of typos -- "he spun out of control like a car without breaks." Good grief.

For/From Indie Authors: Alexis Leno

Alexis Leno is a writer and Software Engineer from Southeastern Pennsylvania. She is currently pursuing her Master's Degree in Software Engineering at Drexel University, but her first love has always been writing. When she is not writing, she is reading or using people as guinea pigs for her cooking. 

Advice:

• Don't get discouraged by low sales. Even if you aren't selling, keep writing. You never what might happen in the future :)
• Lean on fellow writers for support. We are all going through the same thing. We revel in each others success stories and are there when something goes wrong.
  
• Try something new if you are stuck. This could be writing in first-person instead of third or writing in a completely different genre. Have fun because no one is pressuring you on what to write!

Links:

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Barnes and Noble
CreateSpace in Paperback 
My Blog 

Extraordinary People + Extraordinary Situations = Passion

The difference between genre fiction and literary fiction, Stephen King says, is that genre fiction is about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Literary fiction, however, is about extraordinary people in ordinary situations. This is a definition I like because it is both how I read and how I write. But what happens when extraordinary people live through extraordinary times? One result is Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets by Jude Morgan.

 Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Jude Morgan introduces us to the Romantic poets, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats as seen through the eyes of the women who loved them, and weaves a seductive, intriguing narrative that incorporates fact with rumor and imagination all set in a frame of the times in which they lived and the society they took such great joy in defying.

 The story opens with the life of the early feminist Mary Woolstoncraft who was the mother of Mary Godwin, the second wife of Shelley and the author of “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus”. Morgan takes his time developing the society and the historical context in which Mary Godwin, and her young step-sister Jane (she later changed her name to Claire Clairmont), who became one of Byron's lovers, were born and lived. We are also introduced to Augusta Leigh, Lord Byron's older half-sister, Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron's most notorious mistress, and Fanny Brawne, who would fall in love with Keats in the last years of his brief life.

 The story is told through multiple, shifting perspectives and, I'll confess, it becomes a little difficult to know whose eyes we are seeing through at times but once I adjusted to this device, it was easy enough to be aware of it and adjust along with the narrative. Great detail is paid not only to the politics of the era but also the social customs and the philosophical ideals of the various characters. There are times when this becomes a bit much but far more times when it is absolutely fascinating. Gradually, Morgan builds a complex tapestry of connections and inter-connections that, much to my amazement, makes sense of the clash of temperaments and emotional entanglements in which this wildly disparate group of people lived.

Lord Byron and his Women

 Lord Byron was, unsurprisingly, the most colorful character – in the story as he was, doubtless, in life. His affairs with women like Caroline Lamb and Claire Clairmont caused him no end of aggravation and his brief marriage to Annabella were tempestuous but, in Morgan's story anyway, the one great love of his life is his half-sister Augusta, the married mother of seven children, who never found anything but love and compassion for her notorious brother.

The Shelleys

From the minute Mary Godwin meets the dreamy, idealistic, liberal Shelley she loves everything about him. His generosity of spirit and commitment to absolute freedom both attracts and frustrates her especially when her step-sister turns to him when her affair with Byron comes to crashing end. Through their life together in England and then in Italy, Mary adores Shelley and tries to emulate his ideals but, especially after the deaths of two of their children and a miscarriage, she blames herself for not being evolved enough for his idealism.

Fanny Brawne & John Keats

 John Keats, whose very brief life does not leave a lot of room for story, appears late in the over 500 pages of the book but his love for Fanny Brawne, and hers fo him, is sweet, poignant and tragic.

 Though all the particulars of the lives of these people can be easily obtained just by going to Wikipedia, Jude Morgan has brought them all vibrantly to life filled with emotions, thoughts and struggles to which contemporary readers can easily relate. This is an extraordinary book – a bit long in places and occasionally hard to follow – but well worth the effort. 

Thanks for reading. 

For/From Indie Authors: Sean Bridges

ROLL OF THE DIE is my first novel, although I've been a writer for fourteen years. I have ten completed screenplays, two documentary short subjects, an animated short and a graphic novel in the works.
I was a 2001 Finalist and 2004 Semi-Finalist for the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship. I've had a project invited to the 2005 Sundance Institute Producers Conference, and have placed in a variety of writing competitions, including the Austin Film Festival, PAGE International, FADE IN Awards, Cynosure Screenwriting and Scriptapalooza.

I recently produced and directed two documentaries. OUT OF MANY, about the struggles of a Learning Center in Kingston, Jamaica. 20/20 VISION, about the construction of an International Financial Center in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
I'm currently working on my second novel, ON THE BAYOU. An action-thriller in the swamps of Louisiana.

Advice:

• Write what you know, You have to be interested and excited about your work and you have to write for one person, yourself.  If that passion is on the page, other people may want to join you.  If you try to write for the trades or what's popular in the moment, that tends to ring hollow and jump off the page as well. 
•  Don't be discouraged.  This is the only time I'll ever quote Donald Rumsfeld, but it is a long hard slog.  It's easy to keep moving forward when there's some interest or heat around you, it's tough when the only person on the road is you.  Don't give up, and keep going.  Every step you take is a step closer to your final destination. 
• Persistence, patience, luck, timing, talent, and connections.  Everybody has various degrees of each trait, and I don't know what mix of ingredients it takes to find success.  But in a business where you never say never, I feel pretty secure to say that if you're missing any of these, you won't make it. 

Links:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Smashwords

Of Nitwits, Nincompoops, & Knuckleheads

Recently I made a post on an internet forum in which I referred to a certain female half-term politician / failed reality-TV star as a “nincompoop”. Subsequent posters observed that nincompoop is an under-used word but so appropriate for the person I applied it to. This pleased me because I have a fondness for words like that. I used to work with a guy who always referred to an annoying co-worker as a “knucklehead” and it always made me chuckle when he said that.

There are a lot of really good words that have fallen out of use which I am totally in favor of reviving. I have been watching a lot of old 1940s and 1950s movies lately and I'd forgotten about so many of the words that were in common usage back then. Last night I watched Henry Hathaway's incredible Niagara with Joseph Cotton, Marilyn Monroe, and Jean Peters. In one scene, after he has just behaved badly, Cotton says that he feels “kind of goofy” which made me laugh even though the scene wasn't supposed to be funny. Marilyn Monroe uses quite a few now-quaint expressions, too – “swell”, “corny” – I wonder if there is a movie made in the past 30 years that includes such words in the script.

Actually, I did notice Gabriel Byrne say he was “feeling kind of daffy” in a recent re-watch of the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing, one of my all time favorite movies. Personally, I've always been fond of “nitwit” and “fruit loop”, too. Language evolves and transforms with the times but, as writers, we have to stay mindful of those terms when writing period fiction. Nothing quite captures the flavor of a period like using the right slang words. When a character refers to a “dame with a great set of gams”, well, we know he's not talking about a woman from the 21^st century.

The psychology of characters has changed, too. In Niagara Joseph Cotton talks about being sent home from Korea with “battle fatigue” and spending time in, what one of the characters refers to as, a “psycho” hospital. But mostly he is burned out by trying to keep his “tramp” wife (Marilyn Monroe) happy because, despite her betrayal, he is still “stuck on” her. As I was watching it I couldn't help but wonder how that movie might be re-written today – leaving aside the fact that those old wooden walkways in and around the Falls are long gone, replaced by metal ones which are better for safety but not for murdering unwanted husbands.

I also watched Gregory Peck in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit which I don't think I had ever seen before. The story deals with a man trying to come back from war – World War II in this case – and lead a normal life. In the course of the story it is revealed that he fathered a child while stationed in Italy, probably a fairly common occurrence but not one that movies dealt with back then. He decides to do the right thing and support the child but, when he tells his wife, played by Jennifer Jones, about it, she becomes understandably upset. This took place in the era when men did not talk about their feelings and about what happened in the war. While trying to make her understand he says that he got involved with the child's mother because he was so frightened and didn't know if each day would be his last.

In an effort to explain himself he says, “I killed seventeen men face to face, one of them just for his coat, and that is not counting the ones killed in battle.” She replies to this saying, “Yes, but none of that effects me.” Nitwit.

I'm not sure where all this is leading but it doesn't matter. Fascinations are the way writers' brains tell them they are on to something. So I keep collecting words and thoughts and, well, who knows?

Thanks for reading.

For/From Indie Authors: Craig Davis

After earning bachelor’s and graduate degrees at the University of Missouri, Craig Davis toiled for 20 years at newspapers, and has spent a lifetime in biblical scholarship. An amateur musician, he was once wrestled to the ground by a set of bagpipes. He has two adult daughters and a dog that refuses to grow up.

Advice:

• My advice is, first, write what's in your heart and head. Don't worry about getting published; that will only draw you into formulaic writing. If you are interested in the art, resist formulas with all your might and let the publishing take care of itself.
• Second, write what you have lived (not what you've read). Doing this will help you avoid being derivative. You will also find that your experience gives you a much greater knowledge of and intimacy with what you're writing than what you have only read from other authors.
• Second and one half: If you love it, don't give up.
• Third, get a good editor. Everyone needs an editor, and agents, publishers, reviewers and readers hate nothing more than sloppy fundamentals.

Links:
Website
Blog
Facebook fan page
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

Dance, Hines, Dance: HINES WINS IT!

Bravo to Hines Ward and his partner Kym Johnson for winning the 2011 Mirror Ball Trophy. I sure loved watching them dance.

I can't believe how much fun I've had watching Steeler Hines Ward dancing on Dancing With the Stars. His joie de vivre has been contagious throughout this season and, though I've yet to watch a whole show, I very much look forward to seeing his performances. The fact that he made it to the finals and is now tied for first place seems to astonish everyone -- including him. So tonight is the night that will decide and I can say for sure, whichever way it goes, I think he has shown so much charm, charisma, and positive energy that he's a winner already. Last night he and his lovely partner Kym Johnson performed a wonderful Quick Step:





Then followed that up with one of the most unique Freestyle dances ever.





One thing for sure, Hines has gotten tons of support and appreciation from Steeler Nation and from people who never heard of him before but were won over by his spirit. His Steeler teammates and past Steelers have been wonderfully supportive, too. Speaking of that, if you want to fill up a lot of space fast you just need to put a few Steelers in the audience. Last night saw Jerome Bettis, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann, and James Farrior in the audience.

But the most amazing wall of support was the night he was cheered on by Keyaron Fox, James Harrison, James Farrior and Max Starks.

For me this has been tremendous fun and I look forward to seeing what happens tonight. 

Thanks for reading.

"Fry Bacon. Add Onions" is on The New Homemaker Blog!

Lynn at The New Homemaker blog has posted an excerpt from my cookbook/memoir, Fry Bacon. Add Onions on her wonderful blog. She said that even though she is not Pennsylvania Dutch, many of her family's favorite dishes start that way: fry bacon, add onions, stir in cabbage. Her blog is a fabulous resource for information on healthy living, parenting and home schooling, cooking, crafts, and more.

Check out her blog. It's great!


Thanks for reading.

A Generous, Brilliant Review of "The Old Mermaid's Tale"

Many, many thanks to the talented and gracious Maureen Gill for her review of my novel The Old Mermaid's Tale posted on her blog yesterday. I am very grateful!

Maureen wrote:
I hope you can catch some down time to relax with nature and read a good book, and if you're wondering about what book I might recommend it just so happens I have one in mind (are you surprised?). 

I can think of no better book for a lazy day shared with Mother Nature than Kathleen Valentine's "The Old Mermaid's Tale." I read it last year and wrote a review (that I just happened to come across this morning when I was, of course, looking for something else that I still can't find!) and thought "You know what? I think I'd like to read this again...." 

Here's my review and maybe after you read the review you'll want to read the book. No matter what you choose to read, however, I hope that after you read my blog entry today that you'll feel like chillin'... from where I'm sitting now there's no better afternoon to do so! 

So, my wish for you is that wherever you are your day is as wondrous as mine!

The Old Mermaid's Tale by Kathleen Valentine

Kathleen Valentine’s “The Old Mermaid’s Tale” is an elegantly crafted coming of age story about the healing powers of unconditional love.  It is the story of a beautiful young woman, Claire Wagner, who falls in love with the ideal of romanticized love even before she experiences love’s own joys and sorrows.  Claire is first awakened to the breathtaking realities of pure sexual passion by Pio, a young Italian-American who yearns for the dangerous life of a seaman.  Pio, literally, will become the first and last great passion of her life, serving as bookends to Claire’s journey of the heart.  However, the crucible that transforms Claire from love-struck girl to full womanhood will not be Pio but rather her love affair with Baptiste, a mysterious and seductive Breton, a man of tragedy and well as captivating songs of love.

Claire’s pure and unselfish love for Baptiste heals his tormented soul and allows him to claim his destiny.  In return, Baptiste’s age, wisdom and ability to nurture and cherish a woman will serve as that most ancient of all mariners’ navigational tools, the Northern Star.  The knowledge that she is deeply loved by Baptiste creates within her an inner compass so strong that it will guide her safely home through the tumultuous seas of her own passions and doubts, delivering her into a charmed life that gives her a platform for all of her gifts, most especially her astonishing capacity to love unconditionally and with great purity of purpose.  Claire and Baptiste are eternal soul mates who share a love so profound it eventually comes full circle in the fullness of time, giving harbor to others who, like Baptiste, are also in desperate need to recover from the vicissitudes of life. Such souls are in need of safe anchor as surely as any battered ship seeking port after sailing through storms able to sink whole fleets.

Claire Wagner was born into the innocence and security of an age long gone in American history; a period before Americans began to cannibalize their best and brightest through assassination in word and deed and send off to war their own progeny to be killed or damaged beyond repair in grandiose wars of no rational purpose.  Like America, Claire Wagner came of age during the social chaos of the sixties.  Also like America, Claire had within her the ability to love a dream and understand dreams should be preserved and that sometimes, in and of themselves, dreams alone may be enough.   As a historian, I find no small measure of metaphor in the fact that Claire found a way to preserve her dreams and justify her very existence in the arms of an older, wiser man – a man who came from a culture much more experienced than her own.  America has always had a hard time looking backward to history for guidance, insisting instead on making its own mistakes. Claire was smart enough to do it differently.

Valentine sets the heart and soul of “The Old Mermaid’s Tale” in a small fishing town on one of the Great Lakes, successfully using the cultural richness of the locale and its locals as the warp and woof of her great love story.  The effect is mesmerizing, entertaining, and at times enlightening.  This very talented author displays an in-depth understanding and compassion for the lives of the brave men and women who define their existence according to the vagaries of mighty lakes and oceans and an ever present danger that most people will never know and can hardly imagine. The story is rich in folklore and the superstitions of seamen but most compelling when it reminds us about the fragility of our existence.  Clearly to Valentine and her marvelously drawn characters there are many ways a person can die but being dead to love is quite possibly a worse death than being lost at sea.

Kathleen Valentine is a very gifted writer. She captures the prosaic as well as the heavenly but it is in the heavenly – in the sheer beauty of her sometimes astonishingly lush prose – that I was swept off my feet.  Every great story leaves the reader with an indelible impression or a feeling, an idea that can often be captured in an artfully chosen word or clever turn of a phrase.  Some stories leave the reader “breathless,” or “stunned” or “thrilled.” Kathleen Valentine’s “The Old Mermaid’s Tale” left me feeling simply “wonderful,” as if I had been rendered nearly senseless by an over indulgence of fine chocolate, heady wine, hot therapeutic waters, and the sweet caresses of an understanding and satisfying lover. 

I’m not sure what else needs to be said with the possible exception that Kathleen Valentine proves that being an independent author and being an extraordinary talent are not mutually exclusive terms. Kathleen’s writing elevates the bar for all those who want to independently publish.  She has also cast adrift the myth that indies are not the equal of those who are agented or traditionally published.   Everyone who wants to write or loves to read can learn much from Valentine and “The Old Mermaid’s Tale.”

(You can read more about this wonderful book, as well as learn about Kathleen and her other books, and also link over to her blog and places where you can purchase her various books online by going clicking on this link: http://www.valentine-design.com/MermaidInn/enter.htm -- Enjoy!)

The Last Dance Hall in Niagara Falls

A few years back I was spending Christmas with my sister Lisa. It was the day after, a sunny day with lots of snow and glittery flakes drifting down and we were trying to decide what to do. “I know,” Lisa said, “Let's go to Niagara Falls.”

She lives a couple hours from the Falls and when we were kids that was a frequent destination in summer but neither of us had ever been there in the winter. So we bundled up, grabbed cameras, and drove north. We were there in time for lunch.

It was a wonderful day, very cold but sunny with light snow and very few people around. The Bell Tower was playing Christmas Carols and the Falls were, of course, breathtaking. Most of the businesses were closed but we found a couple restaurants and spent most of the day just walking around getting a look at the Falls from every angle. No matter how many times I have seen them they are always stunning.

I write about this because lately I've been juggling a random selection of seemingly unrelated thoughts in my head and the other night, just as I was dropping off to sleep, that little voice in my brain that comes from the parallel universe where literary characters live whispered, “The Last Dance Hall in Niagara Falls.” I heard it clear as anything and was so startled I sat up, grabbed an envelope and a hi-liter from the bedside table and scribbled it down. The Last Dance Hall in Niagara Falls – there's something behind that.

Like a lot of writers, no matter how many stories/books/projects I am juggling there is a part of me that remains fearful that I'll never have another idea worth writing about again. So when some little shred of something pops into my brain I always get excited. As readers of this blog know, I've been enthusiastic about Hines Wards' performances on Dancing With The Stars. Partly because he's a Steeler and I love them but also because there is something about his approach to learning to dance – his mixture of hesitation and commitment, his appreciation of his teacher/partner Kym, his honesty about feeling so far out of his element. I was thinking about that. Say you are very, very, very good at something. Say you have received honors and awards – won Superbowls, been named Most Valuable Player, and played in ProBowls – and then you are presented with the opportunity to do something very public, very far out of your element where you could easily make a colossal jackass of yourself. What do you do? Well, if you're Hines Ward you say, “Okay, I'll give it a shot.” And if you are Hines Ward you dance like hell and wind up in the finals.

But I digress.

Some years back I became infatuated with an old dance hall in a seaside amusement park up the coast a ways. One hot summer night I dragged current boyfriend with me and we spent a very entertaining evening there. There was a surprisingly large crowd, a retro-Big Band and, between dances, we went outside to walk on the beach. It was a lovely evening and reminded me of nights years before spent at The Balinese Room in Galveston.

So the other night when I woke up with that phrase throbbing in my brain, these various thoughts came together – old dance halls, a man testing himself in a seemingly crazy way, Niagara Falls, the magic of doing something crazy just because you can.

I don't know where this is leading but so far the ideas keep coming, characters are taking form and now, while Depraved Heart rests, awaiting the next round of revision, I am dreaming about The Last Dance Hall in Niagara Falls. Who knows where this might lead? I wrote that one very romantic scene set at Niagara Falls in The Old Mermaid's Tale but I think I need to write more.

That December day in Niagara Falls Lisa and I found a restaurant overlooking the falls where we had dinner before heading back to Pennsylvania. We sipped hot chocolate to warm up and watched as the colored lights blinked on illuminating the Falls. Lisa said, “I'm so glad we did this.” “So am I,” I said. “I'll remember this forever.”

And I have.

Thanks for reading.

For/From Indie Authors: Maurice Alvarez & Ande Li

Advice:

In terms of advice for aspiring authors, I will talk about the things I got hung up on while getting my first book out there.

Sometimes the things you think will be the easiest turn out to be the most time-consuming or the most embarrassing

• Spell checking – You’ve been over your manuscript countless times, as have beta readers, etc.  You’re sure you’ve caught all your typos.  Forget all that.  As soon as you’re ready to create your ePub/MOBI/etc., fire up the spell checker and go over it once again.  This has the additional bonus of catching if you accidentally reverted to a prior revision.  You may chuckle, but I’ve seen it happen.  And it’s terribly embarrassing when you realize that the edition you’ve had on sale for a week is the wrong one or has even a few typos in it
• Cover – As indie authors, we have to wear a lot of hats, first the author hat, then the publisher hat, then the marketer hat. And somewhere in there, we need a cover designed.  Considering how important a cover is (I can’t count how many times I’ve impulse-purchased a book because of its cover), it’s not a task you want to skimp on.  If you have the time to devote to it AND you’re good at illustration and layout, go for it.  There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing your own image on your own book out on a retail site.  But let’s face it, that’s a lot of hats to wear.  If you can afford it, contract someone to do it for you.  Also Google for royalty-free images.  There are a lot of great photos are there that can be used as-is or only need some slight tweaking to get to where you’d like them to be.
• A note on ISBN – This is a quote from my blog, but I’m including a link to the site that gave me the answers I was looking for.  It finally spelled out precisely what having an ISBN means and helped me decide whether or not to get one.

I never imagined that the decision on whether or not to purchase ISBNs would be so difficult.  Mostly it has been due to a lack of clear pros/cons on owning your own.  Second has been the cost.  If they were cheaper (and I understand that they have come down in price quite a bit in the last few years), it would be simple.  But compared to the POD and vanity press offers of free, $10, etc. ISBNs, it’s difficult to justify spending so much on some numbers that don’t get the average indie author a whole lot.  Except, perhaps, for that rare occurrence where the author catches a lucky break and their work takes off.  But that’s like playing the lottery, I think; thousands of people play each week, and you might not even have a winner on a given week.

Based on this, it may sound like I’m leaning toward not buying any… yet the opposite is true.  I have this strong–though perhaps ridiculous–urge to own at least the printed version of my book in its entirety.  In the realm of traditional publishing, that’s not even possible, but indie publishing makes it so.  In the grand scheme of things, does it matter?  Not a whit to anyone but me.  But in the end, I will be able to hold that book in my hand and say it is 99.9% my work from cover to cover.  And even if I never recover the cost of the ISBNs, that’ll be a pretty satisfying thing to say.

Links:

The Trouble With Thieves by Maurice X. Alvarez & Ande Li

A science fiction/fantasy adventure about an alien thief scouring the universe for adventure, two human girls seeking to escape the constraints of their environments and one human genius looking for a means to greatness.  When their paths cross, they all get more than they bargained for.

Available on Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

Author interview – I am interviewed by author David H. Burton

AlvarezLi.com – Our author website with our bios and some free short stores available for online reading

For/From Indie Authors: Sam Havens

Sam Havens' novel, Farr Point, is now available as an eBook on both Kindle and Nook. Introductory price is only 0.99 cents.  (You may download a free sample.)

Advice:

• Figure out what most frightens your central character.  Almost all of his/her objectives key off of this fear.
• Give your main characters distinctive voices with unique vocabularies and phrasing.
• Make sure you include archetypes -- threshold guardians, mentors, tricksters, etc. -- in your story.

Link:

Fort Farr Point at Amazon Kindle

For Barnes and Noble Nook

Falling in Love with Hines Ward

"Last night every woman in America fell in love with Hines Ward." - a Tweet from a Hines Fan Convert.


I'd never seen an episode of Dancing with the Stars prior to this season and, frankly, had no clue how it worked. But when I heard that Steeler Wide Receiver Hines Ward was a contestant this year I started paying attention. I've yet to watch a full episode -- it's just not to my taste -- but I've become a Hines & Kym junkie. Every Tuesday morning I can't wait to turn on my computer, go to You Tube, and see Hines dance. He's as impressive on the dance floor as he is on the football field.


This week the news broke that his fabulous partner Kym had been injured during one of their practice routines. Like all his fans I thought, "Oh $#!%!" But she survived and, boy oh boy, did they dance. The footage of their dance also shows what happened and it is a heart-breaker but watching how they pulled through and then danced... well, if you have any kind of a heart at all, this is going to tug at it:





They had a second dance last night and this is the salsa that garnered a perfect score. It is preceded by a brief bio of the Superbowl MVP featuring some great interviews with Coach Tomlin, Coach Cowher, Steelers strong safety Troy Polamalu, former Steeler Jerome "The Bus" Bettis and more.





Next week are the finals and no matter what happens there is little doubt Hines Ward is -- well -- ya gotta love him. Like Troy said, he's all heart.


Thanks for reading.

The Question of Evil

In the wake of the announcement of Osama bin Laden's killing there has been much discussion on some internet boards of good and evil, just and unjust, right and wrong. I personally have been a little stunned by those who consider his death an outrage considering that he was responsible for thousands of deaths far beyond those of the people killed on September 11, 2001. When I saw the hundreds of people gathered in Times Square cheering his death I had a mixed reaction, I was a little shocked by anyone's death being cheered but I also understood the relief that a lot of people felt that the potential for terror that he represented was finally removed.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been in some online discussions about this and it is enlightening. There are many people who are just plain thrilled that a monster has been removed from the earth. There are many people who, while not rejoicing in the need to have done this, are relieved that one less monster exists. And then there are the people who are horrified at the “brutality” of the raid on the bin Laden compound and the manner in which he was killed. I'll be honest, I have a hard time understanding these people.

The Amish believe that if violence is to be stopped it has to be stopped on a one by one basis, that each individual has to make the commitment to stop violence. It is an admirable position but one that is hard to advance in a world in which people live with constant awareness of inequality. I have long been of the opinion that the root of much evil is the feeling that some “other” has something we want but cannot have – freedom, money, sex, prestige, acclaim, respect. Our country was founded on the concept that everyone is created equal and, while it may be true that we are created equal, it is not true that we are all start out equal because we just simply do not. Some people are born with more money, better looks, into more loving families, etc. etc. etc. So, as long as inequality exists there will be rivalry and as long as there is rivalry there will be discontent and competition and discontent and competition always seem to end in violence. Is that evil? No, not really but the end result of violence often appears to be evil.

As a writer these questions fascinate me because most every writer is faced with creating evil characters – or at least bad characters – and in order to make them believable we have to be mindful of how they got that way. Some years back John Ronan interviewed me for his television program The Writer's Block and he said that in my writing there did not appear to be any really bad or evil characters. This was before I had written Each Angel Burns and introduced my readers to Sinclair Delacourt. I told John that I didn't think there were many really bad people in the world but, of course, that is a cavalier statement. There may not be people who are inherently bad but there are a lot of people whose personal circumstances have filled them with such anger, bitterness, rage, resentment – call it what you will – that they act in evil ways trying to assuage their personal hurt.

Yesterday I watched a movie called The Chamber in which Gene Hackman plays one of the most purely dislikeable characters I've ever encountered onscreen. Gene Hackman is so good at playing roles like that. This guy was a Mississippi Klansman convicted of multiple bombings and the murder of two small children in one bombing. As I was watching the movie, and the defense his grandson/lawyer (played by Chris O'Donnell) constructed – generations of hate passed down from from father to son – I thought of how someone becomes so motivated by hate. How does a character like this man, or a real person like Osama bin Laden --- or a Fred Phelps or a Terry Jones? Become so filled with hate that they don't care about the lives of innocents who die because of their actions?

Then there is the irresponsibility of incitement. Bill O'Reilly rails against “Tiller the Baby-killer” and someone decides to assassinate Dr. George Tiller. Sarah Palin tells her followers “don't retreat, reload” and paints cross-hairs on a map of the people she targets for defeat -- and someone takes a gun to one of those cross-haired regions and opens fire. Where does it all end? We know what evil is, we know why it happens, we know what the outcome will be, and yet that damning urge to act out of our own sense of being more entitled to something than the next guy keeps the hate spiraling.

There are no easy answers, there never were, there never will be. As long as there are those who act in evil ways, there will be those who are relieved to see them gone. As writers we will observe these things and try to understand – and as fellow humans we might try doing the same.

Thanks for reading.

Growing Up on Gothics

I don't remember how old I was when I found my mother's copy of Jane Eyre in my grandmother's attic. I remember that once I started reading it I was lost to the world, not only for the time it took me to read the book, but for years. I fell madly in love with the haunting, mysterious quality of that novel and began a very long quest for comparable books. I read Wuthering Heights shortly thereafter and then my mother introduced me to Daphne DuMaurier. The first book of hers that I read was Jamaica Inn. I was completely hooked on Gothic romances, as I learned they were called, and I'm sure I drove the librarian at our tiny local library crazy searching for more.

The librarian, clever lady that she was, introduced me to Victoria Holt. Her novels quickly became an obsession with me. In the tradition of the Brontes and DuMaurier, her novels were a combination of dizzyingly romantic and unnervingly dark, always set in abbeys or castles or crumbling manor homes and, while there was the inevitable romance weaving through the plot, you were never quite sure who would turn out to be a good guy and who would be a bad guy. Sometimes you were in for a surprise.

Being the romantic girl that I was back then, those books fed all my fantasies about romance – which was a bit at odds with the reality of life in the 1960s. In the psychedelic era of political dissent and free love, the entire world of repressed heroines in castles pining away for that mysterious but tantalizing stranger, seemed pretty silly. So the Gothic romances that I loved turned into guilty pleasures to be read when no one was looking while I carried Richard Brautigan and Tom Wolfe around in public.

Life, like it always does, just kept on happening and, though my reading habits changed, there was a part of me that always longed for some of the mystique of those fog-shrouded, misty romances. In college I discovered Thomas Hardy and, though his books were generally depressing, they often embodied that mystique I longed for. In the mid 1970s Anne Rice splashed onto the literary scene with Interview with the Vampire and he subsequent Mayfair Witches stories and, though I read some of them and loved the atmosphere of them, I couldn't get into the paranormal part. Though I always loved a hint of the paranormal, that seductive “what if”, Lestat just didn't do it for me. He was, well, a vampire.

Then in 1992 I came across a book that sucked me in like nothing had in a very long time. The novel was called The Secret History by a first time novelist named Donna Tartt and, though it lacked the trappings of traditional Gothic romance, it was still the most Gothic, delicious, dark, intriguing book I had read in years. Set in an elite rural Vermont college it is the story of a group of college students and two killings – one accidental, the other deliberate. There was a touch of paranormal intrigue thanks to some Bacchanalian rituals and there was a complex love story with one sly, seductive yet damaged girl/woman who was the object of desire for three extraordinarily brilliant but flawed men. I read the book, all 526 pages of it, with that sense of being totally lost that I craved as a girl.

I don't actually remember when I decided to start writing my first novel. I remember the circumstances but I don't remember the year. But as I was writing I remembered an old axiom for writers, “Write what you want to read”. I knew my storyline because it was based on something that had happened in my young life. I was a sophomore in college working my way through school as a waitress in a diner near the Erie waterfront and there was a tavern called the The Mermaid Tavern that, in my Gothic romance-driven mind, I had transformed into Jamaica Inn. That summer a circus set up not far from the diner and every night after the circus closed the diner was filled with the most wonderful, bizarre, incredible variety of characters. One of them was an animal trainer who was tall with long dark hair, fierce blue-eyes, and a Quebec accent. His name was Baptiste and he tried to convince me to quit school and come with him. I didn't but I poured all those feelings into my novel. I named it The Old Mermaid's Tale and I prayed readers would find it as dark, romantic and Gothic as I did.

When I wrote my next novel, Each Angel Burns, I actually set it in an abandoned abbey on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Maine. While keeping it modern in content, I did my best to weave my beloved dark, Gothic atmosphere into it. The resulting novel has gotten good reviews so this week when author Jane Ward wrote about it as a Gothic romance on her blog. I was thrilled. She told me that the first thing she thought when she began reading it was, “This is like all those Gothic novels I loved as a girl.”

I'll love her review forever and I'll keep on striving to “write what you want to read.”

Thanks for reading.