Category Archives: Review

Air completed (V1)

Due to surprise complications at work (basically, IT decided my department wasn’t a priority), I had some free time to finish writing Air. The editor said that I seemed to have more fun writing these. I wouldn’t say it was fun – it was very experimental for me. I wove real history into my stories, using actual historical figures.

But the good thing is, the first editorial pass is complete, with the first corrections in the can. It’s on course to be released for February of next year.

Next is Grimaulkin Collected, an anthology of Grimaulkin stories. I’m going to start doing what I did with Air’s stories–plot them out with enough wiggle room to “discover” the story. Even though my plot cards may not survive contact with the page, at least I have a bit of a guide of where I want the story to end up. Before, I would keep it in my head. Now, setting it down on paper solidifies the ending for me. Also, I can decide whether or not the ending is actually any good.

Switching between Grim’s stories will be Yellowtree. Although I have a story on the page, I can’t seem to answer basic questions. What’s the theme? Who is the antagonist? Why did the protagonist do what he did? Why is the antagonist (if there is one) doing what they’re doing? And most of all, what’s the plot? Until I can answer questions like that, I don’t have a story–I have a protagonist acting and reacting.

So between that and double XP on Champions Online, that’s what my holidays will consist of: writing and gaming. Oh, and reading:

What I read this week:

A new feature of this blog, I think, should be what I read or am reading over the past week. That’s right, I got so much copious free time. Actually my reading time is an hour in bed before my sleep meds kick in.

Be Counted – D.R Perry.
This is a local RI author. She’s really very good, very funny, and, as we say in RI, wicket smaht. This is the second book I’ve read of hers, the first being A Change In Crime. I liked this one, with a couple of exceptions.
1) Errors in name and age. The main character’s sidekick is either named Scott or Patrick. His ex-partner’s partner is named Weintraub or Tierney. The main character himself is, I think, 25 or so, which is way too young to make detective; and his best friend, who is the same age, acts much, much older.
2) Snarky goes so far At first, the snarky comments were amusing. Then they just got irritating. I’m impressed that the author kept up that level of snark, because I couldn’t.
3) Personal preferences. No chapter titles/numbers. Formatting on the Kindle created no indentation of paragraphs. And most of all, the entire novel is in present tense. That is something I can’t do at all and, again, I am impressed by it.
I gave it four stars because I liked the premise, the writing was good, and something I might want to emulate. But, mind you, I didn’t finish the book. Why? The snark level had gotten to me.

Deadly Lover–Jocelyn Drake (in progress)
Okay, so i have a type for romance–enemies that become lovers. I just love to see how other authors can make that twist because I can’t seem to do it. This one is about two mercenaries, alpha males, who are gay, hide it, hide everything from each other even while they circle around trying to pierce each one’s armor. I’m learning a lot about how mercenaries work, how some special ops can quickly go sideways, and how to recover. I don’t think I could write a book on special ops using this book–need to read a lot more Tom Clancy, I’d guess. But this author keeps things tight and tense, and has kept my interest for 35% of the book.

Leaves of Grass–Walt Whitman (up to poem 45)
Whew, fan yourself after reading this! So much masculine love. I needed to read the poems for “Aquarius” (you’ll see why when it comes out). I didn’t read him in college. I remember a long time ago, finding this book in the wild in downtown Providence. I picked it up, leaved through it, didn’t get it, and left it there. Now that I’m older and coming at it from a gay perspective, I can see what he was trying to do. Hot stuff for the 1850’s!

Plugging along

Grimaulkin Tempted is at 40,000 words! That was my goal for this weekend. Only about 20K more to go, and then I’ll let it rest. I will give it a week off, maybe start writing Earth.

Water is out and available under the name Maxwell Thomas and Zarra Knightley publishing.

Grimaulkin will be in the Rhode Island Authors’ Catalog coming out around Labor Day. It will also be at the New England Book Fair and another book conference in Boston sometime (I just signed up for it; I didn’t pay attention to the details because I don’t have to request a day off). Association of Rhode Island Authors will be doing the selling for me.

My next door neighbor, who bought my book last weekend, stopped me while I was heading out to work and told me he “absolutely loved” Grimaulkin! He told me I made one little mistake, and I did a facepalm when he told me. It went right past me and the editor. Oh, well; that’s what second editions are for.

Review:

I read On Writing by Stephen King, supposedly THE BEST WRITING BOOK OF ALL TIME. I was like, “Meh.” I felt like I had read it before because so many people pull out quotes from it.  He’s absolutely right about writing with the door closed and editing with the door open. I’ve found I can’t write with my son in the room. And he comes in a lot because he’s bored.

Anyway, I left it on my Keeper shelf because I suppose in order to be a writer, you have to have it there. Along with Bird by Bird (another book everyone quotes from). Kind of like if you’re going to be a tortured writer, you need to have Hemingway along with your bottle of Jack.

Revision

A few years back, I plunked down a goodly amount of money for an online course on how to revise your novel. It’s by Holly Lisle (someone I never heard of, and someone whose books I’ve never read). It was a fun course, though I never finished it, I found out a few things about how to improve my manuscript and between her and Rayne Hall, I’ve found ways to try an keep my writing clean.

Anyway, I pulled out War Mage and read through it and found out what a wreck it is. Between cutting and pasting, leaving some first-draft stuff, adding seventh (Yes, seventh) draft stuff on top of it, this story, as written, is not what I planned. Even though I knew in my head what I wanted, it didn’t translate on the page because I kept saying to myself, “I’ll go into that in more detail in the next book.” Well, no…I should go into more detail in this book.

One of the things Holly points out is that when you revise, you should start at the 30,000 foot level and then line edit at the very end. Start with the story, the structure, the scenes, then the words. She gives you worksheets to fill out, which might sound stupid, but actually distills your story to a workable form. Right now I’m working through characters, and finding out that my main character carries less weight than most of the secondary and even some tertiary characters.  I describe people in detail that should just be “Sergeant So-and-so”.

I would suggest this course to anyone who’s looking at their manuscript and saying, “Where do I start?” Yes, it’s pricy, and 22 weeks might seem long, but you have access to it for a lifetime. I have given myself until June 1 to get this revision done. Also, in June should be the release of Grimaulkin.

 

Work vs. Play

35K words. That’s all Water has. I need more sex, more story in Scorpio. That’s what I’ll work on this week.

I just finished Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. This is the second book I read that believes that creativity is magic. (The first one, The Inspired Writer by Bryan Hutchinson I thought was better.) Big Magic sounds a lot like The Artist’s Way. Between the “woe is me because of the success of Eat Pray Love” are some nuggets of interesting thought. However, I don’t care much for her Trickster vs Martyr stereotypes of the typical artist. I believe that we are combinations of the two. I don’t want to be Bugs Bunny, but she makes it seem that it’s better for the artist to be that way. Mind you, I don’t like suffering for my art, either.

Water I have been suffering for. Grimaulkin is more fun. Grimaulkin’s voice has been with me for 10 years,  Water, for three months. I have to come up with three distinct voices at that.Water has a deadline. Grimaulkin, not so much. Water stresses me out. Grimaulkin 2 is the one I really want to write. I feel like I keep getting tugged away from the “work” of Water and pushed toward the “play” of Grimaulkin. I honestly thought Water would be fun. But maybe it’s the idea that I have a genre I have to fit myself into. I have rules I have to follow.

Maybe my muse is more of a trickster than I like to believe. I never believed in flogging the muse, because that scares her and makes her retreat into a corner, never to speak again.  But maybe I should work a little bit on Grimaulkin 2, because that’s where she wants to be, and leave Water for a couple of days to let her stew over it. I have a scene in mind, but that’s all it is, a scene, no story.

I have until the end of the month for Water, but my hope was to get it done while on my vacation/recovery from surgery. Tomorrow is another snow day, so I’ll be home working on…something.

 

Is the Media Dead?

I usually get my information from Fox, NPR, and Sirius XM, in that order. All of them are biased. All of them are opinionated.

None of them present the information and let you figure it out. They feed you their bias, their opinion. Your opinions are formed by them and their pundits, and you can either regurgitate what they present, or think about what they’re saying and make your own decisions. I believe in being given the information and let me decide.

However, some media do not give all the facts, nor do they give you correct facts. They skew facts. For instance: How many people actually showed up at Trump’s inauguration? CNN says tens of thousands less than Obama’s first inauguration; Fox says more. Where is the truth? Somewhere in between. Why do we have to question the media? Isn’t it their job to question the powers that be and present to us the proper information so we can make true and informed decisions?

From now on, unfortunately, nothing the media states will be believed. Mainstream media hates Trump. The right doesn’t. Unfortunately, the days of Walter Cronkite are over. No longer are there trusted anchors/newspapers that will be unbiased and report things as they are.

It’s too bad.

Do I Really Need an MFA?

My friend, trying to be helpful, sent me a link so a university offering an online MFA. “You’re writing, so you might as well get credit for it,” she said. I don’t know if that was what the school told her to write or what she decided to write before sending it to me.

For the heck of it, I filled out the application.  For four days I got spammed, constantly, with emails and phone calls and text messages saying they wanted to talk to me about my degree.  At all hours of the day and night, they tried to get a hold of me. I ignored them, because I found out that the start of the semester was June 9, and it’s long past that.

It got me to thinking, though, do I really need an MFA to write professionally? Perusing the Writer’s Digest fiction winners over the past few years, most of them had MFA’s. Some of them were professors. Do I need to provide a CV when entering the Writer’s Digest fiction sweepstakes?

The key word is “professionally.” Our work world is so entranced by how much paper you can accumulate from different “accredited” schools to prove that you’re good at what you do. That’s not necessarily true. You can be a good writer without having a degree saying that you are, I truly believe that. Academic fiction is far different than commercial fiction, and I think commercial fiction is open to anyone.

I say this not because I don’t have an MFA. I am the type to enjoy school and learning, being exposed to things that I normally wouldn’t be exposed to. But as for one or two professors to judge my work on a literary basis as opposed to a commercial basis, I don’t think that’s fair.  I am not a literary writer. I have a story. I tell it. So what if I follow certain rules, certain conventions, to make it commercial. Not only do I want to tell the story, but I want to make the reader enjoy it, not scratch their heads at what I wrote.

The purpose of an MFA, to me, is to get a better job. So that is why I would persue it. As for whether or not it would improve my writing? I really don’t care.

Aside: I’m reading Best Intentions, Glass Bottles Book 1 (Or is it Glass Bottles, Best Intentions, Book 1? Hereafter it’s Glass Bottles), which is written by my press-mate J. Dark. I’m going through the first chapter, and she broke a cardinal rule that I strive to follow: Don’t infodump the world in the first chapter. She did. But she did it well enough so that it moved the story along. Unfortunately, it’s not my cup of tea because it’s got a female protag (I have a thing about that), so I’m reading it to see how she handles the female protag, which is all the rage right now. Is she a badass or a bitch or neither or both? I’m not quite sure; I’ll have to get back to you on it.

I haven’t reviewed this book yet because, like I said, I’m slogging through only chapter one and it wouldn’t be fair. It’s a magical murder mystery; I like that. I would suggest, if you like female protagonists, magic and mystery, then jump into this book with both feet. She’s good.

Appearances, definite dates

Welcome if you’re new. Here are my appearances in the New England area, the definite ones:

New England Author Expo, July 27 from 4 pm-9 pm, Danvers, MA
RI Comicon, November 11, 12, and 13 from 10 am to 8 pm?, Providence, RI
RI Author Expo, December 3, from 10 am to something, Cranston, RI

I’ve also started on War Mage’s third book, tentatively titled The High Road. I did the planning like I did with Blood From a Stone, my NaNoWriMo book last year. I got together index cards and wrote out the main plot. Then I wrote out the subplots and their results. I gathered all the index cards together and put intertwined the subplots in the main plot. I only have five subplots, one not very well defined, but I’ll let the muses work on it.

I will admit, this method worked really well for Blood, because I could keep on task and each index card was vague enough that they let the muses and my mind think up the details. With Blood, I dictated it, so I really didn’t have the time to stop and rewrite like I do normally.

I think with this new one, I’m going to transcribe literally from my first draft, the composition notebook that I usually use. Composition books are portable, don’t need electricity, are easy to bring anywhere and I can sometimes hide my writing at work in it. Now, my first draft isn’t perfect. But I’ve found that I refer to a lot of things in it that aren’t in the second draft. The first draft is ingrained in my memory, which is why sometimes the second draft ends up being confused. Then I have a third draft to try and get the second draft ingrained in my memory. At least, this is what happened with War Mage. I went through six drafts before finally sending the one to the editor. And I personally feel that 1) it’s way too short and 2) it’s a hot mess because I went so far off the first draft. Although another part of me thinks that the character development in the final draft is the best.

I started listening to a couple of books that I had on Audible, (Hard Spell by Justin Gustainis, Hard Magic by Laura Anne Gilman and Butcher Bird by an author I can’t read) and noticed that almost all of them break the cardinal rule of “no info dump in the first chapter.” Also, they don’t go into the detailed description of people. Some description yes, but not the detail that my editor wants. When I listened to the audiobook version of my book, I noticed that the description dragged. It’s something I need to improve.

I dumped Hard Magic because the first chapter was the main character’s in detail discussion of how she gets ready for her day and an info dump of her backstory. I didn’t bother listening to the rest. I dumped Butcher Bird because of the bad grammar and writing. Hard Spell seems like  fun, even though the author did the info dump, it was interesting and something I need to aspire to. I noticed also that all three used the first person POV, and that Hard Magic and Butcher Bird used prologues. That’s one of my cardinal rules – no prologues. I read in a writing book somewhere something like “Prologues are scenes that don’t fit in the novel, but the author thinks are too good to get rid of.” I agree with that sentiment. In fact, in physical books, I don’t read the prologues until I finish the book, and I find that most of the time, they aren’t integral to the book.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to these days. Writing, listening to books. A book I’m reading is Blueprint Your Novel, which kind of uses my index card method but converts it into lists. I’m also reading Heretic, which is a very interesting take on the Knights Templar.

Dead Iron

I tried.  Believe me, I tried to like this book.  I was already almost half way through it, and then…

poof.

It didn’t hold my interest anymore.  I tried to pick it up after I finally got a light for my bed, but I didn’t care.  I didn’t want to know about the witch and her husband, the Strange and what it wanted.  I eventually didn’t care about the lone-wolf (literally) hunter, either.

That’s too bad.

The Memoir

I have two things I’m working on.  I’m not sure if I like either one, because they both take place in the past.

My coworker’s husband passed away.  My coworker’s in her early 40’s.  He died of a sudden illness.  It was a shock.

I was fine talking about it, but I realized how eerie it was compared to my experience.  As I told this to my counselor she said, “You should write a memoir.”

I had it in mind these past few years, even with a title: Torn Asunder.  It’s been seven years now, and to think about revisiting that moment in time as if it was yesterday…

So I decided to do it.  It’s in Scrivener, and I may end up doing it as a Kindle book because it’s not going to be long enough for a real book.  Or I’ll do it as “Book one in a trilogy”, with the other two being about dealing with an autistic child and borderline personality disorder/video game addiction.  I haven’t published it anywhere.

The other thing I decided to do was write out the Leopard Knight – Mal and Knight’s story.  That is published here.

I’m still playing games more than writing.  Doing these two things is like work to me, because I’m an “organic” writer.  I want to see how the story goes and later ends up.  I don’t know the end usually when I start a story.  However, in these cases, I know the end, and details in the middle, and how it all began.  It’s like I’m regurgitating a story I already have memorized.

However, nobody else knows the story like I do.

Review:

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I finally broke down and decided to use my Netflix account for myself.  Being a deep-seated lover of comic books and the super hero genre, I figured I’d watch a couple of super hero stories.  I started with this.

I’m trying so hard not to binge watch this.  I’m only on Volume 1, episode 4.  Even though it’s more like Russel Stover’s than Godiva, it’s still like chocolate and I know I’ll get sick and overwhelmed if I see the entire thing at once.  I have found that I like Netflix over DVD’s.  I’m not sure if I’ll go out and buy this on DVD – it’s good, but not like RED, which was awesome and I had to have the DVD.

Now Write! Sherry Ellis, ed.

This is a series of books that have exercises in them for writers.  I will admit, at first, I was skeptical, but some of the exercises I think I’ll be able to use.  I know this book I will be able to use.

A couple of the exercises I like are “The Collage” and “The Wedding Cake”.  I tried those and enjoyed them immensely.  I did have a writing notebook that I kept beside me where ever I had a table, but when NaNo started, I had just one notebook and kept that with me.  In that notebook I would have the summary of what I did the day before, so that if I had a chance to sit down and write in it, I could.  I plan on keeping that as my writing journal.

Anyway, back to the book.  Most of the articles are by teachers, or by people who have published books that I’ve never heard of.  I suppose it’s more for literary fiction than the kind of genre I read and write in (urban fantasy).  Regardless, pick up this book, and you will find that these exercises will help you with characterization and give you great ideas.  They might be junk, but at least they’re good ideas.