Tag Archives: Books

Clearing the Kindle 5: – Confused? Me too!

Posted on by
Reply

Book read: Breath for Me by Edward Robertson.
Pages: 17

When I downloaded “Breath for Me” onto my kindle I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I didn’t remember picking up the book, and the cover just had some palm trees and simple text across the front. (Though it does say “fantasy story” in very small cursive letters that I didn’t notice until writing this.)

What could a photo of palm trees in green and red tones be? I thought a literary fiction work, or just a fiction story set in a tropical location. Either way I wasn’t expecting a group of slaves building an aqueduct in the middle of a jungle. And I certainly wasn’t expecting the main character to have the ability to make illusions with his magic breath.

Setting the cover aside, I was interested in the setting. I haven’t read many books from a similar time period, so I continued on with the read.

The plot is simple. A man is working to build an aqueduct as a slave (perhaps an indentured servant as it is only for a specific amount of time). He starts sharing stories at night using his illusions to create plays for the other slaves. The overseer, wanting to wave around his authority because he hates his job, tells the main character to stop. MC warns him that a riot will break out, but complies. A riot breaks out and several people die. Then…everything gets confusing.

Before I continue I am going to admit that I am in the minority, it appears. Reading this work, I was incredibly confused at several points in the story. I re-read the ending three times and I still don’t know what exactly happened. The reviews seem to be more favorable. Some of this is clearly because the readers are familiar with Mr. Robertson’s work as they make reference to his other stories. But there are others who found it confusing, as I did.

I, as a new reader, do not have any idea how the magic in this world works. He breaths, and through his breath he can make illusions appear. I don’t know the limits, but the other slaves seem to imply the magic user should be able to build the aqueduct with a wave of his hand. Only the MC insists he isn’t a good magic user and the illusions are the best he can do.

So when mountain sized men in chains start across the sky…I was confused. I think the MC is showing everyone what happened, and how one of the slaves was killed, so that the other slaves would rally together and fight back against those in charge. But everything happens incredibly fast, with broken thoughts strung together, so it’s hard to follow. That, coupled with the fact that I’m unfamiliar with this writer, or his worlds, made the experience a confusing one.

So what did I learn from this short story? First, know your audience. Not only the audience you already have, but are you trying to reach new people with this story as well? Will someone who has never read your work understand what’s going on?

Second, less is not always more. This story was only 17 pages long but I think if the last two pages had been given a few more pages to grow it might have been less confusing. It would also have separated the epilogue from the main story a bit so that it felt like a distinct part instead of just a run on from the previous paragraph. In writing you have nothing to show the passage of time but your words, so use them.

And lastly…not everyone is going to like your work. There are plenty of people who like this story and give it five stars on amazon and goodreads. I won’t be one of them. I think I’d give it a three. That doesn’t mean the story isn’t good, it just means that it isn’t for me. This is important to keep in mind as a writer. You can not please everyone, no matter how hard you try. But also keep in mind if everyone is complaining about the same thing then you probably do need to reevaluate what you’re writing.

And sometimes the stories we like the least are the ones we can learn the most from.

Next story: Zombie 69 by Kitty Glitter (um… this should be interesting…)

Clearing the Kindle 4: – A name by any other name….

Posted on by
Reply

Book read: Shadows Over Innocence by Lindsay Buroker
Pages: 17

This weeks story is a short, but sweet, tale of an assassin watching over a the young heir to a kingdom. There is no softness, no joy in this assassin. All emotion has been beat out of him by the emperor that rules with an iron fist. But still…there’s something about the innocence of this young buy that gives the hardened assassin pause.

Overall the story was an enjoyable peak into this world that the author created. It’s hard, and viscous. It is a land where might makes right. But even in this world of hardness and pain there is one small point of light flickering in the darkness.

But even in a lovely tale like this we, as writers, can learn something.

For this story it was the naming convention. Lindsay Buroker went with names that were unusual, each with three to four syllables, and each unique enough that they might give some readers pause. Still, in fantasy worlds that isn’t unusual.

However, the main character and the heir have names that are very similar to each other. Sicarius and Sespian. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, of course, but one naming convention for story telling is to give characters distinct names so that they don’t get confused, and specifically starting with a different first letter.

While reading this particular story you are first introduced to Sespian, the assassin. He happens across Sicarius within few paragraphs. It is clear they are two separate people, of course, but in my head I kept getting the names mixed up as I was reading it. I had to take a minute to actively separate the two so that I could tell which was which. On the other hand the other named characters, Hallowcrest and Raumesys, had distinct names that were easy to keep straight.

While reading many of us do not take in the words syllable by syllable. We take them in as a whole. Maybe you have seen this puzzle floating about the internet:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Most fluent English readers can decipher this fairly quickly. That is because we take in the words as a whole unit and our mind automatically translates it into the proper spelling. There is a little more to it, you can read more about that here, but in general if the first and last letters are correct than it is easy enough to get the gist of what is said.

Which brings us back to the two names with the same first letter. If you are taking in the name as a whole, not as individual syllables, it is easier to get them mixed up. Separating them with different beginning letters, especially when they appear quite close to each other in the text, helps to separate out the characters.

Such a simple thing, and yet it makes a big difference in writing.

Next up: Breath for Me by Edward Robertson.

Clearing the Kindle: 3 – Tell Me a Story

Posted on by
Reply

Book read: Avengers: Heroes Welcome
Author: Brian Michael Bendis
Pages: 14

What is one of the first things they taught you in English class? Or one of the lessons that stuck with you? For me it was always, ALWAYS, “Show! Don’t tell.” It was drilled into my young mind from the moment I could hold a pen. Show the story, show the characters, and the interactions, don’t just tell it to me.

Picture this: A dark trail, branches reaching high above, their naked fingers scratching at the velvet black sky. A lone figure stumbles down the path clutching at his leg, hot blood seeping from a wound. With heaving breaths, he sends quick glances back over his shoulder, but there’s nothing there.

Can you picture that? Can you feel his heart thumping, the fear in him as he tries to staunch the wound, the desperation as he searches the darkness?

Or I could say “A dude walks down a dark path with someone chasing behind him. He has a wound on his leg that’s bleeding.”

Which would you prefer to read? Which would keep you entertained?

The idea of “show don’t tell” is a hard lesson to learn, and I think one many writers never learn. I believe this even more after reading this weeks short story, or rather a comic. Avengers, Heroes Welcome, does so much telling, and zero showing. So much that it felt more like a sermon than a story.

First I will say… I really do love comic books. I’ve been reading and collecting them for decades now. My favorite has to be Escape from Wonderland, with Fable as a close second. But I also had quite a few Avenger, Thor, and Spiderman back in the day. So I’m not unfamiliar with how comics use panels, and short page counts, to get a story across.

A comic is an illustrated short story. It uses art, as well as dialog and limited narration, to show the action. Most comics (back in the day) had high action content. Catch the bad guy, or escape the serial killer, that sort of thing. But a good comic could get the story across between the pictures and dialog, with very little narration.

“Heroes Welcome,” on the other hand, has no action. No real story, just a bunch of people sitting around discussing what makes a hero.

This feels like the author wanted to tell people what they thought a hero was, and instead of writing a story to show a heroes actions they had Nova (a young hero I’ve honestly never heard of) barge into the Avengers headquarters, and start asking philosophical questions about what makes a hero.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t the first time a super hero had a case of consciousness and needed to figure out if they were doing the right thing. Spiderman goes through this frequently since his actions often cause the bad thing to happen, and his story revolves around taking responsibility for your abilities. But his questioning always happens while in the mist of action, and his actions or successes lead him to his answers.

Instead “Heroes Welcome” is literally just a bunch of people sitting around a room talking.

I was disappointed. The plight of the hero, and what is a hero, is the very substance of a super hero story. And yet they stripped away all vestiges of that to make it a boring classroom lecture.

And sadly they had the perfect opportunity to show exactly what a hero is. A rescue from a fire, and a heart touched. A single life saved, going on to be changed from then on.

This is something firefighters and police officers do daily. They could have used that example to show heroism, even in the face of a person who has no powers.

Instead we got a lecture.

Show. Don’t tell.

Next weeks book will be “Shadows over Innocence” by Lindsay Buroker.

Clearing the Kindle: 2 – Short Stories as Intros

Posted on by
Reply

Book read: Halcyon Days by J.A. Cipriano
Pages: 14

Back when I started collecting kindle books I gathered a number from newer authors who I hadn’t heard of. I would hear about them from a daily deal, or a friend on Goodreads, and add them to my collection. Often because they were short reads that had been marked free to encourage you to get the second in the series.

Halcyon Days seems to be a free give away to introduce others to a series. I say seems to be because it is no longer available on Amazon. However, Mr Cipriano has a large list of books to his name since then, but this appears to be an abandoned series.

Considering many people think prologues are a forgotten relique, the idea of a short story prequel to a series has appeal. It could introduce people to the world, allow others to find the series, or give those who want more information about the world something more to sink their teeth into. Having it set up for 99 cents with the occasional free give away also gives readers a chance to try your writing.

Free books don’t have the same punch that they used to. Amazon changed a lot of algorithms, as did every other book sight, which changed how writers engaged with readers. That doesn’t mean the free give away is completely useless, just that it isn’t lightning in a bottle like it used to be.

One big problem with free giveaways happens to be the reader like me, the one that collects a bunch of new stories and doesn’t read them nearly as fast as they collect them. Still, with the hope that some of those who pick up the free copy will actually read it, enjoy it, and come back for more…we authors give away a lot of copies. It’s like sending a message in a bottle out to sea. So many of them get sent out, but only a few ever find another soul to connect with. But that small glimmer of hope, that dream, it’s the reason why so many bottles get sent out there with notes to begin with.

As for Halcyon Days, it was a solid contender to make someone interested in a series. A boy is rescued from the monster under his bed and taken to a world of magic. He is then introduced to a magical society that hunts the evils that go bump in the night, like vampires, hopping from one world to another in order to do so.

The idea left a lot of room for growth. Do you follow the lone earthling? Pick one of the alien hunters? Do you take the earthling to a new world? Such an open ended story could give a writer issues unless they had a specific destination in mind. That could be why this was abandoned, or it could be as simple as another series taking off and wanting to limit which series he put his efforts into.

We shall never know what became of Halcyon Days, but I might pick up his book “Alone in the Dark” just because it seems…interesting.

Clearing the Kindle: 1 – What About Episodes?

Posted on by
Reply

Book read: The Miscellaneous Adventures of Princess Leona by V.C. Coll.
Pages: 13

This short story has been on my kindle for over five years now. I picked it up when it first came out because I had been on a podcast with Miss Coll, and I wanted to support her work. I never got around to reading it, and I’m not sure why. I don’t really have an excuse, it’s only 13 pages, and took me less than thirty minutes to read.

The Miscellaneous Adventures of Princess Leona is a Grimms style fairy tale about a princess of extraordinarily ordinary origins trying to become a witches apprentice. It has a lot of forth wall breaking by the author, and a narrative style that I found charming.

This was written back in 2013 during a time when “episodic” story telling was all the rage. Miss Coll, along with myself, followed the Self Publishing Podcast which was a group of three guys that talked a lot about the episodic story telling model, so it isn’t unusual that many of us tried this tactic.

An episodic tale is one in which there are multiple shorter stories that are published separately, and together they create and entire season for that world. The SPP guys were influenced by film. Think Breaking Bad, Star Trek, or Friends. Each individual episode had a complete story involved, but they all progressed character development, and the over arching plot of the main series.

Many novel series does the same thing. Xanth, DragonLance, Vampire Diaries, Jack Reacher, etc. Each book in the series has a distinct story of its own, but it contributes to the overall progression of the series as well.

The main difference between a traditional book, and the episodic tellings of the SPP theory, is that the stories were shorter. A traditional book was about four times longer than the SPP episodes. They also sold them for $2.99, then bundled the full season for $5.99 when they completed the season.

For them, and many others, it worked. But there was one flaw that happened with many stories. That is the sudden cliffhanger, or the incomplete story.

Princess Leona’s story falls into this latter category. While charming, I did not feel like it had a satisfying ending. There was some progress toward the end goal, but the narrator kept insisting the end did not exist, there was no edge of the forest. And while there were a couple of encounters with dubious fellows, it felt more like building a team than overcoming an obstacle.

This is the trouble of episodic storytelling. You can, and probably should, have a cliffhanger ending, but you need to have a satisfying ending as well. When completing a book something should have been accomplished, even if it isn’t the final ending. Without that satisfaction of a job well done…well I feel like I’ve just wasted my time.

The other tangle in this weave is that there are only two stories out by Miss Coll, and because the second is just as short as the first I don’t feel an inclination to buy and read the second one. After all this time I doubt she will add a third, and I do not know if the second story will have a satisfactory ending to it. If it were to be another cliffhanger with no further reading then it would be even more disheartening.

In conclusion…Episodic storytelling may not be as fashionable as it once was, but it is still a viable story telling device. However, each story in the series needs to feel like a complete tale that is worth the readers time in reading, with just enough of a hint of the next book to keep them going forward. Otherwise you risk alienating your reader.

And that is what I’ve learned from the first book. Stay tuned for the next: Halcyon Days by J.A. Cipriano.

Clearing the Kindle : Intro

Posted on by
Reply

I, like most kindle owners, have accumulated a vast collection of ebooks. Most of which I’ve never read. They are books ranging in those I picked up because they were free, because the cover looked interesting, or even because I just wanted to support an author I found interesting on a podcast or youtube channel.

This massive collection of ebooks needs to be paired down. I thought I’d start with the shortest books, and move forward.

Now, I couldn’t just read books and take nothing from it. Goodreads gives a little insight into my reading habits, sharing most of my audio book and reading history. But I’m not only reading for fun (sure, most of it is for fun, but not ALL of it). I also like learning from my book choices because I am a writer as well. The best way to improve writing is to read books, and actively see what works, and what didn’t work for you. So I’m going to start with the shortest book in my kindle TBR, and move my way up. And along the way I’m going to share what I’ve learned from it.

A couple of things to note about kindle readers in general. I have a Paperwhite and a Fire. I prefer the Paperwhite to read, the e-ink is easy on the eyes, and good even in a dark room. The Fire is just too bright for me, and needs to be charged a lot more. It also has a lot of distractions since it is a tablet, even if it is a slower model.

I also have a kindle app on my phone which I often use when I am out of the house. Still, it’s a small screen, and also bright like the Fire, and it has the distractions of games and technology as well.

All kindles allow you to collect your books into collections so that you can easily find specific categories. They also allow you to sort by read, not-read, and downloaded. What it does not allow is the sharing of collections between devices, which I just found out today after putting a large part of my books into collections via the online website. That means you have to go through the process of adding books to a collection directly on the Paperwhite, and then again for the Fire, and again for the phone. When you are doing this as you add books that isn’t as bad, but when you have a huge collection and you just want to sort books…well…tough luck, I guess.

Also the kindle doesn’t allow you to sort by page count. This is partly because page counts on kindle aren’t always accurate, but I suspect they do not want to encourage you to read by page count, or deem it as unnecessary. There is a reason a lot of readers prefer to sort their books on Calibre. The features of the kindle haven’t changed in quite some time, and it shows.

In order to get book lengths I used Goodreads. Goodreads allows you to add your books directly from your amazon purchases. Then you can add them to a to-read list and sort them by length. I found that of the 900 books on my to-read list only a dozen of them didn’t have page lengths. The rest were comparable to the amazon page length count.

Goodreads did not import all of my books, and I know I’ve added random books from series I liked that I do not own, so this isn’t a perfect match, but it is helpful. Once I had this list I was able to go into my kindle and download the specific books that I was looking for.

Beyond the lack of collections across platforms, and sorting by length, the kindle is a useful tool. Having my books available on the go, on my phone, and on most devices, is incredibly useful. And using Goodreads, or Calibre, to augment the kindle helps to sort and find exactly what you’re looking for. So… on with the reading!

First up: The Miscellaneous Adventures of Princess Leona by V.C. Coll.

Need a good read? I gottcha covered!

Posted on by
Reply

Free this weekend.
The Camera – A tales from the crypt style story about a cursed item.
Flight of the Griffins –  A  peaceful people may have to rise up to save their home.
Ghostly Intentions – A fantasy haunted house story. 

Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy.

Also, Dragon’s Blood is available for pre-order.

A tale steeped in winters ice, and dragons fire. 

If you haven’t read Dragon’s Flame it is only 99 cents, and also in KU. If you have read it I would really appreciate a review. Reviews are the life blood of the indie creator.

2019 Writing in Review

Posted on by
Reply

It’s the new year, and it’s time to look back at what happened in 2019, and see where things will go in the future.

2019 was a year of change. First, I quite my job and we moved from Seattle to Houston. That was a huge change for Bjorn and I, but so far it was definitely been worth it. It was also the first year I have been writing full time. That’s taken some getting used to, and I am finally starting to get into the swing of making writing/editing/etc a priority, but I have a ways to go.

In 2019 I wrote 209k words. (Red line on graph is story writing, blue line includes newsletters, blog posts, and other projects.) This was double what I wrote in 2017 and 18, and a lot closer to what I was writing before that dip happened.

 

With all that writing I published three books. Steel Heart, and Steel Line which are the second and third books in my  litRPG series, and an anthology of scifi short stories, Stars End. I also started working on Vertigo, which I have uploaded six chapters of for free. It’s available on RoyalRoad, Wattpad, and WebNovel.

I am disappointed that I didn’t keep up with the chapter a week on Vertigo. To be fair, the reason I stopped was because of NaNoWriMo, and getting the 50k done on my Half Blood Sorceress, and book four in the litRPG took up a large part of my time. Then December I spent most of my time hand making all of my Christmas gifts. I forgot how time consuming crocheting hats could be. And a final trip back home to Seattle rounded out the end of the year, so I didn’t get much writing done in December, but I did spend some quality time with family and friends.

Going forward for 2020 I told my family I would be looking to complete, and publish, four novels. That will include book two in my Half Blood Sorceress series, book four in my litRPG series, finishing up Vertigo and publishing that on amazon, and …. I’m not sure what the final book will be yet, but I have a few ideas.

I have been scheduling time to write, read, and edit for this year. Three things I need to do more of in order to get my goals. I’ve also been making some plans to do something more with my art because it makes me happy, and is a nice break from writing when I need it. It also gives me something to do while listening to podcasts.

We’ve also committed to taking better care of ourselves, Bjorn and I. We’ve been eating more salads, going on walks, and getting to the gym more. It’s making him feel better, I’m still struggling with the exercise part, but I can be pretty stubborn, so I haven’t given up yet. I would just like to get to the point where it doesn’t feel awful every time I go… Don’t treat your body badly for years on end, folks, fixing it sucks.

Overall I have high hoped for 2020 going forward. More writing, more art, and more creativity in general. Lets see how far I can go with this.