Alack! Young Princess's Half-Brother Steals Her Throne

First:
Back at the Salt Mines?

Hope you all enjoyed the holidays --
which ever ones you celebrate.
Guess I'm showing my northern hemisphere bias in thinking
 the dark time of year is a good time to party.

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Dipped into the to-read pile a lot over the holidays. One of the most enjoyable reads was Alma's Alexander's The Hidden Queen. Think the book languished there for years because I looked at the jacket and went "eh". 

How many books have you read about a lost princess whose throne was usurped by an unworthy pretender?. Thought I read it all before, but I'm still trying to get rid of the piles of book laying around. So, I gave the book its try and was hooked.

The book quickly moves from the battlefield where the king, Red Dynan, is killed with nine-year-old Anghara, his legitimate heir who also possesses the magical Sight that sustains the kingdom, surviving back at the palace. But she has a grown half-brother, Sif, who takes control of the army and sets his sights on becoming king even though he doesn't possess the Sight. Anghara is spirited from the palace by loyal retainers and fostered by obscure members of her mother's family. Several years later, she is betrayed by a jealous relative after she unwittingly displays her growing powers. The result is a pogrom where Sif uses genocide to rid his country of any magical influences. Anghara escapes over the border into a hostile desert land where she homes her powers.

The plot line's a cliche. So why was I hooked?

First Plus. The book is more than another medieval Europe rehash with an overlay of magic. A good part of the book takes place in a desert culture well-flavored by Silk Road nuances where the main character's magic is tempered. At all stages of her journey back to her throne, Anghara is supported by nicely rounded characters. 

Second Plus. The book's told from several points of view which adds layers of complications to the plot as Anghara struggles to survive long enough to control her magical powers.

Third Plus. The sensory detail of Alexander's writing is lush to say the least and all her characters well motivated.

The big negative. The Hidden Queen ends with her decision to return to reclaim her country. There is a sequel but it is not readily available. Still, I recommend it if you run across The Hidden Queen in a used book store. It was published in 2009. It's a well-orchestrated read.

 

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 Didn't really write much over the holidays.

Just reread a bunch of books
 because I enjoyed them the first or fourth time around.

Nothing like lazing around and talking to visiting relatives.

The Power of Prayer and Consequences--Kevin Hearne's Shattered

    Wasn't going to review Kevin Hearne's Shattered this week. Was just reading it for pleasure because I'd already finished another book. Then, I got to the middle of Shattered.

   A very minor character, in one quick scene several books ago, was shown to have set up a major plot line--with one simple habit. She invoked the cooperation of gods from several major pantheons, an act which has been saving the Iron Druid's behind for several books. In Shattered, the character simply confessed to praying to several gods at once at a crucial juxtaposition. The scene stopped me dead in my tracks while I thought the process through.

   Discovered one of the best arguments I've seen for outlining a series. Quite a revelation for a seat-of-your-pants writer, like me, who has to keep going back and adding bits and pieces.

   Why do I think Hearne outlines? Because in one of his previous books, he mentioned that later in the series, Atticus, his Iron Druid, would be encountering the Vedic pantheon of India. Actually, Atticus was peripheral to those sequences in this book. Granuaile did the Vedic encounters. This made her viewpoint seem superfluous on the surface, but her absence was important to the other happenings in the story line, including the rip-roaring finale.

   There's a lot to like in Hearne's series, now in its seventh mass paperback book...with high rankings and many reviews. One reason, perhaps, why his series is bubbling along: his writing is as crisp as a fresh apple and just as tasty if you like humor.

   Yeah, humor is big in Hearne's writing. He's is even smart with it. Atticus isn't the comic relief. Oberon, the Irish wolfhound with a love of sausage, brisket, and other delectable foods, is. The set up for Oberon thinking Hay'-zus, not Gee'-zus, should pull a sausage out of his pocket had me laughing out loud. Hearne has a genius for twisting humor from almost any cliche.

   We won't talk about my liking for crusty old codgers, but in this book, Hearne has added another druid to modern history. He's good for some laughs too. But, I think he was underutilized. Sad to say, the new character grew more than Atticus did.

Kudos to Hearne for keeping his series running in top form. Shattered is a delightful read than had me not only reading one-more-chapter and smiling, if not occasionally laughing out loud. The family lending library patrons are clamoring for the book to get mailed to them.

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My Writing Adventures

Is writing an "adventure"?
Perhaps, a journey of discovery?

   I've been playing on PicMonkey. Below is one of the new banners I've been working on. I plan to use them on my Twitter postings. Several gurus have encouraged bloggers and Tweeters to use pictures because people tend to read things with pictures.

   Don't ask me to verify that it works.

   Gurus also say not to tell people to "buy my book" -- which most posts seem to do, especially if you use a tweet service of some sort. Tested that premise for a month with very few postings on my stories. Sales and downloads, even of my free stuff, really dropped off. Thus the banners. I'm trying to find effective ways to mention my stories. -- Only they're getting a little stale according to other gurus.

My reaction?

You can't win for losing.

   I am progressing with the On the Run manuscript. My two chapters at the "academy" have expanded into four I think. More and more, Run is threatening to become a book. Did get a new snippet up on my website if you want to look.

Twisting the Reader's Expectations

When Excalibur landed on John Taylor's Nightside table, I expected  A Hard Day's Knight would be the lead-in to a mini-series within a series. The first novel: Excalibur finding where King Arthur might be, then finding King Arthur, and last, the grand battle against some evil or other. Simon R. Green took care of all the options in one book in his usual chuckle-out-loud style.

The book was the perfect book to read while I was too sick to cope with Carol Berg's dense novels and too aware to wadtch TV. Actually, I went from sleeping to watching a few True Blood DVDs to reading Green. Was slower than usual, but I got the book read. 

One of the things I liked best in this book was Green's use of portals from one imaginative world to the next.  Not only does Green have London hosting the Nightside, but the whole world of the descendents of the Knights of the Round Table. Nightside is also the gateway to many other worlds, curtesy of the Doormouse. Green also managed to eliminate elves by sending them to a new un-inhabited world where they can fight among themselves in peace -- after Puck kills Queen Mab, that is.

So, writers be warned. Queen Mab is finally dead. I wonder if Jim Butcher's heard?

Do have one bitch about the book. I saw the book in several places but never bought it because the first chapter was familiar. I thought I'd read the book already. Luckily, before I went into the hospital I picked it up to maybe send it too a friend. Ended up reading the book myself, and will keep it if I can find the rest of my Green books on my chaotic bookshelves.

Was going to spend my afternoon, working on a new story. Guess where I am ... fiddling with my blog. Think it's because I'm feeling a little guilty about not writing my review of A Hard Day's Knight  on Sunday or Monday. I'm really toying with the idea of only blogging once a week -- at least until my energy level re-appears. Problem? I notice my readership drops off.

Have you wondered about the readership levels of your blog? Do you wish you had more participants? [If so, you're more gregarious than I am.]  Whatever, if you're looking to increase your blog traffic, you might check out Lisa Dale's blog about Six Ways to Resuscitate a Dying Author Blog.

I have been reading lots of blogs. Perhaps, the one I like best was Jessica Faust's Is Your Promotion Making Sense?  I savored its permission not to social network. [Actually, that's a twist on what she said. I think she was really saying that you need to be sure your efforts are productive.   

What Are Your Goals for Your Piles of Words?

Do you have huge piles of words in your computer?. More than what you just wrote for NanoWriMo or the last novel or short story you're drafting? Completed stories/novels you are submitting don't count. Stories you sold, especially don't count in your answer.

Just put my Half-Elven novella in the closet to ferment before I go back and tear it apart. Yeah, it's got flaws, major structural flaws. So, now I have two recent things festering in there which I need to rewrite, a MG novel [Emma Kloken] and the above novella, The Somant Troubles. Now, to organize time to do it amidst the seasonal baking and presents and clearing off my desk which has piled higher and deeper again.

Went to procrastinate by reading some blogs, and N. R. Williams slapped me up the side of the head with a blog reminding me about how inadequate my description was in The Somant Troubles. Her article on The Writing Craft: Description is worth studying. Actually, if I remember right, she's doing a series on writing craft.

Perhaps my most sizable pile of words, sitting like a lump in the web-cloud, comes from blogging. [So far, I haven't figured if I can do more with them than leave them here.] I've been blogging for, maybe, three years. A good question: can anyone have anything new to say after you've blogged for a month? Six months? A year? 

Roni Loren at Fiction Groupie wrote a neat little blog on blogging stages the life cycle of a blogger. You might've missed it in the NaNo madness so I decided to link to it here. Just loved the pics, and wish I knew how to do the mechanics to dress up my blog with free artwork.

I hope I've avoided the problem of boring myself by commenting on other blogs and doing fantasy book reviews. Blogging is like self-publishing. As long as someone reads the blog each week, guess this blog will continue.

As any NaNo writer knows your words need to be polished before they are worth reading. No one will read a formless pile -- other than you first readers/writing buddies. They need purpose. Chuck Wendig, who's published by Angry Robots, weighed in with a list of reasons why readers will stop reading. I took the blog to heart because I often quit reading a book when I get bored -- after the cover blurb, and opening intrigue me.

My goal is to organize my time so I can revise/edit/polish my word piles. I plan to spend evenings revising. For the new year, I'll be writing new stuff, including a short story a month. I plan to practice taking a character, giving her/him an introduction, problem, complication, and solution in a well-described world. 

In short, I'm setting the goal to polish my craft skills. Oh, I'll be finding some new words to finish my NaNoWriMo story. Have toooooo many words piled up in 1/3 draft to ignore. 

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Then, there's the ever-present need to promote your words after you can see your face in them. Came across a great way to promote: tattoo your book's url on your forehead.

For more ideas, check out Angela Scott's 10 Ways to Promote Your Book. The smiles are worth the time.

Do Your Characters Live on the Edge?

Why should readers read your stories? Because you're a nice person? I'm sure you are, but I'm not so sure about my myself. Still, I'd like people to read my stories. Thinking about this, I've hit my head against a basic idea: Will your characters survive their trials and tribulations. 

[This is a little difficult with my Half-Elven, but I need to address the principle in some way. Maybe asking: how much skin do your characters stand to lose in your story, might help?] 

Last Friday, I finished Karen Marie Moning's Shadowfever, the last of her Fever series. The almost 700-word-book spent too much time in the head of Mackayla, the main character, for my taste. But still, the book managed to move instead of spin. The Rainbow girl, oozing with Georgia sunshine, is no more ... and has turned into something darker ... and has to cope with that transformation ... and survive, if not live happily ever after. The series is a paranormal romance, after all.

Actually, the Fever series is longer than the five books listed. Moning included characters and situations from her Highlander series. Hints appeared here and there in previous books, but Shadowfever had the Keltar clan playing a major secondary role. Found it kind of amusing that the hyper-virile Keltars had to play second fiddle to Mackayla. Still, they got to snap and snarl at Barrons and his crew.

All in all, she managed to create a great twist on the Fae. Not the cutsie fairies. But the terrible inhuman Fae of serious legend. I thought her ability to give strange creatures understandable motives one of Moning's more striking achievements. 

Moning managed to tie up the loose ends, as far as I can remember, while throwing in some twists which I didn't see coming. I had suspicions that some of the characters weren't exactly what they seemed, but the "reality" Moning presented wasn't exactly like I thought. Moning has two series on my keeper bookshelves.

An Aside:

A good share of my time on Sunday mornings is spent reading the book reviews in the New York Times. Yesterday, they did their children's book insert. Elizabeth Bird's review gave me the most to think about. Consider this beginning:

"Imagine the difficulty of creating an active crime-fighting protagonist in the age of helicopter parents." 

One writer solution would be to put your characters into a historical time, which is what Greg Ruth (City of Orphans) and Chris Moriarty (The Inquisitor's Apprentice) do. Baker's take:

"And for today's readers, finding themselves caught beneath the omnipresent, not to say suffocating, love and attention of their hovering parents, reading about children free to go anywhere and to solve crimes, not to say their own problems, may offer them the escape they understandably crave." 

[Please excuse the typos. NaNoWriMo is really eating into my time.]

Magic in Paranormal Fiction, etc.

Fantasy Book Comments [aka Review]:

Is there a greater cliche in fantasy than "magic"?  Ilona Andrews Magic Slays and the other books in that series has one of the more interesting concepts of magic I've discovered.  The stuff ebbs and flows, making everyone -- nulls, weres, vampires, magic workers -- cope.  In Magic Slays, the coping becomes more complicated because a bunch of nulls is taking advantage of disaffected magic workers to create sleeper cells dedicated to destroying magic.

Do you catch the hint of social commentary there?  Yeah, the team writers, known as Ilona Andrews, make some interesting comments about the "human condition"  within the context of the story.  What amazed me was they stopped before the commentary became tedious a la Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards.

On the writerly level, Andrews trims all sorts of dangling loose ends as they complicate Kate Daniels' first job as a private investigator.  Yeah, its a delight to watch how the flaws in characters come back to bite Daniels in the behind with fangs longer than a were's.  The reader is even treated to some back story about her family which doesn't clog the action flow.

Never fear, even though lots of complications are resolved in the Magic Slays' story line, there're plenty more to carry the series forward.  This is a series that hasn't bogged down ... yet anyway.

Grumping About My Lessons:

Barb Drozdowich at the Indie Book Collective has blog on book blogger/reviewers, simply titled "Reviews".  The reason I mention it is to kick myself in the butt ... or is that "but ..." ... because I've been ignoring the "email for books reviews" on my to-do list.  But then, I've also got this little item about formatting for Amazon and Pub It that's languishing from list to list.

Guess I'm going to have to bite the bullet and ask "followers" on Twitter to do it.  --  My Facebook pages are for people I know/met so I really don't want to beg there.  --  I think my dislike of marketing could very easily rub off onto social networking.  --  What do you think about begging for reviews?  Personally, I don't even care if they're bad.

I'm glad I don't expect to make any money as a writer.  It saves me from lots of disappointment since I'm so deep in an accounting hole, I may never see black again on my Schedule C.  Then, I discovered a fascinating blog by Ellery Adams "Bares All" ,giving us the statistics on the life of a mid-list author.  While he makes some money, he seems to be getting about as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield.

Guess I should say I found him doing a guest blog on Jessica Faust's Bookends blog.  No, Faust isn't a slouch as an agent.  Adams has three mystery series, at least one of them published by Berkley.   Still, he doesn't make enough to make the IRS sit up and pant ... unless he didn't file his taxes. -- It's just that most authors don't make the best seller lists.  It's statistically impossible.  So, forget the leather elbow patches and pipe.

[How's that for a sexist comment?  

Whatever, the article is fascinating ... or did I say that already.]

Is there a cure for paltry sales?  Maybe the WANA? Don't know the term?  Maybe you should read about Kristin Lamb and her approach to social networking. It's a little self-promotional, but has some great insights on increasing your ebook sales.  Basically, it gives some pointers on not promoting alone. Kay rating:  worth printing so you can underline the pertinent parts.

Doesn't all that sound good?  Unfortunately, I think I'm more congenitally geared to growling than glad-handing ... even if I'm only pressing keys.

Trivia:

The dumb cat has decided it likes to be twirled in my computer chair.  I get up to touch my knees so my hip doesn't ossify, and he's usually there meowing for a ride.  Today, he hissed at me when I tried to remove him.  He soon got the message he's not the boss.