The Book: Continuity Slip by Till Noever

Review Category: Buys > Priority

The Blurb: From one moment to the next, the world just wasn’t the same anymore. Not quite anyway, because it seemed to be merging with another, where Ray wasn’t who he thought he was, and where he was about to be framed for a murder he had no memory of having committed.

Preview Available: Yup a perfectly satisfactory lulu one. Reassuring the reader that the prose is readable whilst not really giving anything away.

Why buy this? The preview was very good. I had read a couple other reviews which were complimentary.

The Product: Indistinguishable from a commercial effort except the RRP is not printed on the back jacket. It’s also Royal Size. Essentially the POD eccentricities are few and small, there if you look for them.

The Nitty Gritty: I wanted to get a look at a gold-standard release. Or at least the kind of work that should be right up there. Apparently it’s a sterling 22,703 behind that Didymus Contingency book which seems to be doing okay without reviews by me (its lulu sales rank is 5). Personally I am a further 8000 behind Mr. Noever so I could probably do with mining this for tips. Or maybe it’s all down to marketing.

Let’s forget that immediately. It’s not all about the marketing. Continuity Slip is a solid thriller and, joy of joys, it presents the inquisitive reader with eccentricities of personality that make it an involving read even when it’s not barrelling along at 500 miles per hour.

The first thing that you notice is that for a thriller it really doesn’t indulge in proper thriller stuff for a long time. It’s very talky and almost a third of the novel’s up before we even glimpse a dead body or anything similarly thrillery.

There’s also the potentially fascinating SF angle on the events in the story, the titular continuity slip. Unfortunately there’s not much the novel’s hero, Ray Shannon, or anyone he encounters can do to explain what really happened. The resolution to this strand is annoyingly woolly and even a little glib. “Proper” SF luminaries will be extremely annoyed that no scientific things happen to attempt a proof of the central theory of the story.

The fact is that the slip is a narrative device and is treated as such. This means that the high concept is pressed into the service of a pretty decent thriller and then kind of discarded.

Our main couple Ray and Alyssa spend, perhaps, more time talking than might have been allowed in a more conventional story of this type. The dialogue is intriguing enough to be put down to “character”. Other characters are either information ciphers, proof of the central conceit or cardboardy foils for the central pair.

Most intriguing is that the slip puts Ray in a situation of marital infidelity. This move is almost entirely unnecessary, there are some plot reasons why Ray’s wife exists but she could equally well have been Ray’s sister or even Ray’s estranged daughter and then huge swathes of moral to and froing (that don’t always make Ray look like a hero) could have been abandoned in service of something more interesting. (Well, more interesting to me.)

As an author I always wonder why authors take the hard road for no reason. In the end my speculation rarely yields any solid reason if that reason isn’t in the prose itself. The fact is Ray’s wife Debbie didn’t need to be Ray’s wife and if she hadn’t been it would have made the protagonist far easier to like.

To complain about things like this is churlish, however, especially when your objective is to read good POD because it’s more interesting than mediocre commercial fare. This definitely satisfies on that level. Continuity Slip is dynamic and purposeful writing. That it has a few things which seem odd is something to be celebrated, not mourned.

If you can resign yourself to the the fact that it’s never going to get seriously quantum and you can put up with a main character who philanders and then has the philandering rewarded by the vagaries of parallel universe theory you will probably enjoy this. I did.

I was all set to get really, really itchy about the response I received to Friday’s post from Agent In The Middle, Lori Perkins which for your reading convenience is reproduced in full below:

Thanks for your rant. But I stand by my statement that self-pub is best for books with a small audience.

It costs money to self-pub. Most writers are young and don’t have it to waste on 1,000 copies of their book that they will have to sell out of the back of the family station wagon in order to make the money back.

I am an agent. I SELL books for money, so self-publishing is the exact opposite of what I do. I beleive that if a writer is really determined and has something to say, s/he should spend the money on craft, studying and editing and rewriting.

However this explanatory piece of editorial by POD Critic kind of explains where Ms. Perkins may be coming from. (Maybe she isn’t maybe she is just ignorant of the breadth of self-publishing options available but such a position would be a little unsettling for someone presuming to give advice on the topic so let’s go with the benefit of the doubt).

Lets be plain. It’s possible to produce something that looks like a book, behaves like a book, smells like a book and sits on your shelves with the other books unobtrusively for the price of printing, binding and delivery. Around £10/$15 ish.

Like those Inuit who apparently have a couple of dozen words for “snow” people in publishing have a couple of dozen words for “book”. Or rather they don’t but possibly they should have. Just because “Figure of the Sorcechanic” has pages, binding, a spine, words, page numbers, front matter, a summary on the back cover, a picture of the author etc. that does not make it a book by POD Critic’s reckoning.

Lulu, he says, is to his mind a printer. Not a publisher. People who self-publish via lulu are just having copies of their book-like object “printed”.

It is also implied that a book is not a book if it has no ISBN number. I told you this was going to cause problems down the road.

To the uneducated if a book has an ISBN number but no actual content that may well be less of a book than one which doesn’t but has pages and chapters and content etc. This is why they are uneducated.

Also to many in the publishing industry if you can get lulu to print a copy and send it to someone then that’s neither here nor there. Is it available on Amazon? Or even better in a bookshop?

If it is not then it is not really a book. It might seem to be one but it isn’t.

I am the kind of guy who likes tangibles. Now that I have seen a book with my name on it and flicked through the pages and so on and so forth it gives me a real idea of what kind of things I would like to improve for the future and it motivates me to do my writing. My outlay on this has been no more than £150 ($220ish) and much of that expense was entirely voluntary. And that’s over the course of three books too. That’s £50 a book.

Except of course, they’re not books. I have to stop confusing something that looks like a book with a book. Two of my “books” have no ISBN, none of them are available through approved supply chains. So really, they’re not books.

So bearing this in mind let’s examine Ms. Perkins rebuttal.

Point 1: POD outlets are best for books with a small audience.

Hate to break it to you Lori but the majority of first time author midlist fiction releases do actually have a pretty small audience. Oh, they have a vast potential audience, sure, but few actually realise this potential.

Point 2: Most new authors have no money to spend on 1000 copies of a book they have to hawk round by themselves to sell.

Yeah, I’m one of them. There aren’t 1000 copies of my novels in existence. There are ten. Three I own, seven were bought by people who would never have been able to read them were it not for POD.

Point 3: Selling books for a living is the exact opposite of POD publishing.

Fair enough, but this, of course, discounts all good books that are unrepresented, particularly those which are so because they are not “marketable”.

Point 4: Writers should spend their money learning to write.

Errr… the number one point-blank most blisteringly honest and valuable place to get criticism for your work is American Zoetrope’s FREE writer’s workshop. These people are unmerciful and intelligent, it’s a trial by fire. If you don’t survive Zoetrope you’re not a writer. And you don’t have to pay any money at all.

To summarise: for an outlay of $15 you can see a book-like object come into existence that may well have been subjected to stringent quality control, present your interesting and unorthodox story in a fresh style that fits on a book shelf along with your books. For no extra charge that object will be freely obtainable for about the same price to anyone else who’s interested enough to buy a copy.

But it won’t be a book. And you’ll have to face the fact that you won’t earn a living wage off of it.

On the plus side it won’t break the bank and at least it opens up your fiction to an audience it would otherwise never have reached. If they don’t want it, hey, them’s the breaks, junior. It’s still better than nothing and I have yet to be convinced otherwise.

Again you may colour me stupefied and, yes, depressed.

Let’s infer the word on the street from all of our favourite blogging agents. (Okay, all *my* favourite blogging agents.) This really has been the week for it, it seems.

Let’s start with Nathan Bransford, who exhorts us to examine our rejection letters for places where we might be going a bit off track.

This was all fine right up until the assertion that:

Maybe a few people said that your project isn’t marketable.

Should not cause you any pain as a writer whatsoever. It’s implied that the appropriate response to this being “wrong” with your writing is to somehow make it “more marketable” in future. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is the checklist for “marketable” anyway?

I’ll be honest, until last November I fully believed that agents and publishers had formulated some kind of approach to the “marketable” issue. A checklist of things that bestsellers had in common. I had formulated this opinion on the basis that:

a) fumbling round in the dark seemed to be a completely unacceptable approach to telling someone you can’t sell their decent novel (apparently it’s not) and
b) commercially produced fiction is so bland that finding things it all has in common and has had for years is no great challenge.

Regarding b) specifically you may remember my post about Mrs. Monkey’s appraisal of chick lit that it was either about some superpowered career princess who had never known true love (categorised by her as vomit inducing) or about some regular, everyday lady who had to face some kind of romantic or personal crisis (categorised by her as approachable). There is no best selling chick lit produced in the last decade or two that can’t be slung into one of these two bins as far as we can see. Basically, the chances are if your chick lit opus deviates from these long term trends it is unlikely to sell.

Mercenary as it is those seem to be the indicators. Further research may be required to see if this hypothesis is properly true.

The confusion grows when you add into the mix Agent Kristin’s failure to resolve the difference between “fresh” and “strange”. Read that and tell me some objective guidepost might not be warranted. Basically to summarise the post what’s deemed marketable enough to be worth a punt on vs. what’s deemed just too weird comes down to a shrug and an “I’ll know it when I see it”.

This isn’t adequate as a description of pornography vs. art and it isn’t satisfactory when what ends up getting churned out by the major houses is all demonstrably similar in nature anyway.

Not that major publishing houses largely producing lowest common denominator fiction that hedges its bets would be a problem if agents didn’t believe that self-publishing was a haven for:

…over-anxious authors who can’t wait to go through the agent/editor process and/or do the editing that is necessary to get published by one of the major players.

I mean, yeah, they are. But Lori Perkins there states quite explicitly that this is *all* self-publishing is good for. It’s not good for someone whose self-belief transcended the horror of agents and publishers because they bucked a trend. These people will not get a foothold by self-publishing (tell that to Dan Brown and Matthew Reilly). It’s not good for a reputable author with a publication record to let fans see stuff that no commercial publisher would take a risk on (tell that to JA Konrath and Bruce Bethke). It is also not, apparently, a good place for unpublished authors with unpopular approaches to offer a venue for a small, interested fanbase to get hold of work in an approachable format (tell that to Misti Rainwater-Lites and Jack Saunders). It’s also not a place for people who think that agents and publishers are straitjacketed by over-conservative attitudes towards the way publishing works and wish to retain creative control at the expense of the relatively better initial midlist sales (like wilfully enigmatic but suitably able novelist and general artist Till Noever).

Sorry, Ms. Perkins, self-publishing venues are suitable for all these things. “Marketable” no longer has to be the be-all and end-all of what gets out into the public domain. Your attitude to this issue is limited and moreover demonstrably wrong.

It is wholly possible that Ms. Perkins was just venting a little sideways glancing spleen at someone who was clearly too chicken to just write a goddamn query letter but I just can’t stomach it when people presume to be experts in something they don’t know enough about just because they are experts in something tangentially related. I’m under no illusion that I want to read Mr “Teacher”’s grim literary novel any more than she does.

The problem is that if this was, on some level, a genuine enquiry that a teacher is going to base his lecture upon to young students hoping to become writers this material has now become contaminated by a wrong-headed and unhelpful attitude.

Ms Perkins’ dismissive answer to the self-publishing question just propagates myths that are damaging to those working in a self-published arena who are not just “lazy” or “unable to face rejection”. More worrying still it attempts to tell authors at the school level that they should measure their own artistic life by some arbitrary and undefined idea of what is “marketable”.

The fact is if you’re not pinning your career hopes on living from the profits of your writing and you just want to have a few people read your work and appreciate its value then self-publishing is far less toxic to your own sense of self than the world of commercial publishing. It’s a question of goals. You want the brass ring, you take your licks. You just want to get it out there in some form you may find self-publishing to be a more satisfactory arrangement.

Never let anyone tell you that your choice about how you let people get their hands on your work is “wrong”. I will always point out when I think it’s “problematic” (see the Marcus Alexander Hart affair) but I won’t tell you that what you are trying to accomplish is “worthless” if you don’t do things for the same reasons that I am. I would respectfully ask that anyone who does winds their neck in.

Ms. Perkins, wind your neck in and re-examine your attitudes to self-publishing before you presume an expertise you clearly don’t possess, please.

The Book: Mordiscado by Misti Rainwater-Lites

Review Category: Buys > Priority

The Blurb: What do you get when you put the brains of Stephen King, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Edgar Allan Poe and Misti Rainwater-Lites in a blender? You get an unholy mess. Mordiscado is an unholy mess. Eat it. It is good.

Preview Available: Yup a perfectly satisfactory lulu one. Reassuring the reader that the prose is readable whilst not really giving anything away.

Why buy this? The preview was very good. Ms Rainwater-Lite posted to a thread I’d started requesting that POD authors put themselves forward on the NaNoWriMo shameless promotion board. Looked like the kind of thing I could well read. Affordable.

The Product: This is very confidently a POD novel. That is to say that although it doesn’t really resemble a commercial book it is its own product produced by someone who’s used to working in this medium. The book suffers from a total lack of indents but as it happens this isn’t a problem at all. I think the best way to put it is that the book “gets away with” a load of things. I didn’t have a problem with it.

The Nitty Gritty: I am becoming a real reviewer.

I do not bound towards a work with hope and joyful abandon. I slink towards it with narrowed and suspicious eyes. The gems are rare.

This is one of the gems.

This is like chick lit, erotica, horror, contemporary fiction and poetry were all handcuffed together, given baseball bats, dropped into a dark sack with a single key, bound up tight and dropped into a river.

Let’s be plain this is a heady brew that won’t be for everyone. It’s pretty sexy, and pretty disturbing, and pretty intense. The emotion coming out of this book is just raw.

What impressed me most from the outset was the description of the emotional to and fro between a couple experiencing some trouble because the wife knows her husband is looking elsewhere. Ms. Rainwater-Lites neatly sidesteps all the traditional tropes employed in the depiction of such a scenario settling instead for an unvarnished view of a couple where the woman fears she’s insane and the man is just being an out and out ass.

I’ve been in this emotional place of not getting my partner. Reading this actually helped me gain a new perspective on my own relationship. If a book can do that hell, that’s worth the price of admission right there.

The basic plot, not that it really matters overmuch, is that Zoe and Douglas, our married couple, move into Douglas’s grandmother’s house following the grandmother’s death. The house may be haunted, or maybe Zoe’s just cracking up.

Haunted house fiction like this always treads the line between supernatural occurrences and insanity. This one treads it deftly and with an assurance that stops the reader actually worrying about whether Zoe is really haunted or just insane. It’s unimportant, the important part is the emotional truth of the situation.

When the novel lifts into horror it really does pop. It’s amazing how one person can describe a creepy moaning ghost abusing the protagonist from the hereafter and it seems stale and another author can seriously creep you out. I think that the motivational context and the symbolism of the ghosts in Mordiscado provide the real chill. I don’t want to get too far in analysing it though, suffice to say it works.

This is not to say the novel is free of bum notes. Exchanges between Douglas and his mistress are far more redolent of the fantasy conversations Zoe might imagine them having than real conversations. The mistress herself is never more than a cipher. Male psychology is outwardly described to a tee but the male thought process is a little off kilter.

These details are minor and do not detract from the story’s very earthy passion and power.

I would also have liked to see a different resolution just because I felt it coming from a ways off. The ending itself was incredibly well handled even so. I’m not sure what I would have done because it’s really not my story, maybe asking for something different is asking for too much.

This is really fresh, really taut, gripping and involving stuff. If the right agent were to pick it up I have no doubt it could sell to an indie press or even a brave handler of outspoken contemporary fiction but Ms. Rainwater-Lites seems to have no ambitions in that direction.

If you’re laid back about sex scenes, disturbing religious imagery and description of relationships that’s never less than raw this book is absolutely amazing don’t miss it.

This is remarkable work and I can’t wait to read more from eBuLLieNCe pReSS.

I was reminded today of the limits of any given review system. Of course industries like publishing and cinema move so glacially slowly that the best a reviewer can do is recommend gems and warn against rubbish. This is one of the reasons I don’t bother reviewing things like films and commercially published books. By the time you’ve said what could be done better it’s already three or four years after the event.

One of the major advantages of POD is that someone can be prolific and immediate. Once something is trundled out into the light of day it is still widely regarded as too late to do anything about it (although this is a myth in a lot of cases, we’re talking about juggling with PDF files for the sake of Jeebus). But with almost immediate distribution some reviews could, conceivably, come in before you make a foothold on your next effort. If there’s some useful points in there then so much the better, if you’re a serious writer.

The fact is every reviewer hands out sucky advice. People can miss the point, people can look straight past something obvious, people can ask you to betray your own aesthetic. And reviewers are people. This, however, is not a licence to just ignore criticism. You have to take a critique and sit down with it and examine whether or not the critic has a point. If you’re serious about writing that is.

I remember once reading a short story about this guy who was a substitute teacher who had a rough day and was advised by another, older, teacher that the best idea to maintain classroom control was to sleep with one of the young female students. The younger teacher responds with some revulsion to this and the story ends.

In my criticism I was careful to say that the piece was well written and communicated its narrative effectively to the audience. As was so often the case with examples of competent writing I then went on to explore what part of the repertoire of writing skills the writer might like to explore next. I made the comment that the story seemed a little aimless and that if the author wanted to try something different he might try writing a story that was about something else. An experiment in purpose or subtext. The current story, I felt, was a little fatalistic in the way it just presented events that occurred. It had no moral or philosophical position.

I received a response from the author stating that my criticisms were invalid and that all I had said was “wrong” with his story was there intentionally. This despite a careful attempt to say that his story was what it was and that as far as it existed it seemed fine.

What this author seemed to be saying was that he haad reached the zenith of his potential and he was going to develop no further. He had no wish to explore different ways of writing and that if a short piece had a failing it was not really a fault it was “intentional”.

Well, okay man, fine. It was intentional.

What bakes my noodle, however. Is when you say “this is interesting in concept but flawed in execution” and someone tells you their flawed execution is deliberate.

Lets get this straight people. Aesthetic is fine. I have no argument with an aesthetic. Even if I don’t like an aesthetic I won’t quibble it. But there’s an art and then there’s a craft. And if the aesthetic is betrayed by the craft then I, as an artist, would want to polish up my craft in order to better deliver that aesthetic.

Bad craft leads to worse than something being unreadable. It leads to mixed messages. Mixed messages are the kiss of death.

Ultimately in a single volume you can only ever say one thing, really. Maybe you can say a number of related things but they all have to more or less point in the same direction. Your story has to be about something. Ultimately something has to be the most important thing you are saying.

If your craft betrays you by making that important thing unclear then make no bones about it you have failed.

I write genre fiction because there is, at least, some kind of criteria by which you can measure the effectiveness of genre titles. I don’t read romance novels but I would know for damn sure if I picked one up and none of the characters kissed and they spent their whole time shooting at each other and arguing about the ethics of cloning that the romance novel has failed. Big style. Similarly if I pick up a thriller and it’s full of info-dumping and a bunch of people not shooting at each other and worrying about their relationships that as a thriller it has failed.

I am never going to have a quibble about something being a little off the beaten track. I like to read something that may not want to be by the numbers but by God I’ll complain if that thing doesn’t want to seem to settle on being one thing or another in the end.

If I as a reader can’t tell what something was supposed to be saying I have to presume that as a communication that failed. If I, as a writer, receive feedback about the story as if it were something other than I intended, or that explicitly states that the reader had difficulty understanding what the message was about that’s the alarm bell.

People can tell me that they hated the nun in my last story because nun stories just turn them off generally. I’ll reserve the right to ignore that. But if I wanted to write about a gun-toting action nun and the feedback comes up that they felt I didn’t explore the nun’s crisis of faith in adequate depth I need to go tune. Seriously.

In the end though, if a writer wants to give up learning the craft and will put his or her technical flaws down to “quirks of style” then you can’t say anything more to them. Their inability to retain or expand a fanbase might, one day, get the message out there. We can hope.

The velocity of an object is its speed in a particular direction, says Wikipedia.

Super-observant people may note that a number of post counts have dropped. Notably the “eXistenCe” category. This is because I spring cleaned the earlier entries in the journal. Over the course of the last four or five months I’ve oriented the journal in a particular direction and it irritated me that there was a bunch of random blah stuck in the journal’s history. This is a blog about writing, publishing and reading. I got rid of a bunch of stuff about films and tv and whatnot because it simply isn’t “on message”. These bits are not archived anywhere. They’re just gone.

Don’t weep for them. I checked them and they weren’t particularly worth weeping for.

Now, back to business…

As irritating as this post by Nathan Bransford is it did actually give me pause for thought about an aspect of my own personal position I probably haven’t made explicitly clear. It is strongly implied in my editorial about the preview of “Rusty Nail” I read after devouring two whole JA Konrath e-books in the space of three days but I never came right out and said it.

Let’s be clear: I don’t necessarily think best selling authors are bad writers. There are a lot of people who do think this and there are a few best selling authors who are. But they don’t have to be.

No. My beef is not with the quality of writing, well, not always.

After a little digging it transpires that Mr Bransford’s first pick is a bit of a no-brainer. Cormac McCarthy is an author of ten novels the first of which was published in 1965. So this guy sells enough to be financially viable. He has a canon although he’s not prolific and he almost certainly isn’t a career novelist which probably makes him reasonably cheap. He’s in an enviable position as far as writers go. He’s in the midlist but it’s this kind of fantasy midlist modern authors dream of. He has enough recognition to be happy and enough money goes around that it’s all worthwhile. He’s not J.K. Rowling but then he probably has no desire to be so.

The news that a 73 year-old academic, novelist and playwright with a good CV could produce something readable is hardly news. Not only that but the synopsis of “The Road” that I read leads me to suppose that he has some latitude in what he chooses to write about. I will almost certainly check this work out when it becomes available in paperback.

The question I would pose is, if McCarthy was starting today, with the same exact novel, would he even get a request for a partial stating that he wanted to write a book about a father and son’s bleak fight for survival as they push their belongings in a shopping cart along an unidentified road in post-apocalyptic world? Seriously. I don’t know. I don’t request partials. I’m not an agent. I am willing to give anything a try once. But of course I only care what’s good, I don’t care what would sell. I’m wondering whether any publisher would be willing to take a punt on “The Road” if the author didn’t have such a solid CV?

Moving on Mr Bransford praises the writing of Laurell K. Hamilton I’m not going to argue the point. I found the only book of hers I ever tried to read (the first Anita Blake book) totally irritating and utterly impossible to read. Thousands disagree. I wouldn’t dream of stating that Hamilton is a hack or a poor writer because it works for so many people.

Remember my Dan Brown caveat, he may not be the world’s best writer but I read TDVC without significant problems and so did thousands of others. I can well imagine that some people find Brown as irritating to read as I find Hamilton. Let me be plain, I find it impossible to get through anything by Neal Stephenson without skipping huge chunks. I wouldn’t argue that he was a terrible writer either.

Sometimes the writer’s prose and the reader’s head just don’t get along. Even so, it is no surprise to me that a woman who has written over 20 heinously popular novels has a way with words. I just find the first person perspective grating and the subject matter uninvolving, that’s all.

(In a brief digression I suddenly realised that Darkling, reviewed below, is like a male cyberpunk version of this kind of Fantasy Romance novel. People who like Hamilton may well want to check out Darkling on the grounds that it has that angle. Maybe I just didn’t get it after all.)

Bransford asks the rather crass rhetorical question:

Could it be that the people who are selling the most copies of their books are also some of the best writers alive?

Before then going onto say that some great authors are not recognised in their time and that superb writing can be found coming out of indie presses and languishing in a slowly disappearing midlist.

I suppose this is an exhortation to literary snobs to get their heads out of their backsides and read some goddamn genre fiction. A sentiment I can support wholeheartedly. I think what Mr Bransford may have missed is that great writing exists on every level of Sean Lindsay’s Heirarchy of Authors that actually produces some hard copy. Including some that languishes in shoeboxes long since forgotten. Some of the world’s greatest novels are probably burned on bonfires by uncomprehending relatives following the death of the author. That kind of thing is likely to be on the increase in the current climate.

Then there’s the great works that will never be written because the author chose to dabble in something more commercially viable (see Konrath again). Thinking about all that potential being squandered made me remember one of the things that got me started on this train of thought. Years ago now, probably round about 1996 I picked up a copy of a book called Headcrash written by a guy called Bruce Bethke. It was like Neuromancer stopped taking itself so seriously or like Snow Crash actually grew a sense of humour to go with its instinct for irony. I loved it. Bethke has not really got much more than that done.

I can imagine why. Headcrash won a Philip K. Dick award, Cyberpunk was not written quickly enough the industry told him. He works a day job and his work limits his fiction output. Probably because supercomputer software development garners him more recognition, praise and sense of purpose than fiction writing does (even if it only provides one moment of any of these every decade it probably tops fiction writing).

I love Headcrash. It is one of the things that keeps me writing; the support of Mrs Monkey and a genetic glitch being some of the other major contributors. I reflected at the time, and on many occasions since, how Bethke’s output might quite strongly reflect mine were it not for lulu. I could see myself battling tedium and sweating blood to produce one reasonably saleable manuscript which gets represented and sold. I can see lukewarm return on investment. I can almost feel dread at the prospect of repeating such an arduous and soul destroying process with the further hindrance of having written an award winner that failed to sell. I can see me not bothering to write again because I could not write what I want and make it available to those 100 people who would really enjoy it.

Thankfully I do have lulu and I feel a lot better for it.

So all I really wanted to add to Mr. Bransford’s post is the caveat that to imagine what’s going on in the world of orthodox publishing is not all that is going on in the world of publishing. And every time you relish the writing in a book that made it consider wth some sadness all the books that were just as enjoyable that the unsatisfactory systems of conventional publishing and the wrongheaded thought patterns of those involved in writing as an industry have choked off before they had a chance to bloom.

The Book: Darkling by J.M. Patterson

Review Category: Buys > Priority

The Blurb: She has many names, but her street name is “Shatter”, and it’s the only one that really matters. She’s killed more people than she can remember, sold herself for money, and leaves destruction in her wake. She’s an urban predator, a walking lethal weapon with a past she can’t escape. She’s a Darkling. And all she wants is out, to have some kind of life. But no one has ever done that before…and lived.

Preview Available: The whole volume is available as a free download. I think this is due to the fact the softcover, hard cover and e-book versions are sold as separate products. A neat way to get around the “all versions of a product must have same royalty” thing.

Why buy this? The preview was very good. Mr. Patterson made a personal representation to me asking for a review. Looked like the kind of thing I could well read. Affordable.

The Product: A nice Royal format PBack with a bespoke cover and an effort to produce some front matter. Really clean text, good typography. Not that it was hard to follow but had it been it would have been a prose fault not a production fault.

The Nitty Gritty: As a writer you get reminded time and time again that the worst thing you can do is betray the expectations of your audience. The gritty crime drama Dark Blue, a movie written by LA Police novelist James Ellroy of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia fame, got largely derided because the trailer depicted an action packed stand up fight between big screen heavyweights Ving Rhames and Kurt Russell that the finished product failed to deliver. The fact that the work was far more dense, complex, well written and emotionally engaging than two veteran actors butting heads could have been was unimportant. The fact was that the trailer betrayed expectations and the audience always has the final say.

The aphorism that one should not judge a book by its cover may have held some weight in the days when all you had to go on was a title and a plain cardboard wrapper. In these days of cover art, blurbs and synopses the cover is just about the best way to judge a book in the commercial world. Of course, now we have a new era of creator control and in that situation sometimes the cover, the synopsis and the contents come a little further adrift.

What is “Darkling”? Is it a thrilling cyberpunk SF adventure? That’s what the cover would suggest. So when the answer is “not really” it comes as something of a shock. A discovery, I think, many readers would be less than elated to make. I am quite experimental so I didn’t think that just because the bulk of the prose details a growing relationship between the heroine “Shatter” (and her bewildering array of aliases) and a teacher called “Woody”.

It was interesting to read “Memories of Home” (see below) whilst reading Darkling as well. Both volumes contain a new archetype: the “everyday joe who gets amazing romantic success for very little investment”. I cannot complain too much. My very first novel had a similar trope. I was, at least, guilty enough about it that I made it the central crux of the trilogy’s turning point.

Mr. Patterson has actually done some good tuning work in making Shatter less of an uberbabe and making Woody have to do some work to earn our respect for his outrageous fortune. Still, when you’re not wondering where the hell all this is going you’re wondering whether Woody is really still not smelling a rat with all this.

The ease with which Woody manages to start a conflict only to have Shatter allow him to back pedal out of dangerous emotional waters is incredibly grating. You start to get the feeling that despite the fact only Shatter is a cyborg neither of these people are proper human beings.

Then there’s this cop/corrupt corporate entity strand which makes some attempt to run parallel to the Shatter and Woody story (the ratio is about 2 chapters Woody/Shatter to 1 chapter action movie villain stuff). Patterson seems terminally bored by this strand. Like he can’t wait to get back to the romance.

So we’re looking at Boy meets Female Cyborg in quasi-post apocalyptic brave new world with a side order of OCP from Robocop, and I suppose as bizarre as that may sound if it were done well it might work.

Unfortunately Mr. Patterson seems to need to get over to zoetrope.com where people will not be shy about hammering him with the truth that show is better than tell. We are told that Shatter is a killing machine packed with high tech gizmos. We are told about her past. We are told about her emotional hang ups. We are told about her dangerous life. We are shown so little of this it’s almost non-existent. This is even more frustrating when we keep getting told about all this cool stuff that Shatter used to do that we’re not allowed to see. Or all this cool stuff Shatter could do that we’re not allowed to see. Or all this fascinating stuff about Shatter’s emotional state we’re not allowed to observe.

If this had been structured more traditionally the Shatter/Woody storyline would have been a no-more than three chapter addition to a story that was mostly about Shatter’s last job before she planned to disappear. The whole Woody thing could have been symbolic of Shatter’s aspirations (and hey a relationship with a whiny teacher probably would seem a good alternative to being shot at and used as a guinea pig for unethical cybernetic surgical procedures). As it is everyone just pretty much gets given stuff which allows them to not change and to dwell in the novel mostly drama-free until the closing pages.

Oh, I mean sure, Woody is described as being a little freaked out and uneasy about going out with a cyborg killing machine. The thing is he still seems too laid back about it all. If I were Shatter I’d be concerned that Woody just seemed not to really understand the situation and that he didn’t really seem to want to give her anything but bland assurances that she was up on a pedestal.

The novel has its entertaining moments, for sure and it is definitely nice to read something in the SF mould that isn’t just action movie moments gathered around a series of McGuffins but that doesn’t make up for the novel’s many failings. The romance fails to convince. The action movie moments drift free of dynamic narrative context. The structure is out of joint. The pacing is plain weird. The story never seems to be going anywhere. The thing seems to be caught between being contemplative and being exciting and it loses out in being neither.

Maybe Mr. Patterson has managed to get it together as the series continues. I shall definitely be checking out the previews of his next two volumes. Let’s make no mistake Mr. Patterson can write and can typeset and can produce good materials from a material standpoint. It’s just a shame that the actual work these talents are applied to could do with some serious, well-heeded and unmerciful peer-criticism.

Those of you who pay attention to my sidebar of links (and you should because it’s all good stuff one way or another) will have noticed me frantically adding links to the “other” category whilst the “Self Publishing/POD” category remains eerily the same. The reasons for this are two fold.

1) I’ve come to realise that the Self-Published author/reader/whatever should really make an effort to keep up with what’s going on in the wider world of writing/reading/publishing. I have included links only to sites that I think represent some kind of value added for an interested outsider trying to gain some insight. People who run gossip blogs need not apply.

2) POD Bloggers seem to be remarkably slow at updating on the whole. The POD criticism market seems to suffer from a doldrums of inactivity. I have broadened the remit of my own blog to keep it moving. Maybe some of the other reviewers could do the same.

Having said that it is time to welcome a new reviewer into the fold. The one review I’ve read thus far indicates that this is a reviewer with an important opinion if not the final word as the italicised “the” before his moniker would seek to imply.

He does have a point, a lot of POD criticism is somewhat toothless and maybe more encouraging than honest. I know ego massage is no favour to an author in the long run which is why I have savaged everything that wasn’t an unpublished novel by JA Konrath that I’ve read so far. Even where there have been good points there have been as many bad points in most cases.

I would actually be a little nervous about submitting stuff to this guy to review. That’s how an author should feel about submitting to a critic. The overly nice critic often doesn’t have an opinion worth respecting, I find.

POD Critic is already saying that it’s going to take a long time to read the next two submissions. The one thing that’s going to kill this blog is high turnover between entries. I watch on wth interest.

This article is one of a continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

You would be forgiven for thinking (at least, until the end of this paragraph) that the business of world building is best left to the writers of SF about aliens or fantasy about unicorns. The only difference between these two processes and the rest of fictional world creation is in a degree of subtlety.

Obviously, when we set out to create the magical Kingdom of Harroo we are building an entire world from scratch. The only difference in our creation is that we have far more latitude in the creation of a world that forms some kind of commentary or thematic backdrop to the events of the story. In real life our world is an objective thing and any meaning we ascribe to it is coloured by our own sense of self. In fiction the author is wholly responsible for filtering the experience of the characters through a world that is intended to support their story and adventures.

So, we find ourselves once again in a position where we have to examine our protagonist. Who is Arturo Gatwick? Well, he’s a man who’s going to be a bit nervous about the prospect of entering a magical kingdom, in spite of the fact that his grandpa was born in one. Essentially his nature is that he will probably feel some unconscious pull towards the magical kingdom even though outwardly he may resist.

A deeper part of the story deals with the resolution of past defeat and a final inheritance of birthright. That’s where we’ll start thinking about Darkling Stansted. Stansted will have to take on the persona of the interloper, the invader and so the world of Harroo will bear the marks of occupation. On the other hand if we were to remove Darkling from Harroo we will have to imagine it’s the type of place Arturo Gatwick would like to live. So that’s the world we are building and what we will describe.

Casting our minds back all the way to when we defined Arturo as a character we said that he was a businessman with a preference for mental activity and a man whose career had lead him into marketing. This gives us two possible approaches to the business of creating Harroo. They revolve around the question of whether or not Arturo likes his job.

To a certain extent the answer to this question is going to come down “yes” or “no” but I would add the words “on the whole” before them just to clear up any confusion. This is because although marketing may or may not be the career for him that doesn’t mean that if he likes it he will always be happy and smiley and that if he doesn’t he will always be grumpy and moany.

To give an example of an archetypal character who likes the job on the whole but may not necessarily be cheerful and happy about the situation is that old standby: the put upon law enforcement officer. If we look at one of the classic depictions of this character, Die Hard’s John McClane, we can see that despite being quite a spiky character in his personal manner McClane never entertains the idea of giving up law enforcement over the course of three movies. In fact the worst thing that can happen to this character is that he is forced to turn in his badge and his gun.

Arturo could very well be the reverse, and in fact this would make him an archetype too; the businessman with a lingering feeling of dissatisfaction. This helps us out enormously because if Arturo is, on the surface, happy with his life but on a deeper level not quite sure that a life designing promotional materials for products and services is the royal road to fulfillment then it explains why he’d want to go fighting evil magicians in dark kingdoms anyway.

It also gives us clues to how to handle those first few moments in the story where Arturo turns away from a mundane existence and towards a life of adventure and mystery.

So although we’re ultimately wanting to know what Harroo (which is a kingdom in the world of Primaris, don’t forget) is going to be like what it should be like is reflected in our protagonist.

The fact that Arturo may well be concerned that a small life carrying out clerical tasks is not ultimately rewarding in all the ways it could be tells us Harroo should offer him an alternative. Harroo unblemished would have the potential to be a place of cosmic importance and deep spirituality.

Leading on from here we have a hook word, a difficult concept, one that it would be relatively easy to write a book about (several in fact). Spirituality. There are many aspects to this, belief in the supernatural, mysticism, spirit, religion, the soul, the afterlife and so on and so forth. It’s probably not wise to assume that Harroo contains the answer to life, the universe and everything but it could provide a spiritually nurturing environment.

Let’s also return to cosmic importance. One thing we’ve already learned about Harroo is that you can get from Earth to Harroo by magical means (in this case a mirror). What if you could also get from Harroo (and indeed the other places in Primaris) to many other worlds. A cornucopia of societies and strange alternative worlds. Primaris was a name I dreamed up because it vaguely invokes the concept of “the first”. Well there we have it. Primaris is, very literally, the centre of the inhabited universe. This is why its citizens are so concerned with spiritual matters and why dwelling there opens up one’s eyes to a variety of human experience which is one of the bedrock substances of personal spirituality.

If your head’s spinning at this moment, well, good. All we did was give a character a job and give a magical kingdom a funny name and all of a sudden we’re going deep. If you happen to be a writer of fantasy or SF you may, at this point, be feeling bewildered at the responsibilities placed upon you as creator of a whole world.

To give this all time to sink in let’s take a step back.

If you’re not planning an SF or Fantasy book then you can now snigger quietly to yourself. You do not have the burden of defining a world from scratch in which your protagonist will suffer. The world we live in has many “off the shelf” environments that will perform a variety of different tasks adequately. You’d be wrong for supposing that you don’t have to do anything at all. And if you think that your choice of environment for the story will have no bearing on how the story plays out you’d be so wrong you’d start working against your own aims.

Every choice an author makes about their story comes with a number of advantages and an attendant number of responsibilities. Every story has some sort of theatre of operations. This can be as narrow as “a prison”, “a street” , “a train in motion” or as broad as “London”, “South East England” or “France, Tokyo, Sydney and San Francisco”. In all of these definitions we give ourselves, as writers, specific targets and specific ammunition to employ in telling the story.

For example, we could at this time completely redefine the story of Arturo Gatwick as a story taking place in the everyday world by revealing that Mellifluous Gatwick had started a cult, or rather a collective of people, he was not a magician he was just a charismatic leader. The collective was dedicated to a simple life working the land and exploring a broad based spiritual life. Kind of like a sort of ultra-liberal Amish. Arturo could find the location of the collective and an account of how Darkling Stansted had usurped Mellifluous and made the regime of the collective more oppressive. Arturo then travels to the location of the collective in order to explore his own personal history.

The story remains essentially the same but the issues surrounding birthright and spirituality become even more apparent when viewed through the more mundane story. Also in a fantasy allegory it is pretty easy to see Darkling Stansted as an evil being who must be overcome. In a mundane story we might want to make Arturo’s interference in the collective more of a double edged sword.

Regardless we have identified a theatre of operations in the mundane story of the land the collective owns. This means the concerns of every day people, or whole cities or nations are not necessarily represented but may be reflected upon in the story’s progress. Obviously if we wanted to write a story about the impact of a major catastrophe on a large city the story of Arturo Gatwick doesn’t fit the bill.

In our mythic story of Primaris and Arturo the struggle at the heart of the story is a relatively clear one between Arturo and himself. He wants to break out of a mundane and meaningless existence and take up his birthright in a land of mythic wonder and cosmic importance. Darkling Stansted is all that stands in his way. In the mundane version of the story the issue of Arturo’s belief that a spiritual existence is more rewarding might stand a little more questioning. Darkling Stansted is not just an evil usurper, real people rarely are, he has his own history. Maybe Mellifluous Gatwick was not altogether honest in his report of events. The story suddenly becomes beset by degrees of subtlety and grey areas which are necessary to lend verisimilitude to the setting and characters.

Of course there is no rule that says a dramatic novel or thriller ostensibly set in everyday reality should be layered and convincing, by the same token there is no reason why a mythic fantasy cannot have depth and subtlety. How far you employ techniques for making something “epic myth” versus “domestic potboiler” are up to you.

Once you have made the major decisions about your world you can then go in to fill in the detail. This is an appropriate time for one of those spider diagram sessions we keep getting told are such a good idea. Let’s split the process of general sketching through to specific shadings into an exercise:

1) Get a paper and draw a circle in the middle make it quite small but big enough to write three or four words in block capitals inside it.

2) Draw a bigger circle round the outside, don’t fill up the paper totally, you might want to separate off a column on an A4 sheet to make the area with the circles in it a square. Leave enough space round the edge to jot between 20 and 50 words in blocks around the outside.

3) Pick a spot outside both circles and draw an X there. This is where the Hero begins his journey, you may label your X “START” or “HERO START’S HERE” or whatever.

4) Outside both circles is an area called WORLD ONE, this is the world as the hero sees it every day.

5) Inbetween the outer and inner circle is an area called WORLD TWO this is the world the hero is going to travel into.

6) The inside of the inner circle is the seat of FINAL CONFLICT.

7) The Hero has to journey from his start in World One through World Two to the place where the Final Conflict takes place. He may then have to undertake an escape from that place to his home. He may or may not make it back to World One as a result of this conflict. For futher details you may want to refer back to all the stuff we talked about on the monomyth.

At this stage you may have a very clear idea about what the hero is going to have to go through in order to get to his resolution. If you have none though you could carry out this subprocess to get you there:

1) Write the character’s name on the top of a sheet of paper turned portrait.

2) Divide the sheet into two columns

3) Head one column “Start” head the other “Finish”

4) List at least four things about the hero as known at the start of the story which are going to change by the end of the story.

5) List how they have changed at the end of the story.

The less things there are in this list the shorter your story is going to end up being. Don’t worry, though, none of these documents is set in stone. They’re there to get you started, not to legally bind you to anything.

Once you know, however you manage to do so, what the Hero’s journey is going to be like then you can draw it onto the double circled map you made before. Highlight all the points where the hero has an encounter along his path. If you made the table of character changes comment on how the chracter change is aided by each of these encounters. For example before crossing from World One to World Two it is traditional that the hero faces a threshold guardian.

To keep it leftfield we will apply this concept to the mundane version of the Gatwick story. Arturo travels out to the back of beyond where the Collective farms the old Gatwick estate, now renamed Darkling Meadows. When the villagers of nearby Meffbury find out Arturo intends to enter Darkling Meadows they are hostile towards him and encourage him to leave right away. Not only that Darkling Meadows itself is surrounded by a high wall topped with razor wire.

The hostility of the villagers and the barrier to progress present a very clear threshold and personify Darkling Stansted’s rejection of outsiders through the fear and hostitlity invoked in the villagers. Arturo may be an “anything for a quiet life” guy normally, but this incident could spur him on to taking on confrontations whenever he can’t avoid them.

Once you have negotiated your hero, with suitable commentary, into the Final Conflict just get him out of there again. You may not even have described his opposition in any great detail during the process but you needn’t worry about that. In thinking about these things you should have a greater idea of what sort of world you are about to send your hero into and that’s as much as you need.

If you really have generated a buzz for world creation this is the point for spider diagrams. Remember, what you are mining for in this session is implications of a central premise. We’ve taken the issue of birthright and given it a spiritual spin. What kinds of story can be explored in the tension between borthright and spirituality? All of the ideas you come up with could crop up in your story. They should all go into a process of making the story world what it is.

What will solidify things further is when you start to describe the forces which oppose your hero and that will be the subject of the next Tip. Happy World Building!