Maybe it’s the work, which is rewarding and absorbing. Maybe it’s that I prefer the fresh cold thrill of an autumn breeze. Maybe it’s that having no direction teaches you something about having a direction. Maybe it’s a bit of all of these and a little more. Today I feel that things aren’t so bad in any sense.

Tabitha at iUniverse Reviews doesn’t agree. No according to the man behind the cat’s name big business publishing of any stripe is a con job and aspiring authors may as well give up.

Yeah. I knew that.

Only thing is if you don’t care it becomes a case of: Tell us something we don’t already know. I’ve got my plans for a gimmick product to come out sometime in 2008, sooner if I can lock it all down. Maybe that’ll help shift a few units. I hope so more for the sake of the, er, competitors than anything else. Yes, I said competitors. All will become plain in time.

Even leaving this dirty piece of shameless lucre hunting aside I have Starfall as yet unfinished. To prove I have not been entirely wasting my time a major piece of character psychology only became clear to me this very evening. I will be very proud of Starfall upon its completion. It’s a great book and I mean that not just as a writer but as a writer who’s been sitting on something for a very long time to see if it turned bad.

It didn’t.

So overall, things are okay, everything will be okay. I’m off to put a bit of Jimmy Cliff on the stereo… keep your respective chins up people.

The Book: When An Angel Falls by Stephanie L Jarrett

Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.

The Blurb: Laura is a fallen angel struggling to find acceptance in a world torn apart by war. When a handful of spirits step in to help Laura along her journey toward forgiveness, others are reminded that there is more to a soul than the sum of its vices.

Laura’s friends try to help her confront her shame, as the battle for Heaven escalates. While she is caught between those who shun her and those who want her destroyed, many spirits are coming to realize that Laura holds the keys to preventing their destruction.

When an Angel Falls is a story for the imperfect souls among us who strive to forgive, and who seek forgiveness.

Preview Available: A pretty long but slightly unweildy one on iUniverse, yes. More than enough to get the picture.

Would I buy this? Possibly, I like theological philosophy fic. I think the fact I’m uncertain should be caveat enough.

The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide. The proofreading sometimes leaves a bit to be desired and the cover’s not great but, hey, that’s the world of Self-Pub.

The Nitty Gritty: Occasionally some dumb romantic comedy or comedy of embarrassment slips through the Hollywood net that puts the viewer in a terrible position. The position in question being that of knowing more than all the characters and just so bored out of your brain for the entire time you can bear to watch it because all the “tension” in the piece could be sorted out if people just sat down and talked to one another.

Not that I’m saying a cosmic conflagration of angelic hosts could be sorted out with a cup of char and a good old chinwag but there is one thing here that I just couldn’t get on board with and it all came down to a lack of communication. I think. I’ll come back to it.

Let’s go for an overview before we hit that problem full on. The story begins like a sort of detective story espionage thriller with these two guys called Scott and Ethan looking for an angel on earth on behalf of a cabal of earthly religious luminaries. The subject of their quest, the angel Laura, is living a small town life and being so damned human and not an angel at all no sir that none of her neighbours know that, like the Blues Brothers, she’s on a mission from God.

When we meet Laura the story begins to revolve around her. She ascends to heaven where she introduces us to the heavenly kingdom via a board meeting which seems a bit prim. After that Jarrett’s imagination is unbridled and we don’t know whether we’ll be back on earth with Scott and Ethan or caroming off asteroids disguised as a heavenly light beam.

And let’s get one thing straight, Laura can kick some serious ass in this piece. There are some set-piece comebacks of truly Buffy-esque proportions.

So far, so good. So let’s unveil it. Where are we going to have a problem. Well, the prose is fine, the mistakes are few, and the story is reasonably easy to follow (although occasionally a little fast). So what was…

The Straw That Broke The Reviewer’s Back: I got about 2/3rds of the way through the book before this just became too much.

What you have to understand is that reading should be a pleasure. I should be looking froward to reading a few more snatched pages. When I am seeing the reading as a chore that’s a problem. It might not even necessarily be the author’s fault. Robert Ludlum is a chore to me but loads of people like his stuff… so maybe it’s best not to take this as a last word on WAAF.

I couldn’t finish this book for the following reason: Laura is apparently one of God’s special little soldiers. She’s right up there to the left of Gabriel and apparently just far enough to the right of Lucifer to be upstairs rather than down. But, you see, there was this incident. We’ll call it… the incident. And during the incident Laura did something for which she is ashamed and for which other angels feel that maybe she should be those critical few inches further over to the left… if you follow my drift.

Only Ms. Jarrett does her very best to nudge the gentle reader and tip them the wink. Get this. Whatever Laura is ashamed of, she shouldn’t really be ashamed of it. And what ever other angels think, they are wrong.

I don’t know what the incident was because the novel was evasive on that point right up until my mind gave up. The fact is it was that evasiveness that not only gave the impression that everything would be alright but also that when the great revelation came you would just stop and go “is that it?!?”. You know, like when it turned out Tom Cruise was working for the mafia in The Firm and you went “so what?”.

The major problem was that the more the incident was hidden the bigger the burden of its anticlimactic revelation became. Until in the end I simply ceased to care.

Now, don’t get me wrong. What Laura did might have been a proper nasty piece of work, or may even have looked proper evil until explained. However, I can’t honestly say I believe that because if any reader would be half on the side of the angels who think Laura should be wearing the horns and forked tail ensemble instead of the other then an author would just tell you what was the dealio. That’s dramatic tension and then some. It makes your badass angel dangerous and sexy. If, on the other hand, you would just think all the other angels were uptight for criticising the incident well, then, there’s no more tension.

So maybe I am wrong and the seriousness of the incident was just misplayed. In which case I would urge any author with dramatic character ambivalence to spare to bring it on with all speed. But if I am right and the nature of Laura’s actions were not even misdemeanour let alone crime then new sources of drama should have been sought at any and all costs.

When An Angel Falls was mostly well written, certainly copeable with even when it clunked from time to time. The subject matter was interesting and mostly involving. If it hadn’t been for that one story point I would easily have finished it and be recommending it here. As it is, I simply can’t although I will be interested in seeing further works by the same author.

Not in a bad way. Although I am very conscious that I have not yet finished editing Starfall for publication (the problem is it’s a quality novel and it needs a full gestation period, not that Sorcechanic was tat but it was a lot less… complicated). I also haven’t actually written anything sensible this year at all. I am into my competition project to the stage where prose fiction is being written, the outline’s for version 2 of Binary Baby 1 are shaping up, I still know exactly what I want the Sorcechanic sequel to be like, this year’s NaNo effort is more than a vague idea and I also dreamed the opening to a really promising Sci Fi comedy a la Hitchhiker’s Guide the other night. So the mind is fecund, but the execution is like pulling teeth.

As a token effort in this direction I will be strapping on my reviewing hat and getting through the list I have sitting in my inbox of an amazing (gasp) six titles. Starting very shortly with Stephanie Jarrett’s “When An Angel Falls”.

Oh, and for those on the edge of your seat about this I start a contract on Monday so utter destitution has been postponed.

Thank you all for your patience during the purgatorial hiatus.

Vague vision of NaNoWriMo on the horizon… recruitment agents awaken from their slumber and five or six interviews pop fully formed into existence in a single day… suddenly feel up to my eyeballs in busy…

Yup, it’s September…

In the most tiresome debate in the history of all debates ever it has been asked whether games are art or whether art can be a game.

Well. The answer, as always in these tricky cases would have to be “sometimes” and “it depends what you mean by a game, or art, or both…”

I mean… yawn.

All I know is that having had quite enough time messing about with puzzles and number relationships and the project that I hope will generate some interest for my name and my capabilities there is one key thing that good creative endeavour and good puzzles/games have in common.

Elegance.

An elegantly designed game like chess, or peg solitaire, or even poker, can attain a level of beauty that could be described as art. How many ornamental chess sets, peg solitaire boards or card tables have we seen. There is something about the interrelations of logic and chance in a physical space arbitrated by solid rulesets that speaks to the artist.

I think that puzzle designing is a tough business and I think when you’ve got a good puzzle out there it is a satisfying feeling. Because it combines creative play with intellectual rigour and those two in combination are powerful indeed.

You’ll see what I’m talking about. Soon. Hopefully.

The e-mail gremlin has now been tracked down to web host who had unilaterally decided to change the way e-mail forwarding worked without actually telling any of their customers despite having their e-mail addresses… bless them. I actually expect a slight reduction in the amount of spam to be received due to the new way the firwarding works so yay.

In answer to a recent query I have tested commenting and it works perfectly. I’m not sure whether the anti-spam bot (which works really well) is causing an issue but please assume that I have assumed you are the lazy type of person who doesn’t like the shift key or punctuation so if the question comes up - “What colour is a purple cat?” the answer will be “purple” and not “Purple” or “Purple.” or “Purple!” basically it’s a security measure not a presentation test so bear that in mind.

On to less prosaic matters. I am, as ever, indebted to Mrs Monkey for introducing surprisingly obvious touches of sanity into parts of a writer’s brain that the writer didn’t even know were lacking it.

This begins with her observation that unlike many writer’s partners she is neither disinterested nor also a writer. She is a reader, and an interested one at that. This is why the advice she gives me about why something doesn’t quite work or needs a tweak is different to that which I might receive from another writer. It is strongly suggested that if you are a writer reading this you may want to visit an example of those homes of the proving fire of critique the writer’s circle. Not necessarily because the criticism you will receive there will improve your writing, anything’s possible I suppose but it is unlikely.

The real reason one visits one of these places is to learn to take criticism and if you can learn to take Writer’s Circle criticism any other kind of criticism will seem as water to the proverbial mallard’s dorsus. The fact is peer writers who are only reading your work in order to amass moral credit to force you to read their stuff will always centre on how the peer would have written the piece differently or, in extremely irritating cases, may not have written the piece at all. A critical reader will always focus on how their reader’s experience could have been improved and if you find a sympathetic peer writer you may luck into some of this advice. However as a writer myself how I know the impossible task of resisting saying “If I were writing this I might…”

Onto the second memetic explosive Mrs Monkey helped unearth this week. We paid a visit to the local library as I am still unemployed and therefore out of funds to actually buy things. While there I took the opportunity to pick up a copy of Stephen King’s paean attacking the mobile phone culture “Cell”.

I immediately noticed several things which Mr. King might like to bear in mind before dashing off his next novel.

1) The main character is a genre writer again, although this one has only just sold his first work and therefore has not had time for the iron to enter his soul and to wish to write something more artistic a la The Dark Half and Misery.

2) The protagonist shares his familial arrangements with the protagonists of both Pet Sematary and The Shining (to name two I can recall off the top of my head although possibly the same set up exists in The Dark Half also) in having a wife - with whom he has a troubled relationship - and a young child, a son.

3) The action writes itself into a corner within the first 60 pages and only manages to extricate itself by the development of the central zombification condition.

The third point is perhaps the most interesting. The first two having to do firstly with a penchant King has for making his protagonists share his occupation and presumably also his wish to be taken more seriously, and also with his penchant for making his protagonist’s families resemble those circumstances which prevailed during the dark days of his drug dependencies. I don’t really know what to say about these as they’re so obvious that if King wanted to stop doing that surely he would. I think such blatant reoccurences should make him question his blithe assurance that stories exist fully formed in the ether and all he does is “excavate” them but hey… maybe he just got the “writer with ego problems, a wife he feels distant from and a young son he loves but is terrified of losing” seam of ether.

The third problem is specific to the novel Cell and is the most revealing about more of King’s preferences as a writer. Cell is, essentially, a kind of Whyndham-esque zombie shocker in which some event broadcast through the radio receivers of mobile phones causes people who hear it to become zombie-like in behaviour not unlike people with “rage” infection in the “28 x Later” series. These people are not dead but act in a zombie-like fashion which appears to evolve as the novel progresses.

I can’t help wishing John Wyndham had been alive to write this so no one else had to bother. King misses the mark of zombie-apocalypse fiction in so many ways it’s not even funny. Weirdly The Stand, King’s other apocalypse novel, doesn’t have nearly so many problems, presumably because the hazards in that work come from the dark figure of Randall Flagg and his cohort of miscreants.

King seems entirely unable to deal with the global disaster novel. It manages to surpass War of the Worlds in its ham-fisted inability to match the macro with the micro. A criticism often levelled at HG Wells invasion novel is that you only ever experience one person’s view of the invasion and this limits your understanding of the global phenomenon. Well, whoever first came up with that gem would have an absolute ball with Cell.

The protagonists get trapped in Boston at the outset but don’t even think to make an escape by sea despite the fact that the reported location of the main protagonist’s hotel is just about, oh, across the road from several Marinas, the sea would appear to be the safest place to get away from the armies of zombified mobile phone users and the available coastal destinations in more rural Maine include a Naval Radio Broadcast station where information might have accrued.

In addition none of the characters encountered are in a position to update readers or protagonists on the progress of the zombification condition or indeed any other meta-plot information that may give insight into the mechanics of the apocalypse.

The former point is, perhaps, more irksome. After all if Dr. Know-It-All just happens to bump into Dudley Protagonist early on in the novel it seems convenient but the author can always just say the protagonist probably wouldn’t have survived without Dr KIA. The first point, however, just makes the protagonists look stupid as from Atlantic Ave you’re positively tripping over places with the appellation Wharf to the East about five minutes work. For it to not even occur to them to see if they could hitch a ride with a friendly sailor beggars belief. Although one of the central characters does worry about his cat. Whatever.

I still haven’t engineered the circumstances where I might be tempted to read King’s Magnum Opus the Gunslinger series and to be honest reading this kind of thing doesn’t really encourage me.

The important thing Mrs. Monkey pointed out to me about all this is that King is very much a writer. That is his writing kind of exists in and of itself. If there were to be a subtext identified in Cell it would be that King is irritated by mobile phones and that’s it. As to exactly why mobile phones are seen by King as a bad thing that seems to be expressed through the effects of the zombification malaise on the main characters.

Not that I necessarily think a writer has to have a “grand plan” underlying everything they do but I sure think it helps, a lot. After all how many disgruntled genre writers can be heroes in the overall grand plan? See, having a grand plan helps you avoid mental traps like that.

Even so it tells you how skilled at writing King is that these blatant shortcomings never ruined his career. He’s so good at writing what he writes it makes up for the logical inconsistencies in some measure. That’s an ability to write that I hope never to have to possess.

My e-mail isn’t working, hasn’t been for two weeks… so if I’m not replying or anything it’s because it never arrived. Sorry.