C. Litka's Blog, page 30

Books I read in March

 

False Value Rivers of London Book 8 Ben Aaronovich B-

Gosh, anotherfantasy book. That said, I have been reading the Rivers of Londonseries since it first came out, a decade ago or so. I did, howeverfall behind for a time, as there was a time when there were no massmarket paperbacks to buy. I think that now I have read all the novelsup to this point. I know that I have not read the short stories.

The highlights ofthese urban fantasy books set, you guessed it, mostly in London, isAaronovich’s writing and first person point of view character,Peter Grant, a London policeman with magical powers. In additionthere are a cast of strange and wonderful characters, includinggoddess tied to the rivers that converge on the Thames in London. Thestories are set in our world, where magic exists, but is rare enoughthat most people are not aware of it.

This story is abouta secretive high-tech company developing an artificial intelligence,that already seems dated in 2023, with the advent of AI chat and artbots. As usual, I won’t go into the plot, except to say that it isconvulsed, and deliberately so. The first part of the story’s timeline is sliced and diced, telling the story out of chronologicalorder for no discernible reason that I can discover. Indeed, I haveno idea how long the story spans. And Aaronovich throws in a lot ofsub-plots, minor characters, and police procedural details that servemore to bump up the word count than advance the story. All of thisaccounts for the “-” behind the “B” rating, so you can seethat they were minor annoyances, especially the out of chronologicalorder telling of the story, and I still enjoyed the story despitethem. It was a better story than the one the proceeded it.

My other generalcomplaint is that the premise is that magic is so rare that it isunnoticed in our world, save for a small group of people. However, asthe series continues, magic plays such a large role in large scaleevents in these books, that it is unrealistic to expect me, at least,to believe that this is our world. If magic exists in our world, itis rare and known to an actual few, not the entire London policedepartment. I had the same complaint for the book I read last month,Fated. You can’t have it both ways; our familiar world with magicall but unknown, or a world were the existence of magic is widelyknow and as a result, the world would be very different. But that’sno doubt the writer in my outlook.

The Sunne inSplendour Sharon Kay Penman DNF 7% (page 71)

No doubt a perfectlyfine book, but not for me. I was looking for some historical fiction,and this one sounded pretty good. It’s about Richard III and theWar of the Roses. However, this book starts out with Richard as achild of seven, and to be perfectly honest, I am not interested inreading about children, unless I am reading to children. In this wayit covers history leading up to when Richard steps onto the world’sstage, but with 1233 pages, it clearly was going to take a while toget there.

My other complaintis my usual one – hopping between point of view characters. In whatI read of the story, we start with young Richard, move on to one ofhis older brothers, and after he is killed, on to Richard’s mother,at which point I called it a day.

My objection tojumping around in the heads of characters in general, is very simple:in my view, it makes them props rather than characters. Authors use them, and their thoughts, to tell what they want at any point inthe story, and when whey don't need them, they are just ciphers,pawns to move around. In these types of stories, the author is themain character, as they are the ones who play every role, jumpingform character to character, to speak every important line, thinkevery important thought. I want to be told a story by a person, aboutpeople, not sock puppets. Readers can get to know characters fromwhat the say and do, we don’t need to be in their head to knowthem. And not, when the author doesn’t want us to know what theyare thinking for whatever reason.

The Eastern Front1914 – 1920 By Michael S Neiberg & David Jordan B-

This is an overviewof World War One and the Russian Revolution, part of a series: “TheHistory of World War One.” As such is is a perfectly fine, wellwritten book. It includes maps and lots of photos, with many sidebarson different aspects of the war on the Eastern Front and thepersonalities involved in it. As I mentioned in my Waterloo Bookreview, military history without easy access to maps, is less thanideal. Here the maps were pretty general, and not adjacent to thetext, but that is the price you pay if you are too lazy to go outinto the cold and drive to the library for a paper book. As well asWorld War One, it covers the battles of the White Russians againstthe Bolsheviks, and briefly, the war between Poland and Russia. Theselater conflicts were very confusing in reality, and they remainconfusing in the book as well. Still, the book does the job it setout to do; give the reader an overview of World War One beyond thetrenches of the Western Front.

Winter on theHill by Michael Graeme C

Graeme writesintrospective novels of literary fiction. All three of the novelsI’ve read so far, are narrated by men of a certain age – ofsixty, plus or minus a few years – who find themselves inretirement a stranger in a strange land. They are single, lonely,usually rather bitter, if not angry, about not only their lives, butwhat has happened to the world in their lifetime. They are lookingfor something worthwhile to do with their rather empty lives. Withinthis narrative of contemplation, Graeme introduces characters thatchange the lives of his narrator. In this novel, it is a set ofmostly single women of a certain age who are members of a hiking clubthat he joins. Set in the Covid years in Britain, the story revolvesaround his relationships with several of those women, one of whom hastaken a vow of silence, and thus is very intriguing. It is very mucha slice of life story, not much of a romance, and in the end, not allthat satisfying of a story, as the key character, the woman whodoesn’t speak, doesn’t quite live up to her potential as acharacter, I think. We never quite get to know her, even as thenarrator spends more time with her. Maybe it’s just me, I likeromances, but unlike the first two Graeme books, Saving Grace,and the best of his that I’ve read, A Lone Tree Falls, havea strong genre mystery story that is wrapped within all the thoughtsof his introspective narrator. That strong mystery/genre story ismissing in this novel despite his attempts to suggest one. It ismostly introspective thoughts, and those get rather tedious.

Writer, Sailor,Soldier, Spy Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures 1935-1961 byNicolas Reynolds C

Non fiction. Thiscovers Hemingway’s life from about 1936 to his death in 1961 andfocuses on his ongoing fight against fascism, first in Spain and thenin World War 2. And documents his contacts and general approval ofthe Russians who were the only ones who were fighting fascists.Though he was never a formal agent of the communists, he had files inboth Moscow and Washington as a know lefty. It is a very detailedaccount of what he did and who he did it with reporting andoccasionally fighting in both Spain during their civil war, and thenin World War 2, where he used is fishing boat to patrol the watersoff of Cuba in order to locate German submarines, and then, landingwith the US Army’s Normandy invasion, and followed it on to theliberation of Paris. I found all of the details and characters a bit tedious, but that’s just me.

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L Sayers C

My reading chair isalongside my wall of books. And the books most handy from the readingchair is my modest mystery story collection. This is a Lord PeterWimsey mystery. It has no doubt been on my bookshelves for half acentury. I may’ve read it back in the day. Or not. I seem toremember that I grew rather weary of Lord Peter Wimsey bright banter.In any case, I had no recollection of it, nor did reading it stir upany. In this book, Wimsey’s older brother is charged with murderand Wimsey must discover who actually did it, despite the silence ofhis brother. Sayers writes an intricate mystery, but I found itrather slow going, and never got caught up in the story or themystery. And there were several scenes that I though were a bit overthe top. I have several more Wimsey books on the shelf, but I won’tbe getting to them anytime soon.

The High Windowby Raymond Chandler A

I reached over andpicked up another mystery, and this was the one I picked up. RaymondChandler and P G Wodehouse where the two authors that I discovered inmy early 20’s that changed the way I looked on reading. After adecade of reading SF where stories, if not just far out ideas, werethe focus, I discovered that with Chandler and Wodehouse, writingbecame the focus. Never mind the story, their writing alone was theentertainment. It still is. If you like clever, witty, gritty, andmarvelously atmospheric writing, with deftly drawn characters andconvoluted plots, Chandler is your guy.

The LastPassenger - A Charles Lerox Mystery by Charles Finch C-

This is more or lessa cozy mystery set in London in 1855. It is the third prequel to along running series of Charles Lenox mysteries. It recounts how helearned his trade and lost his love. I found it to be an annoy book.It is written by an American in a contemporary style for acontemporary audience, and as such has almost no authentic feel. Abunch of Victorian era tropes are thrown in but from such a remote,modern distance, that they add no atmosphere to the story. In thisbook Finch was either trying to showcase his Wikipedia skills, oreducate his readers, since he tosses in all sorts of factoids intothe narrative. Things like brief bios of a historical characters, thehistory of the anti-slave movement in Britain, why the tobacco plantwas introduced in Europe, etc. None of which are necessary for thestory. But what bugged me the most was that he didn’t get the factsright that he shoved into the story.

The story involvesfind a mutilated body on a London and North Western Railroad traincarriage from Manchester in Paddington Station. He has his hero usehorse drawn dog carts to search along the track from PaddingtonStation, explaining that “the width between railroad tracks allacross England was exactly four feet eight and a half inches…because that was the width of a horse-drawn wagon.” and goes on toexplain how that came to be, adding at no extra cost, that was alsothe exact width for the war chariots of ancient Rome. Finch then hasus to believe that not only could a horse-drawn dog cart be pulledalong the top of the two rails without the wheels slipping off at anyspeed, but that they could do so without making any specialarrangements on two rail lines leading from Paddington Station –without being run over by approaching or departing trains. Even in1855 a station like Paddinton would have trains arriving anddeparting on numerous tracks. However, leaving that impossibilityaside, if Mr Finch had done his Wikipedia homework thoroughly, hewould’ve discovered that in 1855 the width of railroad tracks wasnot uniform across England. The Great Western Railroad operated onit’s own wide gauge tracks, those being a seven foot and onequarter inch gauge (I looked it up on Wikipedia). He would have alsodiscovered that the London terminal for the GWR was PaddingtonStation. If he had looked a little further into the Wikipedia entryfor the London and North Western Railroad, the train arriving inLondon from Manchester, he would have discovered it would havearrived in London at Euston Station, the L.A.N.W.’s Londonterminus. So why Paddington Station rather than Euston? I’ve noclue. A minor point, yes, but if you are going to stuff your storywith all sorts of extraneous “facts,” get them right.

I will not becontinuing on with this series.

The Girl on the Kerb is Finally Available!

 

My 2023 full length novel, The Girl on the Kerb, is now available! Get your copy in the your preferred format today at the following online bookshops!

EBOOK

Smashwords: Here For FREE

Google Play Store: Here For FREE

AUDIOBOOK

Google Play Store: Here For FREE

TRADE PAPERBACK

Amazon: Here For $11.99

Amazon ebook version will be released on 6 April 2023 Here  It can be pre-ordered now for $3.99 Amazon requires a non-zero price. They may reduce the price to match the other stores at some point. Or not. It is up to them.

Apple, Kobo, and B & N ebook versions will become available within this next week once the book clears Smashwords premium process. All these versions will also be FREE.

The Girl on the Kerb

"Thered 8:25 tram crossed Crane House Lane and disappeared behindVilliers House, sealing my fate. I’d be late for work. I slowed toa walk and took another bite of toast. I found I didn’t care. Itwas that kind of day."

– HenriHardy, The Girl on the Kerb

Ittook several months for Henri Hardy to discover just what type of dayit really was. It was more than a day when his alarm clock failed toring. It was more than an unusually mild day in early spring. It wasa prelude to undreamed of changes in his life as an analyticalengineer in the Ministry of Innovation. It was a prelude to travel,adventure, danger, and romance.

Fifteenhundred years before that day, a devastating plague swept across theplanets, moons, and space ships of Earth’s solar system spanningcivilization. It ended space travel and forced the survivingpopulation of the resource depleted Earth to live at a near 20thcentury level of technology, while endlessly recycling theremains of their once highly advanced civilization. To that end,every aspect of their society is governed by an elaborate set of lawsknown as the Code.

Butnot everyone is content to live at the reduced level of technologydictated by the Code. There are those who dream of returning to spaceand the planets. Once such person is the administrator of Europe’sEuraEast region, the Duchess of Fauconcourt. She has made it clearthat she intends to alter the Code, one way or another, much to thealarm of the neighboring regions’ administrators. So when anillegal flying machine that crashes in EuraEast comes to theattention of the administrators of EuraCentre and EuraNorthwest, theyrecruit two amateur agents. One being Henri Hardy, the other isJeanne Murat, an expert in EuraEast. Together they set out as a teamfor EuraEast seeking the evidence needed to compel the WorldGovernment to preemptively act to foil the Duchess’ dangerousambitions. Murat and Hardy soon discover that not only had theirgovernments selected them as a team, fate had as well.

Nevertheless,their mission to EuraEast goes south almost immediately, propellingthem into one perilous situation after another, even as they seek touncover the Duchess’ secret plans.

TheGirl on the Kerb isa new full length novel from the pen of C. Litka. It blends a farfuture world with a nostalgic past in an espionage novel filled withintrigue, adventure, and romance, told in his classic lightheartedstyle. Like all his novels, it features engaging characters, wittydialog, meticulous world-building, and mysteries to be solved inunexpected ways.

C.Litka’s novella Keiree is set on Mars after this same plagueand in this same time period, so that The Girl on the Kerb canbe read, not as a sequel, but as a companion piece to that story,answering the question of what happened on Earth. And vice versa.

The Girl on the Kerb - Smashwords & Google Release Date: 30 March 2023

 

The iconic "WTF? This is a SF cover?" cover

I received an email from Gollancz on Friday indicating that they were passing on the novel I had submitted to them, which eliminated any lingering considerations that I might have had about publishing it myself. I had none, Nevertheless… this allows me to release The Girl on the Kerb a week earlier on Smashwords and Google, which is to say on 30 March 2023!n It will be FREE, as usual everywhere but Amazon.

This earlier release will allow the book to work its way through Smashword’s premium service so as to be available everywhere by 6 April when the ebook becomes available on Amazon. 

The trade paperback version is already available on Amazon for $11.99 

The FREE ebook version of The Girl on the Kerb will be available on Smashwords & Google on Thursday, 30 March 2023  Apple, Kobo, B & N versions should follow within a week.

The FREE audiobook version of The Girl on the Kerb should also be available on 30 March 2023 on the Google Play Store Books/Audiobooks

March Writing Update

 

There might still be room for one more book...

So what comes after the looming release of my 2023 novel, The Girl on the Kerb on 6 April 2023, you ask. At least for the purposes of this post, you’re asking.

First off, I’m hoping to enter my one “fantasy novel,” Beneath the Lanterns, in the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off this May. I wanted to do so last year but somehow missed the very brief entry window.  I am determined to keep on top of Mark Lawrence's blog so as to not miss it this time. With that in mind, there were several minor things in the book that sort of bugged me about it, so, with nothing more pressing to do, I spent a week reading it over and making some minor changes.

I started with rewriting the opening paragraph, which struck me as rather clunky. Next I felt that the story had gotten a little dated, even after only five years. In the story the daughter of the Empress of Jasmyne is sent to marry the son of the leader of the Azere Empire in an arranged political marriage. This daughter shows up looking like a boy and dressed as a soldier which enrages the groom’s father. I wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t her appearance per se – or what it implied about her sexual orientation – but rather that it seemed to be an act calculated to suggest that if the two leaders were expecting grandchildren – who would have claims to both thrones – they would find themselves disappointed. It is this implied threat that angered the Azerian ruler rather than how, or what she appeared to be. That, and the possibility that he had been tricked into accepting her by the Jasmyne Empress. Beyond that, I fixed sentences here and there that had even me confused when I came upon them. All in all these changes added about two pages to the book, hopefully making it just a little more polished, just a little better.

As for new work… I have pretty much let the winter slide by without working on anything new. I did some work on the third and likely final Tropic Sea book, Passage to Jarpara back in January, adding several new chapters at the beginning of the story I had started last fall. However, upon reaching the parts I had previously written, I lost interest and so far have not continue on. Still, I have some 38,000 words written in first draft that I can return to whenever, if ever, I get in the mood to write again. Right now I’m considering it my 2024 novel so there’s no hurry to finish it. I’ve got 18 months… But who knows? I must confess that with eleven novels and three novellas written in the last dozen years I don’t feel any great urgency. I’m content to let them can stand as my legacy. Still, it has been a habit of a decade or more to spend an hour or two every day writing, so I may well find that I have nothing better to do than to continue to plug away on that story.

As an alternative, I’ve been entertaining the idea of a sort of portal fantasy novella, writing it off and on in my head. However, I am not satisfied with my initial version – it offers nothing new at all and seemed almost too close to Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber'spremise, though far less elaborate, of course. If you are going to write something, it should bring something new to the table, which I haven’t found yet. I am not very optimistic about finding that new thing, but I'm still thinking about it.

Looking ahead to summer, I’m planning to play with my back catalog. Once the initial jump in sales that a new book brings, I will release a “boxed set” of my four Nine Star Nebula stories on Amazon. Several of them are not free on Amazon.com and none are free on Amazon’s other stores, as far as I know, so that a boxed set – at a sale price – might lead to some sales. If that generates any interest, an omnibus version of my two Lost Star books might follow as well as boxed set of Some Day Days and A Summer in Amber all aimed at the non-US Amazon market, were most of my books are not free.

To summon things up; if I should find something new in the portal fantasy novella idea, it might see the light of publication this fall. If not, then Passage to Jarpara sometime in 2024 might be my next work. But again, it’s not something I would bet money on

Looks like I'm going to have to update this image

The Making of a Cover, Part Three

Let’s address the elephant in the room. This is a silly painting for a book cover, especially one for a story that purports to be an espionage & science fiction adventure story. What gives?

What gives is that this is an expression of the great joy of writing and publishing your own work. You can do whatever you damn well please. The painting illustrates, with some artistic license, the opening lines of the book. And the opening lines of the book are me thumbing my nose at the received wisdom of what an opening line should be these days in a traditionally published novel. The fashion in books today is to have a opening “hook” to draw the agent, editor, and eventually, the reader into the story, like a fish. The opening should have a worm, a barbed hook, or intriguing lure. Of course you still have to land the fish, but let’s leave this analogy aside, and move on…

One of the many things that bug me about today's fashion in books, is the perceived necessity of hooking a reader with a dramatic, and often violent, opening scene. Sometimes this is in the form of a prologue, sometime this is a scene taken from the middle of the book that then has to be then walked back. and sometimes a writer just starts their book in the middle of the action and explains it later. The idea is to raise the stakes in order to draw in the reader. I’m not saying that it doesn’t work, only that it doesn’t work for me. In the case of The Girl on the Kerb, I deliberately decided to make my opening stakes trivial, by having my main character oversleeping and finding that he is going to be late for work. Basically, it's a private joke, but I write what amuses me, so it works, for me. And I’m willing to let the chips fall where they might.

The cover is in the same vein. There are more than a few exciting scenes in the story, but the overall tone of the book is similar to all my others; lighthearted and very retro, despite it being set in the far distant future. The cover is about as far away from science fiction as you can get, and this is somewhat deliberate, as I will be "marketing" this as an espionage novel first, SF second. While my regular readers are used to my covers, who knows how this cover will be perceived by readers not familiar with my work. My theory is that my covers, being different than the run of the mill books in the genres, makes the WTF nature of it stand out as something different, something worth investigating. That's my story, anyways. On to the cover.

Below is the original piece of art I painted for the cover. I take these photos of the art outside, and as a result the photo captures some of the blue of the sky, which usually gives the resulting photo of the piece of art a blue cast that has to be color corrected. The photo below is before I corrected for color, so the blues are bluer in the photo than they are on the paper.

As I mentioned in my last post about this cover, the painting is just the first step. After I take a photo of it and upload it into Gimp, where I can play around with it, changing tone, colors, crop and edit details. Below are the various versions I tried. In them you can see how I played around with color, tone, size and orientation it order to capture the mood I wanted to give to the cover - that of a carefree spring morning.

In this first attempt, above, I've brightened the painting, toned down the blues and upped the yellows to create a bright spring morning look. I faded the colors of the tram and distant buildings in the distance to create a greater sense of distance. And finally, I added the cartoon effect to sharpen everything up a bit.

In the next version above, I dialed back the brightness of the yellows, did not fade the distance, and upped the blues a bit. The cover is cropped slightly different as well. Things like this come down to a matter of taste and experimentation. It works pretty well, but I was afraid that the printed version would be too dark and dull.

In the version above I've brightened things up again, making the colors more saturated, in anticipation of the colors getting duller when printed on a matte cover. The distant buildings are a bit more faded, the tram less so. Plus, the crop is different, making the figure of Henri Hardy a little larger.

In the above version I've died back the brightness a bit and enhanced the blue in the shadows. The black outlines are a little stronger. The crop is a little wider so the character is a little smaller.

In this, the current final version of the art, I've once again dialed back the blues, and the black outlines. I have fixed up the tram so that it has more regular features and straightened it roofline a bit. The crop is closer, so the figure is larger again.

As you can see, these are minor variations, each has its pluses and minuses. It's take your pick. And one of the factors in taking your pick, is knowing that what you see on your computer screen is not exactly what your printed copy will look like, even if you have a color calibrated screen, which I don't. Images often look darker when I open an image in another context like the Amazon listing, so I'm not afraid to make my images pretty bright, confident that they won't be too bright at the end of the process. In addition to the image on a glowing screen is going to look different on a matte paper book cover. And those covers might be a little different every time the book is run. Being print on demand books, subtle differences in color can occur. For some reason my dozen author copies of my most recent release were printed at two different plants, and there was a slight difference in colors between the two editions. The nice thing about self publishing is that you can tweak things as you go, even paperback covers, since there is no long press run. (I saw a YouTube video recently where the cover had an error in it, a quote from H P Lovecraft, without the quote, so they had to place a sticker with the quote above his name on the cover. Having been in the print and newspaper industry, things like that happen. Somehow.)

If you look closely at the actual cover of the printed book above and compare it to the final version on the top of the page, you will see that I've tweaked the back blurb a bit. Not that it matters, since I do not expect anyone to find this book in a bookstore and turn it over to read what the story is about. The back blurb is there, just because that is how things are done in the real world.

Not being a patient fellow, and not wanting to wait 2 to 3 weeks after my announced release date for my author copies of the books to arrive, The Girl on the Kerb trade paperback is now, quietly, available for $11.99 on Amazon ( Here ) in order to get my copies as soon as possible, hopefully next week. My beta readers will get their copies a week or so after that. You, dear reader, are welcome to get you own paper copy now.

 

The Girl on the Kerb Coming 6 April 2023!

 

"The red 8:25 tram crossed Crane House Lane and disappeared behind Villiers House, sealing my fate. I’d be late for work. I slowed to a walk and took another bite of toast. I found I didn’t care. It was that kind of day."

– Henri Hardy, The Girl on the Kerb

It took several months for Henri Hardy to discover just what type of day it really was. It was more than a day when his alarm clock failed to ring. It was more than an unusually mild day in early spring. It was a prelude to undreamed of changes in his life as an analytical engineer in the Ministry of Innovation. It was a prelude to travel, adventure, danger, and romance.

Fifteen hundred years before that day, a devastating plague swept across the planets, moons, and space ships of Earth’s solar system spanning civilization. It ended space travel and forced the surviving population of the resource depleted Earth to live at a near 20thcentury level of technology, while endlessly recycling the remains of their once highly advanced civilization. To that end, every aspect of their society governed by an elaborate set of laws known as the Code.

But not everyone is content to live at the reduced level of technology dictated by the Code. There are those who dream of returning to space and the planets. Once such person is the Administrator of EuraEast, the Duchess of Fauconcourt. She has made it clear that she intends to alter the Code, one way or another to that end, much to the alarm of the neighboring regions’ administrators. So when an illegal flying machine, crashes in EuraEast comes to the attention of the administrators of EuraCentre and EuraNorthwest, they recruit two amateur agents; Jeanne Murat, an expert in EuraEast, and Henri Hardy, to travel as a team to EuraEast seeking the evidence needed to compel the World Government to preemptively act to foil the Duchess’ dangerous ambitions. Murat and Hardy soon discover that not only had their governments selected them as a team, fate had as well.

Nevertheless, their mission to EuraEast goes south almost immediately, propelling them into one perilous situation after another, even as they seek to uncover the Duchess’ secret plans.

The Girl on the Kerb is a new full length novel from the pen of C. Litka. It blends a far future world with a nostalgic past in an espionage novel filled with intrigue, adventure, and romance, told in his classic lighthearted style. Like all his novels, it features engaging characters, witty dialog, meticulous world-building, and mysteries to be solved in unexpected ways.

C. Litka’s novella Keiree is set on Mars after this same plague and in this same time period, so that The Girl on the Kerb can be read, not as a sequel, but as a companion piece to that story, answering the question of what happened on Earth? And vice versa.

THE GIRL ON THE KERB RELEASE DATE; 6 APRIL 2023 

The ebook version will also be available on Amazon, Smashwords, and Google on 6 April 2023. It should be available on Apple, B & N, and Kobo within a week or so after the initial release date once it clears Smashword's premium program process.

As always, the ebook version will be a FREE book on Smashwords, Google, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and a number of other European ebook stores. 

The audiobook version will also be FREE on the Google Play Store.

The Amazon ebook version will have a list price of $3.99. Amazon may match the free price some time down the road. That's up to them.

The trade paperback version will be available on Amazon for $11.99

My February Reading

 

The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham  A

This is my third Maugham book, and I really enjoyed this story. It is my favorite of his so far. It is mostly a character study of supposedly real people deeply disguised. It might be, Maugham had used real people and events, slightly disguised as characters in his earlier novels. There are several people who either claim to be or have been suggested to be the real characters, but if so, he as taken such great liberties with their real life as not to matter.

The story follows the life of a young American from Chicago who comes back from World War One changed. He has friends and good prospects, but all he wants to do is “loaf” as he tells his friends. He is in love with a young woman who also loves him, but she can’t understand why he doesn’t seem to want to work to make something of himself, given that he has friends who will give him the opportunity to do just that. The "Maugham" in the story meets this young man because he has a friend who is the uncle of the young woman. This friend, an American, got rich by brown nosing his way into European society, mainly the society of lonely wealthy widows, and dealing in art – selling the painting of hard pressed European aristocrats to wealthy American millionaires. We follow the lives of these people, and meet others along the way, as periodically throughout the 1920’s & 30’s Maugham encounters them in his life. We discover  how the young man lives and what he is looking for. And that’s it – Maugham’s engaging writing and his interesting characters make for an excellent story.

Fated, An Alex Verus Novel by Benedict Jaka  C+

I came across this book on Mike’s Book Review YouTube channel. He was asking viewers what fantasy series he should read next. This one, a 12 book series, is an urban fantasy set in London. As you may have gathered, I am a big fan of London, and so it interested me simply because it was set in London. I looked it up on the library website and the ebook version of it was available, so I picked it up.

The premise is that there are wizards and other types of magical people and creatures in our familiar world. I’m not sure if it supposed to be our world, or an alternate version of it where magic is well known. Since he makes a sly reference to Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, whatever that world is, so is this one. My C+ rating reflects the fact that while I enjoyed the narrator and characters, this is really not my type of story. The story is fast paced and the narrator fulfills what I really like in a story – a character that I can enjoy traveling alongside of through the book. All to the good. What doesn’t click with me is my typical fantasy complaints, namely that with magic, an author can  their your character a special trait to pull out when he or she seems doomed. That and the fact that the hero can never totally defeat evil, since it is need for the next book in the series. In this story, all the utterly cruel and ruthless people the hero betrayed, just decide to let him be after their plans are defeated. No doubt we’ll see them again. And again. The library seems to have more or less the complete collection, so I might read the next book, someday. Who knows, anything can happen even in the non-magical world.

Comanche Moonby Larry McMurtry  C+

This is the second book, chronologically, in the Lonesome Dove series of four books, but the last written. This takes place about ten years after Dead Man Walk, starting a few years before the Civil War and ending after that war. One might call this a sweeping tale of the old west. But in reality, it's an interconnected series of little tales of the old west, some concluded, others left hanging. We have our two main characters of Lonesome Dove, Woodrow Call and Augustus, Gus, McCrea who are now veteran Texas Rangers, but perhaps because they are more thoroughly explored in Lonesome Dove, they remain rather sketched in, Call especially. Many minor characters are more developed than the two key characters.

To be honest, before I finished the book I had started the review, and had it pegged as a B- book, a minus mainly because of McMurtry’s signature style, i.e. that of a bee or humming bird flirting from one flower to the next, or in the case of McMurtry, from the mind of one character to the next, restlessly, within a chapter, and from chapter to chapter, which can get tiring after 590 pages or so. While this technique allows the reader to get to know something of all the characters, it is doled out in small and often incomplete doses. Indeed, major things happen to characters that are never explained, even though he spent pages exploring little things about them. Moreover, he will sometimes start a story arc with a character and never finish it. Perhaps that is intentional making the readers think about the story without any resolution. He did, after all, win the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, so this can't be a problem for most. Still, I have to wonder is he just didn’t know where to go with it. In any event, it loses points in my book.

The book is divided into three books, each focusing on a different main story, with all the continuing characters tagging along. I was getting pretty weary by the end of the second book, but the third books starts fresh with the civil war, and I thought, well, this should be interesting. However, it is more of the same, with a great deal of confusion thrown in. It seemed like Texas had joined the Confederacy, and yet the Rangers were riding with “Blue Coats”, which I take to be American soldiers, i.e. Union soldiers. And, well, it skips through the war pretty briskly, in McMurtry’s signature style of snippets, of character and action. And yet, despite this hopping about, the book still dragged, with pages of the thoughts of minor characters, that I began to skip past. So for me, McMurtry did not stick the landing, leaving his main characters walking across Texas, failing again to achieve their mission, hence the final C+ rating.

Lonesome Dove is next up, but to tell the truth, I’m not really looking forward to it. We’ll get to it, but I’m going to take a month or two or more off before tackling 858 pages of small text.

NOTE the story depicts violence, killing, rape, and graphic torturer.

Life Class by Pat Barker  C

Looking for something new to read, I searched the library website for “London Historical Fiction” and came up Noonday by Pat Barker set in London during the blitz. While the blurb said it could be read as a standalone novel, it features characters from two other books, Life Class and Toby’s Room. Despite my rather disappointing experience with the Lonesome Dove series, I decided to start at the beginning rather than the end, and read Life Class.

Part one of the story follows two main point of view characters, Paul and Elinor who are art students at the Slade School of Art in London in the summer of 1914, along with two other characters, a young successful artist, Neville, and Teresa, a model (for artists to draw). We have a love affair and a love triangle of sorts with both Neville and Paul in love with Elinor, or maybe not. Paul, though a point of view character is either opaque or wish-washy. Actually both. Part two follows Paul as he goes to war working for the Red Cross as a dresser (one who bandages the wounds) and an ambulance driver. We get a slice of the human price of war in the field hospital, and letters between he and Elinor as she pursues her art career in London and a tentative affair.

Pat Baker is an award winning British author of the Regeneration Trilogy. Life Class is the first book in another trilogy about young English characters. English author, English characters, first book of three, perhaps those factors explains the rather cool and colorless characters, and the rather pointlessness, and damp squib of an ending for this story. While we sometimes get the thoughts of the two point of view characters, and have their thoughts expressed in their exchange of letters, they remained, to me anyway, ciphers. I never could quite make out what they were thinking since their attitudes seemed to shift constantly even if we were privileged to view their thoughts. Often, however, we had to rely on their dialog, which may well not have been fully honest. I expected more – more life in the story, and a more complete novel – than this book  turned out to offer.

The other thing I was hoping to find in this story is a taste of the times. A bit of Earl Grey’s line:"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."in the writing. However, all that was mentioned was that people were talking about the crisis that lead to WW1, which apparently her characters didn’t care much about. There was little period atmosphere in the story, though I did learn that even in WW1 there was a blackout in London, complete with streetlights dimmed and searchlights in the sky. Still, it was a I believe a Big Thing, and recognized as such at the time, and that seems missing in this story, which does not bode well for a story set in the Blitz of WW2. All in all, I won’t be reading further.

The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk B-

What the heck? For someone who doesn’t like fantasy and has given up on SF, what’s yet another fantasy book doing on this list this month? If I can blame the last one on my love of London, I can blame this on on my love of tea. The TOR blog recently had a piece on books to read while drinking tea, and this book was the one to read while drinking Earl Grey tea. My daughter’s family spent a long week in London last fall (a long COVID delayed holiday) and for both Christmas and my birthday, I received gifts of tea from them, one of which was Twinings Strand Earl Grey, and the other Fortnum & Mason’s Earl Grey Classic, so I’ve been drinking Earl Grey tea. Thus, when I found that this book was available as an ebook from the library, I borrowed it. And I rather enjoyed it.

It is basically a regency romance with magic, as well as a story about the emancipation of women from men’s expectations. The setting is entirely fictional, though perhaps on a human colonized planet – just a guess from some subtle hints, though it doesn’t matter in the story. The story is set around something like the “coming out parties” of England, where the debutantes began their quest to find a suitable husband. In this story, that quest is quite specific, as arranged marriages to enhance the families’ fortunes was the open intent of the book's "Bargaining Season" setting. While both sexes can possess the talent to summon and take control of immaterial spirits whose various powers can be used as magic – with the proper training – females of childbearing age are forced to wear collars that suppress their magical powers, since the immaterial spirits that they have the talent to summon can take over a fetus in their womb uninvited, thus giving the immaterial spirit a real body without the control a human. They can become powerful monsters with a body of their own. The hero of the story is a young lady of a family on the verge of ruin who is expected to land a rich husband. But in doing so, she must give up her magical abilities, at least until she is old. She doesn’t want to give up her abilities, as so doesn’t want to marry… but falls in love anyway. Reconciling all these factors and finding her own way to what she wants is what the novel is about.

There are plenty of twists and turns, that, in the end are happily resolved, perhaps a bit too sugary sweetly, but then, it is a romance, after all, and romances require happily ever after endings. But still, it is a light, entertaining read. Nothing too grim and dark here.

The Making of a Cover, Part Two

In my previous post I described how I put together my first cover, creating it more or less as a fun project to use on the beta versions of the manuscript. However, this past summer I decided to revert to a single, uniform design for all my covers – wrap around painted artwork for the paper version with two simple boxes. The collage version was neither painted nor did it wrap around, so I needed a new cover for the published edition.

I have also posted about my first attempt to produce this painted cover. I'd chosen a scene just a few paragraphs into the story, but the complicated street scene proved too challenging for my talents, so I eventually abandoned it. Below is penultimate version of the painting before I abandoned it.

My first attempt, a pencil sketch, with some color, and some pencil revisions (i.e. a larger, closer tram)

Having abandoned my first attempt, I needed to come up with a) a scene from the book, or a general scene that would convey the mood of the book, and b) one that I could actually paint. Both of these requirements where a challenge. The latter because I haven’t been painting more than the covers of my books for three or four years now, and I’m out of practice. Really out of practice. You’d think you’d not forget how to paint, but it seems that I have. The former was just as problematical, in that it would be very hard to capture the mood of the story – or a scene from the story, with my talents.

Since the story takes the characters into the steppes of Ukraine, and includes incidents that involved traveling in cars, I considered a scene with a car driving down a narrow, dusty road – grass and wildflowers on either side, and a whole lot of sky above. I had painted similar scenes without the car before. Here's one example of what I was thinking about.

But without the ocean and hills. Just the foreground and sky.

While this seemed doable, I feared that the car might give me trouble, given my impressionist style of painting. As I said in the post about the first cover, if you paint in an impressionist style, you want to make sure that viewers know that your lack of attention to details is deliberate, not a result of incompetence, so painting something that looked like a car in the free, impressionist style would be a challenge. I was also having trouble designing the painting that would wrap around the print version. I needed the action - the car - on the front cover so the road would have to go to the left, as in the painting above, but where to put the car and how big in needed to be without it being lost... I hesitated.

Then one Saturday I happened upon the paintings of Grant Wood, and more specifically, his birds-eye view of Iowa. Below is one such painting, or rather it seems to be an oil sketch for a painting that I've yet to find the finished version of. I'm using it here because I think it the best of the series of such paintings,  I've never found a finished painting that is, in my opinion, as good as the sketch. I like the freedom of sketches over the more rigorous painting of the final version. Anyway, the sketch:

Grant Wood oil painting

Seeing those paintings got me to thinking. Could I take the same approach? Could I use a birds-eye view of flat farm fields stretching into the great distance of the steppes, conveying the vastness of a major setting in the book. It seemed doable, from my talent point of view, and in keeping with my general policy of going for mood over specific scenes. So I painted the picture below.

The thing about covers is that the painting only represents a starting point. Once I’ve taken a photo of it and uploaded it to my computer, I can manipulate many aspects of the painting; its light or darkness, its tone, and colors. I can and do add lines for shading and sharpness. I can eliminate or alter things and crop it as I choose. Given the limits of my talent, all this comes in very handy.

I went to work on the photo of this painting. Unfortunately I don’t have the complete paper cover of what I ended up with since I deleted the level it resided in, once I settled on the next cover. Gimp, as with most graphic programs, allows one to assemble an image in numerous layers. Each layer can be manipulated independently of the others. The cover art is my lowest level and I add things like the title box, book spine and back blurb box, as well as the text, each on its own layer on top of the cover art. At some point, I decided to eliminate this layer from the stack once I had settled on the next version. All I have is the front cover/ebook cover version of that cover, but it does show what I did to enhance the painting for the cover.

As you can see from the sky and fields, I lightened and brightened the painting, shifting its tone more to the yellows. I also added, as I usually do, some slight black lines to the painting using the "cartoon" filter in Gimp. This tends to sharpen the image, and give it a little texture or shadows. I also brightened and enhanced the plume of dust behind the car on the road.

As for the  painting itself, it was supposed to represent the largely flat steppes of what is now Ukraine with a village and a large estate on a ridge in the distance, that is one of the scenes in the story. However, in the end, I decided that this was not very good artistically speaking, and too abstract for the cover of the book, so I moved on to the version of the cover that I revealed several weeks ago. In the next and last instalment of this series, I'll talk about that cover, and show all the subtle ways a painting can be manipulated, since I still have something like four or five variations of that cover still potentially active in Gimp version of the cover. 

The Making of a Cover, Part One

On a whim, I submitted the manuscript that has become The Girl on the Kerb, to the British SF publisher Gollancz during a rare open window for manuscripts without agents, back in June 2022. They said I could expect to hear back from them in 6 to 9 months. This left me with a lot of time on my hands, and well, idle hands being the devil’s workshop, I’ve used the last 7 months plus to play around with all aspects of this book, including some significant revisions. In this and in two future posts, I will detail my extended efforts to create a cover for the book that began as EuraEast.

Below is the first version of the cover. For the background I used a 1913 copy of A Satchel Guide to Europe and one of the maps included in the guide book. The only thing I altered, is changing the “To Europe” on the book to read “To EuraEast” in Gimp, a free PhotoShop like program.

First cover, with its first title.

I thought the red book made the cover too dark, so I reluctantly changed it to blue. In addition, thinking that this cover was too plain, I went on to make a collage of it, adding several more elements to it that I created in Gimp. The first of these were Press ID’s from the fictional Gazette de Paree for my two main characters. Jeanne Murat and Henri Hardy (AKA Henri Tardy).

In researching Russian country houses for the story, I came across the photo below of a Russian family in the late 1800’s.  

Photo credit: https://artsandculture.google.com/sto...

For some reason the daughter on the far left struck me as looking something like the vague idea of Jeanne Murat that I had in my head. I try to leave the image of all my characters up to each and every reader, but sometimes I do have an image in my head, and this unknown young woman, seemed to be Murat, though the braided hair she sometimes wears in the story also comes from how a host on YouTube sometimes wears her hair. Needing a mug shot, I decided to use this young woman on my ID card for Murat. For Hardy, I used an old photo of my late father-in-law, Frank, as he looked in his early 30’s. Frank was always an enthusiastic supporter of all my efforts, so this is a little tribute to him. Being small, I felt that they would not influence the readers' ideas of the characters too much.

I made the ID press cards from scratch. I found the globe graphic and designed them myself. I thought they came out pretty good. Missed my calling as an ID card designer.

In addition to the press cards, I created a newspaper clipping that is part of the story, with a murky photo of what was supposed to be a crashed flying machine. For the photo of the crash, I used a picture I took when I was 8 years old with my Kodak brownie box camera of a train derailment, and made it murky, knowing that most of it would be covered up by the guide book. I then added some shadows to give the effect of collection being in 3D, resulting in the cover below.

This then was my first complete cover. However, as I said, I had time on my hands, time to make changes, the first being to change the name of the novel to The Road to EuraEast because as I was writing it, I felt that it had a certain Hope and Crosby road picture feel to the story. At least that was something I was aiming for. Several months later, I changed the title again while I was querying agents. Being aware of a long series of books that have “The Girl” in the title, and thinking that the agents might actually be familiar with those books even as I doubted that more than one or two of the agent were old enough to be familiar with Hope and Crosby’s road pictures, I changed it to The Girl on the Kerb. And while the title does refer to one aspect of the story, I made this change with my tongue firmly in my cheek. This was one of several little jokes, including the novel’s opening lines setting out the stakes, that I did just to poke some purely private fun at the publishing world and its expectations.

However, after making this cover, I decided to revert to my original idea of having all my books have a standard cover design, as my trademark branding. In the last several years, I had drifted away from that idea, looking to make them appear more modern. I decided to return to my original standard and to do so very rigorously. That meant that not only would this cover have the standard size title & author box on the cover, but that it would have to be a painted cover as well to match all the other books, So, as the cover, the collage version was out. Unwilling to give it up entirely, I am using it as the first page in the paper version, below.

In the next installment, I will describe the creation of the first two attempts at a painted cover, both of which failed in one way or another.

Happy Birthday Sally!

 

We have a lot of February birthdays in the family, and today it's my dear wife's 72nd birthday. And since she has a new portrait photo, I thought I would post it here today on her birthday. Friends for nearly 50 years, married for nearly 45, mother of our two fine children, grandchildren to two more, she's my editor, proofreader, and partner for life. Love'ya Sal.