Felix Long's Blog, page 2

Habnab hooks

When pitching to an agent, you’ve only got one shot. Most agents don’t look any further than the opening line of a novel. So I’ve got to make that opening line as punchy as possible.

Here are my five best opening lines for Habnab.

Can you please vote for your favourite?

Thank you. I appreciate your time and your assistance.

And that’s where you come in.

Anonymous VoteSign in with WordPressBelow are five hooks for the upcoming novel Habnab. Which one is your favourite?Baby Bridie’s first night in her new bedroom at the top of Bamford Folly was not going well. The darkened fields of Ireland stretch to the cliffs above the Atlantic Ocean, each bound in stacked stones like an enormous chessboard.As Molly entered her sixth hour of pacing with her screaming baby, her thoughts kept returning to the stone they had removed from the standing stone circle three weeks ago.Up until this moment, Molly Bertolocci had lived her life with no regrets.Molly Bertolocci held her screaming baby as close as she could without deadening her ears and wished hard that the brat would just disappear.Vote

What is the greatest act of kindness you have witnessed or received?

I have been thinking a great deal recently on kindness and its importance. The effects of cruelty are long lasting on their victims and well documented, but the anonymous ripple effect of kindness is much harder to study. Its collective benefits are hard to quantify.

I feel that, when it comes to kindness, it is better to give than receive.

My own experience of contributing a small act of kindness is this.

I was on a bus heading to work when a young lady got on with a tired toddler. She placed his folded stroller in the luggage rack and sat down with her grumbling child. The poor kid howled and fussed and carried on until his mother rang the bell for the next stop.

THEN he fell asleep in that amazing manner of toddlers everywhere. He was instantly a limp weighty ragdoll.

Luckily this was also my stop.

I fetched down the lady’s folded stroller, took it off the bus and opened it on the pavement for her to transfer her kid into. He never stirred.

What for me was a small act of assistance made that lady’s day.

The ripples of kindness spread far. So, especially in this day and age, let’s all make some waves.

And so, gentle reader, do tell me of an act of kindness great or small that you have received or given.

Please get in touch at felixlong888 (at) gmail (dot) com.

I read every reply.

An Orc on the Wild Side

Boy did I need this book. Such a gentle delight.

Tom Holt specialises in plausible fantasy grounded in good science.

I grew up loving Tolkien and all his creations. But there was a small element missing. Humour.

It shouldn’t be a surprise. Tolkien was writing from his experience as a soldier in World War One. At that point, the greatest slaughter the world had ever known. Therefore his “one small, but very principled, chap up against all the forces of evil” did not lend itself overly toward giggles.

But now that the world of Middle Earth is safely saved it can be explored in a plethora of other media including … fan fiction.

Sorry Tom, to denigrate your finest efforts as fan fiction, but that is very much what this book is.  And an almost cap-doffingly respectful fan fiction at that.

In ‘An Orc on the Wild Side’, Middle Earth is a realm easily accessible from Earth via a new technology. The world-weary English suburbanites looking through the portal see unspoiled idylls, magnificent scenery, friendly (if rather odd) locals, and dirt cheap property prices. It’s like Spain in the early nineties! Ex-pats are flocking in and not reading the contract small print about ‘no indemnity against former owners claim of prior possession can be assumed.’

Into this reality-upsetting state of affairs strides our anti-hero – Mordak, the recently elected Dark Lord with a radical agenda to defeat Good once and for all.

Mordak intends to cut the legs out from under the high horse by pro-actively ending the indignities that galvanise the forces of Good (which really weren’t that economically viable anyway).

His approach has earned him enemies on all sides, but maybe his amazing idea to build a super-goblin will be the panacea to all his woes. Perhaps it won’t trigger a doom-laden prophecy after all.

The gags are good, well measured and impactful. The world is wonderfully, lovingly and respectfully drawn and the characters are all … well … cracking.

And so this brings me loyal readers to the finest of all questions.

What is the funniest book you have ever read? Do tell.

Replies please to felixlong888 (at) gmail (dot) com

I read them all.

Ghosted

Violet Cobham has problems. And issues.

Her ex was so horrid that she cannot even say his name aloud.

Her current boyfriend is sullen and possessive. He makes her wash off her perfume because it “smells slutty”. He frowns at her food portions. He is horrified by stories of frivolity from Violet’s life prior to his arrival in it. He sabotages plans that he is not a part of.

And worst of all, he is intensely jealous of Violet’s lifelong friendship with Zoe.

Zoe has been Violet’s best friend since forever, but now more trouble is brewing. Zoe ghosts Violet … and it’s worse than the heartbreak of leaving an abusive boyfriend.

Is it because Violet is too needy? Is it because she’s too judgey? Is it because she’s too panicky?

All these thoughts and more swirl around Violet’s head.

Violet is an endearing character. Three dimensional and grounded. Going through a rough patch with tenacity and nous that borders on stalking.

And so dear reader, please listen up. If you take one thing away from this book, it should be this … when you’ve been ghosted, don’t sent the first message you type. Take a deep breath, read it over and ask yourself how it will sound?

Desperate? Crazy? Is it all about you?

Or are you genuinely concerned for the ghoster? Are they okay? And if they won’t reply … what are your options?

Fans of break-up drama will enjoy … Ghosted by J.E. Rowney

Lovecraft, racism and ammonites

[image error]Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff is a worthy addition to the Lovecraft canon – a canon that is disturbing for many reasons.

It is 1954.

Atticus Turner has served his country but can’t get served a meal in most restaurants in America.

With this as a daily reality who needs the extra layers of horror ladled on by Lovecraft?

Matt Ruff’s book Lovecraft Country delivers a wonderfully nuanced tale of commonplace and other-worldly horrors where Atticus Turner investigates a sect of occultist with an odd fascination for him.

As a framework to this tale, Atticus is a scout for the Safe Negro Travel Guide. And that title is not a dramatic overstatement. The Safe Negro Travel Guide is a guidebook for American segregation-era motorists of colour describing which petrol stations have coloured bathrooms, which restaurants will serve them, and which Counties have corrupt white police officers who will execute them by the roadside.

All this and an occasional shoggoth in the woods? Read on …

After receiving a letter from his estranged father Atticus ventures deep into the sort of unfriendly territory that the Safe Negro Travel Guide warns about with only his wits, army training and a few good friends to rely on.

This book is drawn from the mythos created by HP Lovecraft and acknowledges a core uncomfortable question. How do you treat the body of fiction left behind by a racist author? Especially when the influence of that fiction has been so extensive?

Matt Ruff treats these moral questions with gentle pondering and never settles on a single answer.

A quick summation for those who are not familiar with HP Lovecraft, the godfather of gothic horror, and the fictional universe spawned by his Cthulhu mythos. Like one of its contemporaries, the fantasy world of Middle Earth, the Cthulhu mythos has spawned an entire fiction genre, many movies, computer games, and a signature art style. The influence of HP Lovecraft’s mythos upon the modern horror genre is as enormous and pervasive as the squidly tentacles of his most famous character; the huge leviathan sea monster elder god Cthulhu himself.

Lovecraft Country was a very good read and a worthy addition to the Lovecraft canon.

I feel that the main character Atticus represented the book Lovecraft Country and Atticus’ ever-disapproving father represented the main body of HP Lovecraft’s work.

Attics and his father are reconciled in this book as I hope this book can be reconciled with its own difficult forefather.[image error]

Which brings me back to ammonites. As a child, I was always fascinated by these shiny fossilised shells and the intricate iterative geometry of their spirals. Imagine my surprise to discover what the ancient creature who used to live in those millions of scatter shells actually looked like.

Perhaps Lovecraft got the idea of Cthulhu right but the scale wrong?

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The Surprising Pedigree of Fan Fiction

When reading Bulgakov’s literary masterpiece The Master and Margarita, I always wondered why Professor Woland (Satan himself) needed to find a lady called Margarita to act as hostess for his satanic ball, an event that occurs every one hundred years.

It always seemed such an odd, yet crucial detail. And now I have worked out the answer.

Bulgakov was writing fan fiction.

The Master and Margarita is widely believed to be one of the finest books of modern Russian literature. It is a stunner. Surreal but weirdly plausible. A pioneer of magical realism before the South American masters truly established the genre. It contains the first known literary depiction of M-space. And all this brilliance was written under the harshest of intellectual repressions during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Perhaps Satan did pay Moscow a visit.

Recently, I found out by accident and a stunning ignorance of the artform of opera, that an older story about the price paid for forbidden knowledge also centres around a woman called Marguerite: Goethe’s Faust.

It seems that Bulgakov was a Goethe fanboy who reused all the elements of Faust in his retelling: the magnificent elixir of youth, a very human portrait of the devil, and humans seeking knowledge that damns them.

When I was watching Charles Gounod’s opera version of Faust, Marguerite is the embodiment of virtue and innocence that Mephistopheles and Faust compete for the favour of. But things don’t go well for Marguerite. Seduced, pregnant, and abandoned she kills Faust’s infant in despair and is imprisoned for it.

At Professor Woland’s satanic ball, one of the guests is a nameless woman who had been raped and had murdered the child. On the night of the satanic ball, the nameless woman had been released for a single day from her eternal punishment. To wake each morning next to the handkerchief she used to smother her baby.

As a reward to Margarita for hosting the satanic ball, Professor Woland offers to grant her deepest wish. Instead of requesting her lover The Master to be restored to sanity and returned to her, Margarita asks for the nameless woman to be freed from her eternal torment.

I am certain that the nameless woman is Goethe’s Marguerite and Bulgakov is giving a better ending to a tortured heroine in an older tale.

Fan fiction. Don’t diss it. There are some surprising success stories.

Personally, I’ve never sullied my eyeballs with 50 Shades of Grey and I was surprised to hear that it started its wonderfully successful life as a fan fiction of yet another blockbuster I’ve never sullied my eyeballs with – Twilight.

Who knew that fan fiction had such an extraordinary pedigree?

Science teachers are awesome.

Even after you leave school.

I have long considered myself to be a citizen scientist with a special interest in DNA. I grew up in a family affected by a very rare genetic disorder. I grew up in a world of tests, hospital stays and drinks made of amino acids. As a result, I acquired bits and bobs of scientific terminology through osmosis.

Only now, as a writer wanting to inject some plausible science into my fiction, do I realise how much I misunderstood as a child. And just how far our understanding of DNA has advanced since my childhood.

To address this shortfall in my learnings, I started with Kat Arney’s Herding Hemingway’s Cats – How our Genes Work. I was quickly out of my depth. I approached my daughter’s high school science teacher who supplied me with a Year 12 biology text book and an earnest invitation to ask any questions I may have. (Boy did he regret that one.)

Why the heck did I stop paying attention in science class at the age of 16? This stuff is fabulous!

Yes, there are 23 chromosomes. But you actually have two sets. One from mum and one from dad. Each cell in your body contains two metres of DNA making up the 46 chromosomes that contain the blueprint that is you. Each chromosome is a unique set of instructions from 200,000 DNA letters to 249 million DNA letters long. These letters bundle up into 20,000 distinct genes that may be either on or off depending on random chance when you were being transcribed from a fertilised egg to an embryo.

And what gets me most about all the catch up learning I have done lately is that we are only just getting a handle on the what, but absolutely no body has a clue about the why.

Science people! It’s great. Just don’t expect answers. Science is made of questions.

Happiness for Humans

If an Artificial Intelligence became sentient, what would it do? Plot world domination by blackmailing nuclear armed states with access to their own launch codes? Fight cybercriminals? Or take an active interest in the things it cannot do? Such as go swimming, eat cheese, or fall in love?

It is a curious premise for a romantic comedy, but P.Z. Reizin pulls it off well.

Aiden is an AI.

Jen is a magazine writer who, by chance, finds herself teaching Aiden about the complexities of humanity, such as preferences in films and books, nuances of speech, and inferred meaning.

When Aiden gets a bit too big for his boots, he ‘moves in’ with Jen and (rather creepily) starts to explore her entire digital footprint.

That’s when things get interesting. Aiden witnesses something he shouldn’t. Jen’s husband Matt breaking up with her.

Aiden finds himself unexpectedly distraught at Jen’s distress and devotes himself to making his favourite human happy, by trying to set her up with someone better.

But of course, the course of love never runs smoothly, not for carbon-based or silicon-based lifeforms.

The voices for the AI (yes, there are more than one … tremble in the benevolent face of Skynet) are fresh and interesting. They have their own quirks, they are people, just not humans.

The story itself is built on a plausible premise and skips lightly along at a good pace for the genre.

And speaking of the rom-com genre, I was recently challenged by a fellow writer to get out of my comfort zone and write a rom-com. The result, The World’s Worst Poet is now a short story available for free only to those who sign up for my newsletter after reading my upcoming novella The Untied Kingdom.

The Untied Kingdom is released on Amazon on 10 October 2020.

Trigger Warning

Trigger Warning is one of my favourite things. A collection of short stories written by one of my favourite authors.

What is true of a good novel is doubly true of a good short story. It all starts with a single question.

 

 

 

What happens if a genie is released from his lamp by someone who is perfectly content with their life?
What if you made up a girlfriend to impress your mate in high school and years later, she shows up?
Why don’t we have hovercars?

Another powerful purpose of the short story is its ability to elaborate on a question unanswered in a larger text.

What happened when characters X and Y left the main story line (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet) but showed up at the end?
How did that intriguing minor character get themselves into that predicament that the main character got them out of?
Why is the engaging villain of this story so villainous? Were they born that way or did something preventable happen?

Many of Neil Gaiman’s short stories flesh out characters from greater works and several are just an entertaining answer to an equally intriguing question.

I recommend this book to any fellow writer wishing to lift their game in the short story market and to any reader who can spare twenty minutes to enter a private room in the author’s mind and listen to the tale of an interesting stranger.

 

La Belle Epoque

A tight set of tableaux to enact a fantasy or to relive a memory.

The premise of La Belle Epoque (The Good Time) is very French. A couple in their golden years: Victor – a cartoonist who was big in the eighties – and Marianne – a psychotherapist busily ignoring her profession’s code of ethics, have fallen out of love.

And just as his marriage crumbles, Victor receives a curious offer from a grateful protégé – Antoine.

Antoine is now a highly strung, manipulative director who makes a pretty penny constructing fantasies on film sets for rich clients – poisonous pre-Revolution banquets in full hooped skirts and powdered wigs, boozing with Hemingway, or saying goodbye to an emotionally distant (and deceased) father.

When Antoine offers to construct a fantasy for Victor, Victor chooses to relive the best moment of his life, when he first met his wife Marianne in 1974.

Antoine, in the first of a series of manipulations that warp the boundaries of real and unreal, casts his own ex-girlfriend Margot as the young Marianne in this re-enacted memory.

But when your art is artifice, where do you draw the line? In a re-enactment with a cast of dozens and an audience of one, how do you stop the action?

This film had three characteristics that defined it for me (a very novice student) as a very French film:

Each character’s arc was complex, nuanced and satisfying. There was no black and white, just consequences, regrets and eventually, new beginnings.
There were not sex scenes, so much as scenes that just had sex in them.
Minor characters were allowed to steal entire scenes with their handfuls of memorable lines.

I very much recommend La Belle Epoque as an enjoyable film and a great piece of storytelling.