Felix Long's Blog, page 4

A lesser known gem

Robert Harris is a writer’s writer. In this book he did something that I usually detest. He never named the main character.

However, Harris is such a skilled writer that he made it work beautifully. The main character is a ghost writer and is therefore not even credited with a name even though they are at the heart of an international conspiracy between allies.

This is a political drama with lots of heart and intrigue.

Sophrosyne – summary

Well ladies and gentlemen, it has been quite the ride.

Sophrosyne launched on a magical day. A day that only occurs once every four years. February 29.

Thanks to your wonderful support Sophrosyne launched straight to the top of the Amazon charts and sold 2624 copies on its first day.

Way to push out the boat people!

Sophrosyne is supported by the Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF). RADF is a partnership between the Queensland Government and Logan City Council to support arts and culture in regional Queensland.

Dark: A Dark Paranormal Romance

An interesting paranormal romance tale

If you like your werewolves recast in a Texan hipster cafe setting, then this is the book for you.

Hayden pulls beers and plays tunes for a living. Just another songster-gal working hard for her break to the big time. Except the break she gets isn’t the one she was expecting or deserves. She comes to in an alley with a cryptic message on her arm and funny hankering for raw steak on a full moon.

So she goes and looks up her ex. Ethan is a coffee brewing artistic genius convinced he was never good enough for her. And also a werewolf.

Sex, shenanigans, and frothy mocha-chinos ensue. Until Ethan’s pack comes knocking.

Enjoyable romance tale with a modern twist.

Available on Amazon

Derelict

Review of ‘Derelict’ by JE Rowney

This is a tale of failing love, hope and urban exploration.

Evangeline is a 28-year-old photographer stuck in a failing marriage. Others might have an affair … she takes up urban exploring. Eva’s fascination with the maturing beauty of buildings in decay become a metaphor for her own broken marriage. Eva hopes that she can restore, or at least enjoy what is left of, her marriage. But is it too late?

Her husband Mark, is snappy, distant, cold and yet is not willing to throw in the towel. His motives are murky but become clearing through the tale.

The choices that characters make, to engage or not, to quarrel or not, and to share or not, are what drive this story forward.

JE Rowney paints both her characters in a realistic and sympathetic light. Neither are lily white. Neither are totally to blame. But blame each other they do. And round and round they go.

My favourite scenes were of Eva’s urban exploration with her urban explorer guide Scooter. I like the care that Eva and Scooter show to the sites they explore. They are there to explore entropy. Whereas kids would be there to enjoy the thrill of wrecking and vandalism.

They are artists and explorers. And their reasons for the risks they take to do what they love are thoughtfully explored by the author.

An interesting read that will appeal to fans of bittersweet romance.

Gong xi fa cai – Happy New Year of the Rat

Wishing you all the very best for the coming year of the Rat.

The twelve-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac starts anew on Saturday 25 January with the dawning of the Year of the Rat.

If you happen to be born in the Year of the Rat, please do not despair. The first animal of the Chinese zodiac is considered cunning and wise.

So cunning and wise that, according to Chinese legend, when the Jade Emperor held a race between twelve different types of animal the Rat, playing a flute, rode in on the back of the Ox and was declared the winner.

The previous evening, the Cat had asked the Rat for a wake-up call to get to the race on time. Which the Rat neglected to give. And so, to this very day the Cat hates the Rat for losing out on a spot in the zodiac.

Should you celebrate Chinese New Year, may many blessings grace your household.

As a gift from me, please enjoy another tale of legend. Calliope is the first story in Sophrosyne – ten commute-length murder mystery stories in a handy app available on App Store and Google Play.

Five things I learned when writing Sophrosyne

Sophrosyne is the ancient Greek word for the ideal state of mind. Characterised by self-control, moderation, and a deep understanding of one’s true nature. But Sophrosyne can only be achieved through sacrifice.

Detective Hubert Maimone specialises in weird. He even has a list in the men’s locker room of the Didymus Police Station titled “You haven’t seen it all until…”

And today he will add “eight identical naked hysterical women running around the base of an industrial chimney and a ninth woman inside impaled on stakes”

These nine identical sisters are each named after a Greek muse. Their arrival will trigger a spate of bizarre deaths. And all these deaths lead back to Detective Maimone.

Short is sweet, but short is tough.

When someone finds out I am an author they often feel compelled to say “Oh I love to read, but I have no time.” And yet, looking around on the bus, everyone is nose deep in their phone flicking away on a social feed or playing a game.

Art must always transcend its medium. Just as poems become lyrics and visual art dominates social media, short stories must band together in a small literary militia and fight boredom where it is found the most – the daily commute. And so I decided to write Sophrosyne as a series of ten commute-length stories and launch it as a smartphone app.

But to write a memorable and engaging story in 3,500 words or less is a brutally difficult undertaking.

My advice to budding short story writers is this. Keep the character roster as small as possible. Keep the characters in one location. Keep the action in one scene. And when you are done, cut, cut and cut some more. Every word must earn its spot.

Twins are magical.

I’ve always thought so. Years ago, at a previous place of employment, a random conversation thread revealed that of the twenty-eight people in the office, nine of them had a twin. No one thought terribly much of it … just an odd little coincidence … until I got curious and crunched the numbers.

3% of the world is a twin, but in my office the rate was 32%. Those odds came out at 19,683 to one. Not impossible, but too remarkable to dismiss as just an odd little coincidence.

My brain burned with questions. Were there other twin clusters? If so where would they be? And why?

Over the course of several years these questions stewed away with other potential plot bones until it formed the spine of Sophrosyne.

Don’t summon anything you can’t bind.

One of the nine muses is Melpomene, the goddess of tragedy. I was pondering her story when driving to work one morning and had a minor car accident. What seemed like an odd irony should have been a clue.

Later that same month I had a routine screening test come back positive and embarked on a three-month cancer investigation. Thankfully a false alarm.

Three days after Christmas my neighbour’s house caught fire and I broke my foot when fighting back the flames with a garden hose.

And that was when the run of luck changed. Even though I broke my foot, thankfully there were no other injuries. We managed to get our elderly neighbours out of their burning house without a scratch.

So the moral of that story is this … you cannot summon or compel a goddess. You may politely request her Gift and patiently await her reply. But beware, that Gift will be within the confines of her celestial remit.

Find out what the story is about.

This simple question can be the most profound and the most difficult to answer. What is this story about?

I found one story in particular very challenging. It was the story of Euterpe, the goddess of musical instruments. The story was difficult for many reasons. Not least of which was the sensitive subject matter – the routine sexual exploitation of young people in the recording industry. The story was also difficult to nail down until the answer to the question, what is this story about, quietly dawned on me.

The story of Euterpe boils down to one line: “Evil needs only two things to grow – opportunity and impunity”.

Euterpe is about the hundreds of police officers who held hands, passed tissues and listened to tales of woe from thousands of women. And then carefully sifted through these statements to find connections and build cases against the powerful unregistered sex offenders who are so prevalent in the entertainment industry.

The patience and empathy of hundreds of police officers supplied the fuel that sustained the #MeToo movement and stripped away the impunity upon which the predators in the entertainment industries rely.

Don’t worry if you haven’t worked out what the story is about when you start writing. But you are not done until you know the answer.

In digital marketing no one really knows what they are doing.

I decided to launch Sophrosyne as a smartphone app instead of a conventional eBook because I wanted to engage with people who think that they have no time to read. They do have time, just not that much. They want to read something brief, rich and tantalising. And they would be open to buy it from the same place they get their other commute boredom-busters – the App Store.

Since I have already published my debut action-adventure novel To Conquer Heaven on Amazon, I am familiar with ad campaigns where you bid on keywords to briefly win the attention of a potential customer. I thought I could apply everything I had learned to the digital marketplaces of App Store and Google Ads.

Boy was I wrong.

When someone is flicking though their Kindle they are looking for a book. All you need to do is convince them to buy yours. The context of the transaction is set.

However keywords behave very differently in the bidding systems of the App Store and Google Ads. The context of the transaction is not set. There is a lot more ground to cover to persuade your customer to buy. My best success came when I focussed not on what I was trying to sell, but why someone might want to buy it. I changed my keywords accordingly and things improved.

And so, in the world of digital marketing, no one really knows what they are doing. Try, fail, learn, try again is the only rule that works.

Sophrosyne
Get it now on Google Play or App Store.

He did it.
And you will NEVER guess how.
Detective Hubert Maimone solves a series of bizarre deaths that all lead back to him.

Mindf*ck

When I was reading this book, I kept thinking of Rocket from Guardians of the Galaxy holding a handful of anulax batteries and saying …

“But they were really easy to steal!”

Christopher Wylie is the new Chelsea Manning. He blew the whistle on the outrageously shady shenanigans behind the 2016 US presidential election and during the UK Brexit referendum.

Cambridge Analytica, a firm that Wylie was central to launching, was at the centre of election campaigns that broke the international elections laws by using internet ads based on stolen Facebook data to psychologically profile voters and personalise narratives to persuade them to vote … or to not vote.

This book is not just the tale of industrial scale data crime and vote tampering, it is a story of the dawning realisation by the author of the awesome impact upon geopolitics by Cambridge Analytica and its clients and collaborators.

What I ‘enjoyed’ most about this book was the description of how Cambridge Analytica achieved its primary goal of compiling as many data sources as possible to individually tailor advertising messages from inferred psychometric analysis based upon Facebook likes. How could something so simple yield such devastating results as President Trump and Britain leaving the European Union?

Read on to find out.

All Rights Reserved

I am reading All Rights Reserved by Gregory Scott Katsoulis.

Dystopian YA exploring themes of intellectual property and free speech. In this world everyone has to pay for every word they say after their 15th birthday. Speth Jimes decides to take a stand and reserve her right to remain silent.

One phrase in particular gives me writer envy: “I remember my father claimed there used to be places called ‘liberties’ that would let you read any book, and all you’d have to do is show them a card.”

I lay awake at night trying to conjure a sentiment so fine as that.

Supanova … great times

Dear All,

I attended my first convention (as an author) on April 28-29.

Highlights were:

Being within touching distance of Peter Capaldi. A true gentlemen who gave his attention freely and engaged with his followers like a Messiah, not a Pope.


Kicking myself for not having a promo card for my ebook to allow him the option to read, enjoy, and buy the movie rights.

Selling copies of To Conquer Heaven to these truly wonderful folk.


And having a 9 year old girl answer the following riddle with a bloody close guess:

“Guess my name, oh sure you can!

An Irish imp called …

???-??-???

Alright, alright, just cause it’s you

I will give a single clue.

An Irish name, guess if you can.

Because it rhymes with Instagram!”

And this young lass guessed closer than most when she said:

“Hannigan?”

 

The Elephant – by Peter Carnavas

“I believe you, but is it real?”

Only a child could ask a question so observant.

How do you seem to your child? How do you seem to your child when you are sad?

Young Olive is a lovely little kid. But since she lost her mum, she has seen an elephant following him around. Big and grey,

taking up all the space in the room. Keeping him distant and distracted.

I’m not sure how this book ended up in my bag as I left for work one morning. A mixture of magic and mischief.

I started reading this book at the bus stop. My bus was late. When it arrived, it was packed. So packed and stuffy that a

poor pregnant lady sitting behind me lost her breakfast. The bus driver handled the moment well, cleaned up, and made sure

the lady had a seat. And I just kept on reading.

Peter Carnavas has done a wonderful job of delivering a difficult subject with humour, grace, and reflection of the

indominable optimism of a child.

There are so many strong themes, the effect of depression on a those around you, the importance of elders in the lives of our

children, the healing quality of love.

This is a very happy story. And a very touching one too …

Available on Amazon