Frederic Martin's Blog, page 2

Ravens, ravens, ravens...

If you haven't already gone down this rabbit hole, prepare to spend a worthwhile fifteen minutes or more (a lot more) watching the fascinating videos of Fable the Raven on youtube. Fable is a raven raised by Amy, a falconer in Great Britain.

It was Fable who inspired me to include the ravens Ardeth, Blackbeard, and André in the Vox Oculis Trilogy. Some readers found it a stretch to believe ravens were capable of some of the acts these ravens performed in the novels, however after viewing some of these videos, perhaps you will not find it so unbelievable!

If watching some of those videos fascinates you in the same way they fascinated me, you might want to take the next step and dig into this excellent book (as Blue does in VO: Forest): Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds written by a fellow Vermont author, Bernd Heinrich.

(BTW, have you spotted the raven on the cover of Forest yet? ;^)

-fm

"Forest"

Book 3 is ready at last.

Publishing September 1st!

It's always satisfying holding the real deal in your hand even if it is a proof copy.

It's been an interesting journey, my quest to become a bona fide author in the eyes of readers, critics, and myself. There is an ocean of books out there thanks to the self-publishing revolution and I am but a speck in that ocean. All I can say is I am enjoying myself and hope that at least a few people find some enjoyment and maybe even a little insight into human nature after reading what I have written.

You can download book 1, (still free!) here: Not Alone on Amazon You can purchase book 2, (still $0.99!) here: The Innocence of Westbury on AmazonAnd you can preorder book 3, ($0.99 'til Aug 1st) here: Forest on Amazon

And if you want to download a free advanced reader copy (ARC) of “Forest” (which has a few typos) you can download it here, but you have to promise (honor system!) to rate and review on Goodreads before Sept 1st. That helps get some ratings on record before publication:

Forest ARC on Bookfunnel

Have a great summer!

-FM

4% With No Parent

When I started writing the Vox Oculis series, I was worried that I was writing a "YAPOB"—Yet Another Poor Orphan Book—just another author trying to leverage the Harry Potter phenomena or the Moonrise Kingdom magic.

I admit, I am fascinated with the lives of kids who grew up without parents—just like Suzy was in Moonrise Kingdom, "I wish I was an orphan . . . I think your lives are more special."

Well, like any author, when I dug into the research I had a rude awakening. Like Sam's reply, "I love you but you don't know what you're talking about," I discovered orphans have challenges most of us can't imagine. In most cases, the circumstances that made them orphans are as heartbreaking as the challenges they face. And consider this: orphans are more numerous than you may think. Even in the small community that I live in, we have had several orphans—some due to violence or drugs, some due to accidents or disease. In fact, the title of this blog is the statistic for the U.S. in 2011 (the same time period as the Vox Oculis trilogy) of children under the age of 18 living with no parent. That's one out of every 25 children. And then consider that 28% lived with only one parent. More than a quarter of children in the U.S. live with only one parent. Let that sink in.

And that's just in the U.S. We're lucky. Worldwide, thanks to famine, disease, and war, there are 143 million orphans. The entire U.S. population is 300 million. The entire Mexican population is 129 million. There are more orphans in the world than Mexican citizens!

You get my point by now. Unfortunately, my research has given me the reassurance that the violent and tragic situations my parentless characters experience in the Vox Oculis series are by no means unrealistic. Outrageous, yes, but rare or unusual? No. On the other hand, neither is the love, companionship, community, and humanity I portray. I just strive to represent it all in a slightly unusual and entertaining way that might stimulate a conversation that might then generate a little higher level of understanding and compassion. I hope I was successful.

-FM

Review: The Grey Seas Under

When you are looking for a gripping adventure story with superhuman characters overcoming incomprehensible adversity, I think I can safely say that most readers do not start by filtering on "history," or "maritime," or "tugboats," unless, perhaps, you are already a fan of Farley Mowat. For those of you who aren't (yet) but are looking for something that isn't Hunger Games or Ready Player One, I would recommend starting a new adventure by reading The Grey Seas Under.

As you can read in other reviews (which are plentiful), the topic of this book revolves almost entirely around a single ocean-going Canadian salvage tug, the Foundation Franklin, and more importantly, it revolves about the hardy Newfoundland and Nova Scotian sailors who manned and captained this ship. (Yes, "manned," I am afraid there were no women crew members in the 1930s. Some progress has been made since). And what you will read in the pages of this book is an account of the exploits of this ship and her crews, and you will read it with almost disbelieving awe—so much so that some of you may even write off the dramatic descriptions and vivid storytelling as excessive poetic license.

Now I will not deny that Farley Mowat is a master storyteller and capable of spinning a yarn ten yards long, but I also believe (as evidenced by his personal recollections in many memoirs like And No Birds Sang) that he doesn't tend to overblow the facts because the facts themselves are pretty sensational. In the case of The Grey Seas Under I have assurance from a good friend (a grand niece of Captain Harry Brushett, whose experiences with Foundation Franklin compose about a third of the book), that the tales are not overblown in the slightest.

Man is capable of remarkable feats of unbelievable endurance and survival, and these are worth writing about and reading about with the same awe as any fictional superhero story. And The Grey Seas Under is really, at its heart, historical and biographical evidence that humans have real superpowers in industry, perseverance, ingenuity, and raw resourcefulness, and that perhaps the sea, where life originated, is the source and catalyst for those superpowers.

Four and a half stars