Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 53

Book review: The Dark Half by Stephen King

True fact: I have owned multiple copies of The Dark Half in my life, but have always somehow lost those copies without reading the book. I bought this…third copy, I believe, and I finally committed myself to reading it. I really wish I hadn’t.

King is typically known for monsters that are abstract and fuzzily defined. I get that, and I’m okay with it most of the time because he makes up for it with characters I want to follow. But Thad and Liz Beaumont are severely flat cardboard characters who I can’t believe in. Worse, I don’t buy the premise for the monster, which is Thad’s “twin,” George Stark.

Except, it isn’t his twin. Thad had an operation as a child to remove the partial remains of a twin fetus that was developing in his brain. So there is nothing there. No twin. No lump of goo also developing in his head. What King wants me to believe is that because Thad imagined a southern talking crime fiction-writing version of himself, his dead twin took over that personality as Thad’s pen name. And, because Thad had chosen to kill off his pen name, Stark suddenly rises from a fake grave to become an adult supa-killer. He and Thad share fingerprints, even though twins don’t. He and Thad share the same voice print, again, even though twins don’t. Stark knows where all his victims are. He’s much smarter than the cops, and he’s uber manly. He talks like a villain from a 1980s era Canon film. For a guy just born, he has amazing bomb making skills. But forget his skills. Where did he get his bomb making supplies from with no money, no wallet, and no ID? He was born with a full set of clothing and his principle weapon already in his pocket. As all twins do, usually.

And before I go on, I want to say that even with me not being a fan of cops, King’s depictions of the police as goobers or prissy so-and-so’s is just kind of pathetic. In one chapter alone, he said the FBI agents looked like H&R Block reps instead of agents, that they looked like they wanted to hold each other for comfort, and then he describes an agent eeking like a woman.

The supposed highlight of the book is a Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who is mostly just a figurehead with some home life scenes thrown in. I mention them because Alan’s wife is described one point as being “gloriously naked.” I have in mind an image of a woman laying curled on her side, the sheets glowing underneath her lithe form while a choir sings “Hallelujah!” But aside from giving me a buzzword NEVER to use while describing women, most of Alan’s role is doing legwork in the wake of Stark’s uber-spree. Pangborn’s charm wore off for me when he referred to a victim as “The cunt from Vassar with nasal problems.”

And King is humping the “twins share a psychic bond” cliche to ridiculous levels here, even having a scene where one baby falls, and the other gets a matching psychic bruise. Thad then uses this to explain how Stark knew to call Thad in a convenience store without knowing the number: “Because the sparrows are flying again. And because we are twins.” No, even if it’s King peddling this bullshit, I can still smell what it is.

But where the book finally loses me is when King insists that I read sloppy ass supa-killer handwriting, and insist that this “channeled writing” is coming from his southern talking evil twin who was literally just born from a hole in the ground.

And why is it that all of Stephen King’s writer alter egos have southern accents? Is Stephen King terrified of southerners? Do the sounds of a banjo make his butthole pucker tight enough to crack walnuts? Does a Dairy Queen make him quiver in his Maine-issued loafers? Cause in Secret Window, the alter ego pen name also speaks with a southern accent. So this feels like a trend with him.

I really tried to read the chicken scratching that’s supposed to pass as Stark’s next brilliant novel. But it just made my eyes sting trying to sort it out, and I realized, I stopped caring about King’s writer characters after Misery. Do I want to follow another of King’s writers on a writing journey under pressure? No. And really, I thought of the situation like this: if George Stark had all these skills to kill people, why doesn’t he know how to write his own stupid book? He could just know the right words from Thad though their magical twin connection, so why does he have to channel his book through Thad?

Ultimately, I don’t care to see where this story goes. I can forgive a monster with a vague origin in a King story. It happens. But without a strong cast of characters, this whole venture feels like a waste of time.

I’m a huge fan of King, but I have to give The Dark Half one star. I would only recommend it to completists who feel they need to read everything an author’s ever written.

Book review: Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Anansi Boys is the second book by Neil Gaiman that I’ve read, and it shares many similar themes with my first read, American Gods. But while I felt that book fell flat in many ways, Anansi Boys is a superior book which improved on the central idea. More importantly, Anansi Boys delivers on the premise in more satisfying ways than American Gods. Fat Charlie is by far a better protagonist than Shadow, and his story flows more eloquently, in my opinion.

Charlie Nancy, or Fat Charlie, is the son of a god named Anansi. Anasi is charismatic and a trickster, and growing up under his huge shadow, Charlie feels terminally embarrassed by his father’s outlandish behavior. He even feels embarrassed by his father’s sudden death, which happened in a karaoke bar while Charlie’s father was in the midst of wrapping up a big number.

Charlie doesn’t know he has a brother, but during his father’s funeral, a friend of the family tells Charlie many shocking things. He learns only then that his father was a god, and that he has a brother named Spider. According to the family friend Spider got all of the godly powers in the family, while Charlie was just…Charlie. The family friend suggests that Charlie summon his brother by talking to any spider. But Charlie doesn’t believe this being a bland kind of guy who doesn’t believe in gods living among men. He returns to his home in London, and he glibly tells a spider to send his brother by for a visit.

He’s understandably shocked when Spider does show up, and he’s got to be the bearer of bad news and explain their father’s death. Spider investigates the death in a way that proves to Charlie that Spider is a god, and then he takes out Charlie for a night of “mourning.” Charlie wakes up with an unknown woman in his bed, and from then on Spider’s influence in his life just keeps making things worse.

Spider is an irresponsible and carefree god, and after getting Charlie plastered, he makes a very bad attempt to imitate Charlie and do his job and have a lunch date with Charlie’s fiancée, Rosie. He exposes Charlie’s boss as a fraud, which almost seems like a good thing at first. But from the moment that Spider meets Rosie, all his plans for life change, and Charlie’s life rapidly slides off the side of a cliff. The fact that Rosie is the fiancée of Charlie doesn’t matter, Spider just knows that he wants her. So Spider, disguised as Charlie, seduces Rosie. And Charlie finds out about it in the worst way possible.

Charlie then sets out on a quest to get rid of his brother, and in the process, he makes major problems, for Spider, and for himself.

Without giving spoilers, it’s very hard to talk about what happens next, but this is a complex and sometimes muddled book. Spider’s meddling with Charlie’s boss begins revealing that Graham Coats, talent agent to the stars, is in fact a scam artist with a heart of coal. Because of Spider exposing his criminal enterprise, Graham begins a panicked plan to frame Charlie. At the same time, he’s also confronted by one of his older clients. He kills them, and then he takes off, believing he has escaped and pinned everything on his inept employee. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The main thing that made this a superior book to American Gods is that the sub plots and side characters here all tied back into the main story. In American Gods, there were a number of side stories that, while interesting, had nothing to do with the main story. They didn’t go anywhere or relate back to the man character’s plight. Shadow was kind of dull and unlikable, so I was actually grateful for any tangent, even if it wasn’t part of the main plot. At least then, it was an excuse to get away from Shadow for a little while longer.

But the side stories of Anansi Boys all tie in to the main plot, and I didn’t feel anything was useless padding. Fat Charlie is a much better character to follow, both funny and bumbling in a ways that were kind of endearing. So when the story shifted to cover the other characters, I liked those scenes too, but I still wanted to get back to Charlie and his side of the story.

Gaiman also should get credit for writing great dialogue. This was one of the saving graces of American Gods, but in Anansi Boys, he’s better able to weave together dialogue that makes me less aware of when the story’s gotten muddled. The quips and cracks are so sharp and witty that the conversations gloss over low points in the story. This is dialogue so good, writers ought to study it as “the right way to handle conversations,” in my opinion.

What really disappointed me about American Gods was the weak ending, and I feel like Anansi Boys does a lot better in this regard, although it’s still kind of a letdown after all the previous build up. But from the anticlimactic battle, the narrator goes on to explain how both Charlie and Spider embrace their true natures and become good gods. Charlie chooses a path of lower godhood, but it feels fitting, like a continuing legacy of his father’s “undercover” work.

So, I give Anansi Boys 4 stars, and I recommend it to fans of fantasy and mythology. In comparison to American Gods, I think it’s in every way a superior book that creates a convincing world of gods among men, and their epic misadventures.

Sandy got reviewed…

Yes, I found a kind reviewer with a blog willing to take a look at Sandy Morrison and the Pack of Pussies. While her review was fond of the work and offered mostly positive praise, she also said she wasn’t likely to read more in the series due to its grittiness. You should take a minute to read her review first. Go on, I’ll wait here.

So as you saw she was also worried that I’m plotting up a threesome for the next book, which was one of her main reasons for not wanting to read more. I can at least assure her and other readers that there will be no threesome in the next book, as the cast will be completely different, save for Sandy herself. There may be sex in book three, and I won’t say with who, but I will say I’ve got this future theoretical sex planned as a “fade to black” kind of intimacy. The point is to make a YA, after all. A graphic threesome that was still YA would be mighty darned difficult to pull off if I were planning one. But I’m not planning one. Because I don’t know if I’m that skillful to handle that kind of juggling act.

I realize that admission was probably disappointing for some of you, the one hoping for a threesome in the sequel. (>_>) I’m sorry for you, truly sorry. But the point of Sandy’s series isn’t to put her in a relationship with some actiony subplot on the side. Sandy’s relationships with other people take a sideline to her development in the mystical arts, and to her increasing role of importance in fae politics through no intentional maneuvering of her own.

In fact, I had started a draft of Sandy’s second story and thought I was headed in the right direction. I have, since then, decided that I needed to start over because I had royally messed up the introduction of Sandy’s new magic training partner, who is the nephew of her trainer Donald. Also I took Sandy in a direction that felt right from a “happy story” standpoint, but which felt like a cheap ploy right after I did it. That’s totally book four material, for when I’m ready to jump the shark. So the redo of this story will cut out that early wish fulfillment crap.

I want to close this post by thanking Wading Through Electronic Ink for agreeing to take my book, and for reviewing it. I’m happy that the reviewer felt enough to cry over the characters in my story. Also, it’s okay that she couldn’t take the werecats completely seriously. If I were facing a pack of werecats in real life, I’d be dead for not taking them seriously. I mean, it’s hard to be scared by a large grey striped tabby, yo. I’d be leaning down to pet it right before it killed me.

Anywho, thanks very much to the reviewer, and I totally understand her reason for not continuing further into the series. Since she’s not comfortable with more gritty work, I also know I can’t really offer her any of my other stories. Which is a shame, but I can respect that it’s not her cup of tea.

Woohoo! New review! And it’s a good review too! (^_^)

Yet another ungodly long writing ramble…

Right now, me and my muse are in discussions about future projects, which I suspect will cause even more people to hate me as my squicky releases pile up. But our discussion is not a debate so much as a reaffirmation of the reasons why I chose to to write in the first place, and a recognition that editing and revising have often diluted my stories.

First, I’ve been reading a lot these last few months, and a lot of what I’m reading is still relying on the same formulas. The hero that nobody talks to suddenly becomes the most important person in the world. The fate of the world hangs on the decisions of one person, or on a small group of people. Everyone always has the right answer to lead to an obvious conclusion. Morals are usually starkly black and white on these conflicts, and the conflict is typically resolved with someone being killed. Might makes right, and revenge is always the right answer. The hero works in a kitten orphanage, coaching crippled kittens to use mini-wheelchairs while the villain eats puppy stew every day for lunch…after strangling the puppies himself and saving the wrung out blood for the soup stock.

I’ve read so much of this stuff, and I’m sick of it. Lots of people aren’t, and some people will be buying new versions of the formula without knowing how old or overdone it is. Lots of people will love it, and the publishers will keep cranking out more of the same. I get that. So if I want something different, instead of complaining, I have to write it myself. Which is easier said than done, and just writing the stories doesn’t mean I can sell them. Writing a story isn’t a big fucking deal, but writing a good story with a great pitch to catch readers with? That’s not so easy.

I want to bring up a painful truth, which will upset some of you. When I was 14, I had a 6-year-old girlfriend, one of two sisters, who had been a part of my life for fully two years. She’d caught me with her older sister, who I was seeing because my little brother blackmailed me into seducing her. So the younger sister insisted that I do the same things with her, or she would tell her mother. To my credit, I balked, but she called her mother and got right up to point of saying we were naked before I grabbed the phone. I was stuck with her for two years, and it was only the last six months that I felt anything for her besides revulsion.

This was not a happy childhood, for any of us. In gym class, I used to listen to boys brag in the locker room about what they’d do if they had a girlfriend, and I had two, neither of which I could talk about, because I’d been blackmailed into these relationships and couldn’t stop them. It only ended after the girls were moved far, far away from us. And once they were gone, I was both grateful and very, very lonely. I also felt constant guilt for ruining the girls’ lives, and resentment at my brother for treating me as a cog in his plots. He was lousy at crime, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near him when he got caught again. (And he did, over, and over, and over.)

This is not the kind of childhood you see depicted in fiction. You won’t even find one of the stereotypical bad kids in mainstream fiction acting anything like me. I’m pretty sure I was one of the few seven-year-olds who could send a story to Penthouse about having two babysitters in bed with me and have it be a true story. But even at seven, I also understood that no one would publish the story of a seven-year-old making out with his teenage babysitters. Sure, looking back now, I can admit they abused me. But I was beaten by the boys daily for the way I walked, talked, laughed, ran, skipped…everything I did was too girlish for guys, so they beat the crap out of me. And yet, at the same time, I was a little stud-muffin, and I was doing things with my babysitters that the older boys could only wish they were doing.

But if I write about my life as a seven-year-old and tried to publish that, people would have a shit fit and claim I was trying to warp the fragile minds of all the precious, precious children. Just as I couldn’t send a letter to Penthouse when I was seven, I still can’t brag, “So there I was, seven, and slathered in baby oil at the foot of the bed…” (Which is a shame, because compared to my later sexual encounters, I actually got a lot worse for a while, not better. Oy, I was a lousy lover to way too many people.)

Kids in books and movies are sacred, and there are rules about what topics one can cover in the life of a fictional child. Roughly 80% of my childhood life isn’t fit for mainstream fiction. It isn’t all sex, but I was never a good kid. Unlike fictional kids, who react to bullying by becoming the heroes of their own story, I turned into an abuser myself. I became a shoplifter and a scam artist. I took drugs whenever I had a chance, just to see what they would do. I reacted badly to my upbringing, in other words.

There aren’t many books about kids like me, who reacted badly to bullying and parental neglect. Even if there were more books like that, a lot of people would turn their noses up at those kinds of stories because they think the act of writing encourages the readers to do the same deeds. The act of writing isn’t about sharing a darker perspective on life, or about shedding light on how the other half lives. It’s all about “promoting a lifestyle.”

With all due respect to people who come to that interpretation, I disagree. My point isn’t to say “Isn’t this kind of life great? You should do it too!” My point is to say, “This is how some people end up living.” Still, you’d be surprised how many people have suggested that I write stories like Peter the Wolf because I want other kids to be abused the way I was. It wasn’t my intention to promote Peter’s mindset as healthy, though. On the contrary, I wanted to show how the abuse he suffered had corrupted him and left him incapable of making the right choices.

I bring this up, because the muse wants to do a story about another pair of young lovers with a large gap in the ages between the two. That age gap is slightly larger than the one between Peter and Alice, which means it will make people uncomfortable even if they don’t read the story. The fact that it exists at all will upset them. I can’t say at this point if the story will get written, only that the muse is pushing the idea. But the muse is insisting that this story isn’t so important as the whole point of why I’m writing. It isn’t to make another book about a chosen one who saves the world. That market is saturated and full, and I’m writing these stories because not too many people want to speak about how “the other half” lives.

Which brings me to the next point, sex. When I first got started writing, I hated my own sex scenes so badly that I went out and bought a book, How to Write a Dirty Story by Susie Bright. I’ve hated a lot of sex scenes in fiction because the writers seems to be describing the scene with their hands covering their eyes. I didn’t feel like I could get a handle on how to write sex just by studying examples in the wild. So I got this one book, and ever since then, I’ve not once shied away from a chance to write a sex scene…in the rough draft phase.

I decided that unless there was a very good reason not to, I would write sex scenes to give some kind of idea of what was actually going on instead of just doing a fade to black. I don’t just mean taking stock of the limb and torso positions, but also trying to account for how the characters react to being touched. I don’t always write scenes with consent given. Some sex scenes are meant to be exciting and titillating, while others are meant to make the reader feel awkward and uncomfortable. But I try to let word choice and dialogue explain the mood. So even if a scene is “bad,” I want to cover it because it’s still a part of the story.

How then, to cover a positive sex act between consenting minors, without making it feel like an endorsement for real kids to engage in the same activity? Make it creepy and awkward on purpose? Or write the scene the same as one might handle an erotic story? (Which would make the story creepy to most adult readers anyway.)

This is where I’ve ended up diluting my work most often. In the original Little Monsters, there’s were a number of intimate scenes between Misty and Cora, and between Misty and Danny. Miguel’s relationship with Terry was also part of the book, though I think that was only for their first time together. The point is, when I say that I cut 100K of sex scenes out of Little Monsters, it’s not an exaggeration.

What happened was, I felt like the sex overpowered the story, which made it hard for anyone to see the characters. So I opted to cut out all intimacy that didn’t relate directly to the plot of the story. Both of those remaining scenes are between Linda and Jarred, and while everyone else is still having sex, their intimate moments happen off screen because they don’t add much to the story.

This dilution is a good thing, making the story less awkward for readers because it takes a great deal of the awkward moments off-camera. It also dilutes the story and robs it of its ability to make people uncomfortable. Because those scenes would have also shown readers emphatically, no, these are not good guys. They’re just a better class of abusers than the men the girls had first lived with. The story would have been far more troubling, but fewer people would have been able to get to the final chapters, where the deaths of two characters causes everyone else to fall apart.

But it’s a conundrum, you see? While the central question is still there, it’s been blunted so much by dilution in editing and revisions that it reads like an effort has been made to say “these guys aren’t so bad.” And that’s missing the point. They are bad, and their story doesn’t lead somewhere positive. That’s why it’s called a tragedy. But stripping out all the sex also removed a lot of the emotions that would have made that ending so much more of a gut check. Then, people could have understood the emotional connections shared between the characters. But the trade-off would have been that a lot less people would have been able to read halfway through the book. Losing the sex meant gaining more readers. Did it diminish the story? Yes. But it lowered the number of reader gut checks required.

Which brings me back to a future project featuring minors in a long-term affair. I’m sure a lot of their intimacy could be handled off-camera, and that does help to make the story more approachable. But it also cuts me off from being able to explore and describe that internal tug of war between desire and shame, of need and instinct versus lectures and social programming. People sneer when they hear of children having sex, but they do it to stop thinking quickly about that reality, that some kids grow up a lot faster than others.

Mainstream fiction is full to the rim with seventeen-year-old virgins who are just meeting the person of their dreams and gosh-golly-gee-willickers, they ain’t never even been kissed before! In all fiction everywhere, there are virtually no seven-year-old non-virgins who have long-term affairs with someone who they shouldn’t be with. Fiction doesn’t often explore that kid, the one who makes a terrible mistake and stays silent, and who lets the abuse go on because to them, eh, it’s not so bad.

That kind of thing sets in over time even if a person doesn’t talk about it, because every day, someone will invariably bring up childhood sexuality as being the most devastating, crippling, awful, heinous deed ever. And it doesn’t matter what the victims feel for their encounters, because all the non-victims dictate the terms of how abuse is discussed. Child sexuality, then, in all forms, is the grossest, nastiest, most dreadful thing that any person can ever talk about, regardless of their intentions. Why? Because we’ll either A) encourage more kids to do it; or B) encourage some adults to abuse kids.

I feel like these questions about whether or not to describe sex miss the point. I’m not writing speculative porn to sell to children. Even though Peter the Wolf features a teen main character, it’s not a YA book. It’s YA-ish, at best. The scene of Peter molesting Alice takes it firmly out of the YA market. I don’t have regrets about keeping it intact in the final release because that one scene tells you a lot about how messed up Peter is. No, a proper hero wouldn’t have done that to a young girl. But Peter isn’t a proper hero. He’s a monster, and he’s a monster you should feel uncomfortable watching.

And obviously, if I’m planning to write about a 14-year-old boy having a months-long affair with a much younger girl, my target audience isn’t teen boys or young girls. You won’t find me submitting my stuff to Scholastic or some other kids publisher. But who is my market? Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve never known that. I can’t even find a niche in the indie market, making me so niche I can legitimately claim to be alternative-indie. I only know that I’m writing because I’m tired of seeing the mainstream erase everyone else. In my time making words at this keyboard, I’ve written about many people who wouldn’t normally have a voice in fiction, because the mainstream isn’t interested in looking at fictional worlds from these perspectives.

Much as it irks me to admit it, my muse has a point. Aside from Peter the Wolf, nothing I’ve written has dipped into the dark and worrying pool of experience I had forced upon me during my childhood. When I try to talk about my past, people will do everything they can to make me stop talking. I’ve been complimented and insulted by the same people in the same conversation, and all their words are efforts to derail the discussion and move on to “nicer things.”

People like to filter their world now, and when most mainstream readers realize my fiction is probing at topics they never want to discuss, they will shut me out and shun me. They will say I’m trying to teach kids to misbehave. Or they will say I’m trying to train new perverts to attack kids. But what I’m wanting to share isn’t meant to be a training session for the next generation. It’s to look back on those confused moments in my childhood, when there were no easy solutions or rescues from bad situations. It’s to look at characters who don’t have any grand destiny to seize, but who instead live in an ongoing tragedy which most people would find depressing or appalling.

I wanted to write the sad stories about people who probably shouldn’t be together, but are because…because. I want to write a little bit closer to real life, to that sense that a lot of things don’t have to make sense, because real life is under no obligations to explain why this ration of shit got dumped at just this moment in time.

Part of this bugs me, but not because of what I write being taken as offensive to someone reading it as an instruction manual. I can’t help how some people will interpret the work’s “hidden agenda.” (There is an agenda, yes, but not that one, and it isn’t very hidden.) It bugs me because while this exactly what I want to write, I still have no clue who to market this shit to. Obviously adults who like spec-fic, but beyond that it’s not so easy to break down who I’m looking for. I just know I’m not for everyone.

As a writer, I vaguely want success in definable terms. I want to write a story like Twilight, something that captures the interest of a lot of people. I want to write something popular that maybe spawns a movie series that makes me cringe every time it’s brought up. I do want that kind of success, yes, but not if it means I have to write a story I don’t feel anything for. I also don’t want to make this one mainstream heteronormative story that everyone loves, but then they turn around and shun the rest of my work as “too squicky.”

So, for the foreseeable future (like, say through 2014 or so), I think I’ll be stuck in this low sales slump. The types of characters I wish to write about are not easy to sell to the readers. They don’t save the world, and they may have trouble even saving themselves. They lead uncomfortable and embarrassing lives, certainly not the kind that they would brag to their friends about.

Is there a point? Well sure, but it’s to give voice to characters who most people don’t want to think about. It means that by choice, I’m admitting that I write the unpopular characters; the lowest nerds of the literary world, where even other nerds will pretend like they don’t know these nerds.

I want to write Lolita from the perspective of Delores, and I want to be bluntly detailed. Why? Because it’s a story that needs to be explored, that role of a willing victim, one coached into early sexuality who thinks, no, believes, that this is really what they want too. I want to write about people who make mistakes, but believe they are doing these things with the best of intentions.

Readers can take this many different ways, and a lot of them won’t be positive interpretations. My desire not to cover my eyes while describing sex will make me seem like I’m writing a training manual. But what I’m trying to do is show what is going through these characters’ minds while they are in the midst of making their biggest mistakes. Some stories are written to highlight the protagonists’ greatest moments. Others are meant to examine the pieces of a life gone wrong. Only, I feel that very few writers use speculative fiction to explore “bad characters.” It’s easy to sell a hero, or even an anti-hero, in a fantasy setting if the story is easy for readers to grasp. So, saving the world is popular, because who doesn’t want to save the world? It’s not so easy trying to convince them about reading a fantasy where the plot is a teen werewolf trying to keep his dirty paws off of his underage girlfriend.

Well I don’t want to save the world, fictionally speaking. I want to make my stories about more personal concerns. I want to make my conflicts more personal, even if they risk making the reader feel awkward or uncomfortable. There was a time when readers were more willing to explore sad stories, or stories of characters making bad choices. There was a time when a character self-destructing could be a story in itself. That’s the kind of story I’m wanting to write more of, and maybe the cycle will change again, and a few people will eventually try my books out. Or maybe I’ll forever remain obscure because my choices of topics are just too awkward for the average reader.

Either that, or eventually the muse will give me a character who trips onto the mainstream by accident. What I’m saying is, I know I’ll continue to write objectionable books. I just won’t be all that surprised when they only move 10 copies. Yes, I wish it weren’t this way. I long to wake up and discover that ha-ha, you’re all kidding and today I’m really famous, and 10,000 copies of each of my books has sold over-night. But that’s the path of the mainstream writer, and where I’m going, even the literary nerds go “hrmmm…I dunno.”

And, that’s okay, I guess. I’ve got sales. I’ve got a few reviews. I’m never going to win an award, or get invited to a con to chat with my adoring fans. I have better odds of winning the lottery without buying a ticket than I do getting a six-figure advance for one of my series. My next four books in the publishing queue are all going to flop, badly, and after that, my muse wants to write another five or six flops about shitty kids behaving badly. I’m sure that if I play along, they’ll be stories in between with adults behaving badly, and those won’t be nearly as squicky or awkward.

But this is what the muse insists is my “brand.” I’m all over the genre spectrum, but the underlying theme for so many of my stories is, the main characters are typically victims of abuse. Some of my characters react to abuse better than others. Some are almost good people. So my intention isn’t to bring you into contact with a new best friend you’re going to love right away. My characters might make you wish they weren’t so messed up, or that they didn’t make so many lousy choices. But what I’m writing about is the path less explored in fiction. It won’t be popular, but that doesn’t mean it’s without value.

Which in theory means I’ll be bitching less with each consecutive flop. Kind of like with the current flop. Okay, I’ve rambled enough, so I’ll shut up now.

Ebook review: Between by Cyndi Tefft

Between is a story which didn’t quite work for me, but which wasn’t really bad either. It’s a story about the afterlife, and while I don’t really agree with the author’s interpretation, I don’t see much point in arguing about something that everyone has guessed at at one time or another. It’s like saying, “Nuh-uh, your imaginary castle isn’t like the one Jebus promised me!” So, taking this story in its own merits, it wasn’t bad. But was I swept off my feet and left breathless? No, not exactly.

Between starts with the rather exciting and tragic automotive death of the main character, Lindsey, where she meets a “transporter” named Aiden whose job is to help prepare Lindsey for heaven. Instead of going to heaven, Lindsey falls in love with Aiden, and they spend some time “casting” through each other’s memories to learn about each other. Just when they are becoming a Very Happy Couple, Lindsey returns to the land of the living and must learn how to live without her soul mate.

As much as I wanted to identify with Lindsey, I never quite got into her character. The same goes for Aiden, who was physically attractive, but whose personality didn’t quite ring any romantic bells for me. This wasn’t helped by the story’s fade to black method of handling intimacy, but then I might be biased for having read some awesome erotica in the last few months. I’ve got nothing against using a fade to black in fiction of any genre, and have used it many times in my own stuff. But the lead up to the fade out didn’t quite pass the wet test for me either. So while I liked this story, it never quite made my heart go pitter patter.

This is not to say I hated the story. Far from it, I found the author’s take on the afterlife to be kind of interesting, and I liked how later chapters allowed Lindsey to see her memories in a different light by listening to her parents. (Once she was back in the land of the living)

Having said that, there was a bit of tossing around thew word slut, and Lindsey’s sheltered life and sheltered views were what created some distance between me and her. She’s pretty quick to call her mother a slut, and Aiden is also fast to say that Lindsey is dressing like a slut. Aiden’s sheltered views are partially explained by his history, and later chapters show how some of Lindsey’s perspective is sheltered, but at the time, the way the scenes played out tended to rub me the wrong way.

So I give Between 3 stars. It’s a good story, though it didn’t quite work as a romance for me. This is part of a series, and I will be looking for the sequel, Hell Transporter, in the future. So I guess I would recommend this to fans of paranormal romance looking for a book about romance in the afterlife.

Book review: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Despite knowing a lot about Hemingway, I have not ever taken the chance to read any of his books. I live in Milan, and have many times walked past the building where Hemingway stayed while recovering from his wounds. It was here in Milan that Hemingway began writing A Farewell to Arms, and perhaps hoping to learn more about his life in Italy, I finally picked up a print copy at the local store.

Given Hemingway’s reputation, I expected a huge war story as sold by an uber-manly hero. What I got was the quiet and oftentimes undignified romance between Frederic Henry and Nurse Catherine Barkley. The scene where she slaps Henry for attempting to kiss her is probably one of the best in the book for me. Henry later gets to kiss her anyway, but when she tries to apologize, I love that he says, “You were right to do it.”

Cat has her reasons for not wanting to fall for another soldier, and yet it’s clear that she and Frederic are perfect for each other. So even though she’s reluctant to be courted at first, once Frederic begins his efforts in earnest, she goes along for the romance, even if she doesn’t feel ready for it.

In between moments of their budding relationships are brief scenes of a war that doesn’t seem very grand or romantic at all. When Frederic is injured, everyone else tells him he ought to make up a story about what really happened, to get a better medal. But Henry is an unassuming guy, someone with a great deal more humility than I’d been expecting.

Although there’s not much similarity, I found myself most often comparing this story to the movie version of M.A.S.H. Certainly Frederic reminds me often of Hawkeye, and the constant references to alcohol reminds me of the way the doctors of the 4077th used liquor to numb themselves to their surroundings. Catherine and Frederic drink a lot, but given the world they live in, they have good reasons for seeking a filter from their present reality.

The ending, without giving spoilers, is very tragic, and even though I saw this coming about halfway through the book, I still got moist eyes in the final pages.

I’m giving A Farewell to Arms 4 stars. It’s a quiet book that kept me pulled in with characters who are easy to relate to, and who make me hope for a better ending. While I like Frederic, I really loved Catherine, and I think she has some of the best quips in the book. She had me reading just to know more about her, and not really caring that there was a war on. And I have to respect a story like that, where I love the characters so much that I don’t even care where the story is going. I’m just happy to be spending time with these people. A Highly enjoyable read, and I’m glad I took the chance to pick up something old, just because it was there.

Book review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Really disappointing. Great writing style, but I hate every single character. An incredible feat, but probably not the one the author was hoping for.

The main character is irritating, and she lives with an abusive “father” monster and a monster family who “tries really hard.” The heroine’s got blue hair (cause she wished for it) and she’s an artist who lives wherever she feels like. At the start she’s in Prague, and she made he ex-boyfriend’s asshole itch with petty wishes because he “stole her virginity” and she doesn’t like him anymore. She has spare petty wishes because her adopted “dad” is a monster, the ONLY monster in existence who makes wishes come true. Demon dad sends the heroine all over the world like a lapdog hunting squirrels, except her task is collecting teeth. This is not good work, and the story tells me that the heroine was once shot. I’m told Demon-dad really cares, even though he treats the heroine like shit. That’s nice. I sure don’t care about either character. Or any of the bit characters either.

Once I got to the point of establishing why there was going to be a huge conflict, I decided to skip to read the last few chapters, and I still hated everyone. I’m sure this kind of story will appeal to many fantasy fans, because it explores the same tired tropes that fantasy’s been wallowing in for the last few decades. But from the start, this story’s characters rubbed me the wrong way.

More than the characters, I hate the scale. Couldn’t just tell a story about a few magical people who work in a larger wish industry. No, this is a story about the ONLY place to get wishes anywhere. With the wishmaster’s portals being invaded and closed, the fate of the whole world is threatened in this conflict. I don’t care that the story here is following “the bad guys,” because I’ve got no desire to read yet another story where the fate of the whole world rests on the actions of just a few bratty people. Why do we continually worship this idea in our fantasy, that “the chosen one” will come along and trigger some fate of the world plot? Would it kill fantasy authors to try exploring the idea that even with powers, sometimes characters can have smaller scale conflicts and crises? And why do we always have to have romantic subplots that suck added to these fate of the world conflicts? I don’t care if any of these people find true love. Maybe I might, if they weren’t also fighting to change the fate of the whole world.

The final product is kind of pathetic. Giving Giving Daughter of Sulk and Bore…Daughter of Smoke and Bone, one star. Wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and I wish the upcoming sequel would die a quiet remaindered death.

Book review: Crossover by Joel Shepherd

I bought all three books in the Cassandra Kresnov series a couple years back in Amsterdam, but kind of lost track of the books until this summer, when hubby read Crossover and the two sequels in the series back-to-back and declared them to be “really good.” I think that for a great many of the “target market” males, nothing will seem off about the character Sandy Kresnov.

Except, she’s a dude. In every aspect of her personality, the main character struck me as a male, and turning them and the other main characters into women didn’t change the fact that they all thought like dudes. I got what the writer was trying to say about artificial people not being sexually selective, but then later “character development” reveals that Sandy’s hyper-sexuality is unique even among her people. And…her sexuality is male. Possibly gay male, but really, given how poorly the author writes a sex scene, I would argue that this story might have been improved without making the heroine a “nymphomaniac.”

There are sex scenes in this book that I wanted to end. Me, Miss “I love porn” was instead begging, “Please, make the bad sex scene stop.” But it gets worse. The author cannot write a decent chase scene without messing it up. The author spends many, many pages on political lectures, and the biggest “plot twists” in the book are political plays. This book is so, so boring. This writer could make a blow job during a gunfight boring. There’s really no help for someone who thinks they’re writing “cool” and they are in fact ice cold and killing their story with way, way too many tangential details.

Feeling something for the “heroine’s” starting predicament of being violently dismembered, I stuck with this in the hope that maybe there would be some fast-paced payoff for all this slow buildup, but there is nothing this writer touches here that they don’t blow badly. This is not to say there aren’t some neat ideas in the premise. There are. But when you start a book by ripping the heroine into little pieces, and then insist that she’ll get over that a few days later, you’ve confused a man from an 80s action movie for a woman. In fact, if the main character were a dude in an 80s sci-fi movie, I’d be more likely to believe this ridiculous and contrived plot.

I’m sorry to get harpy, but this is my main point of complaint. Sandy is an artificial person with a human personality imprinted on an artificial brain. The story claims that she has a human sexuality because her brain is a copy of an organic human brain. BUT, Sandy’s internal line of reasoning, her method of coping with stress, her hypersexuality and indiscreet need for physical contact; it’s all male. Adding breasts, blonde hair, and blue eyes doesn’t change this conflict of her character. I don’t see a butch woman. I see a character made female simple to satisfy the writer’s need for some lame sexual fantasy. After all, Sandy is the ultimate badass, AND she’s indiscriminate with who she sleeps with. Dudes in the target audience are sure to love this combination. But to me, Sandy comes across as hugely fake, and I’d be willing to give back a star in my rating if Sandy had been Andrew instead. Because then the character would have been more realistic.

The same is true of the head of SWAT, Vannessa Rice, a character who’s “short” “cute,” and “considered fluffy” among her troops. This is all strictly male fantasies, and the women don’t really behave like women except at very rare moments near the end of the book. The rest of the time, they act like men. So for me, the story just wasn’t very believable.

There really wasn’t much I liked about this story, and I find Sandy’s reaction to trauma to be the first of many bad character development choices. It’s strictly a by-the-numbers formula, and it never rises above a man’s fantasy of how awesome women would be, if they only acted more like men.

I give Crossover two stars, and I’m sorely tempted to drop that to one. I can’t say that I’d really recommend it to anyone, but as hubby liked it, I’ll guess fans of military sci-will think it’s “super.” Mostly, I was bored to tears, and it’s going to be a long time before I bother reading the other books in this series.

Guest Post: Carrie Clevenger – The Bad Side of Writing

I’ve got a book coming out that I’ve been working on for almost a year. Champagne time, right? Cake and ice cream? No.

Time to write another book, because that’s what we do. Once you write your first book, it never stops. The ideas flow like water and sometimes you’re straddling two worlds. Frying bacon while getting hit with a sudden plot revelation equals burnt bacon. A night planned out with friends coinciding with a deadline or a character really laying into me about a story equals me staying home.

I can express disgruntlement with writing. A few, really.

No Friends

I have a couple of friends, but nothing solid and steady locally. My friends are instead in other states or even countries. Since I work at night for my real job, most are on the other side of the world. I flake on plans because instead of going to see a movie, I know I could do two to three thousand words. I’m inaccessible at times by my family that lives with me because I must write. My head will explode if I don’t, and brains don’t come out of carpet easily.

I have to leave the house at times because I get cabin fever. Since I work at home, I see a lot of the inside of my house.

No Spare Time

Every minute is accounted for and any event out of the ordinary has to be categorized and color-coded on my calendar, or I’ll totally forget about it. I’d love to sit and veg in front of the TV or level a toon on a game, any game, but I have to choose my priorities. I think that’s why music has become such an obsessive crutch for me. It’s the one thing I can do while doing something else.

No Peace

My characters are always pacing like tigers in a cage, anxious to tell me this or that. Some days it’s fine, but I wish there was an ‘off’ switch that could let me think about menial stuff, like planning a dinner party or remembering to change the oil in the car. Stamps at the grocery store. I have apparently bought rice and pasta seven times because I don’t remember that I bought them already. Yet I run out of bread.

Last week I had a driver honk me out of a plot stupor when a red light turned green. I was that dumb guy that didn’t know when the light changed. It makes me wonder if I’m behind another writer when the driver ahead of me doesn’t react immediately.

I Love It

But what can I say? I love writing. I love the power and freedom to create or destroy worlds in words. I can have anything I want in words. I can take you places you’ve never been.

This time around, let me take you to Pinecliffe, Colorado and down into New Mexico in Crooked Fang:

Sometimes a vampire’s past can bite him in the ass.

Xan Marcelles–bassist for Crooked Fang, vampire and full-time asshole, is content with his quiet existence in the backwoods of Pinecliffe, Colorado. But life at the Pale Rider tavern is set to become a little more complicated when he gets entangled with a feisty, blue-haired damsel and her abusive soon-to-be ex boyfriend.

To add to his woes, he’s gone from hunter to hunted, and his past returns to haunt him when a phone call draws him back to New Mexico. With the help of friends from his living past, he must get to the bottom of a murder, and figure out where he stands with his lover and his band, all while keeping one step ahead of his enemies. Hiding won’t be easy for him, especially with a mysterious woman dogging him every step of the way.

WARNING: Cussing, smoking, drinking and hot sex.

Main site: crookedfang.com

Lyrical Press, ebook format (all formats) to be published August 20.

http://www.lyricalpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=535

Amazon:

US: http://www.amazon.com/Crooked-Fang-Volume-Carrie-Clevenger/dp/0615668135/

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crooked-Fang-1-Carrie-Clevenger/dp/0615668135/

Katarr Kanticles also, print version releasing August 1.

https://www.createspace.com/3930335

Goodreads link: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15705395-crooked-fang

Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/CrookedFang

Ebooks review: By the River by Katey Hawthorne

This makes my fifth story from Katey Hawthorne’s work in two genres, horror and erotica. Having already read several of her erotic stories, I knew what to expect going into By the River. Katey’s got a talent for making up characters I can believe in, even if they just happen to have mystical powers of some kind. And those characters happen to like sex. A lot. I like that.

The character with powers in this story is Leith Marshal, whose mother was apparently a mermaid or a selkie. The story is told from the perspective of a relatively normal guy, Adam Kavanaugh, making him the perfect person to introduce readers to his new lover. And Leith has a lot of quirks that make him interesting. Adam is just returning to a small town, and he’s not sure he’s made the right choice, until he meets Leith coming out of the river. And from that moment forward, he’s so deeply in love that he can’t leave.

I don’t want to spoil the story, but I will offer a warning that this is some active gay erotica, with intimates sense happening very frequently. This is not in any way a complaint on my part. In fact, one thing I love about Katey’s erotica is that I don’t mind reading her sex scenes. They pass the “wet test” rather well, and in between the hot sex, she writes these fascinating people who I want to know more about. But if you’r squeamish about watching two hot dude making out, this book is potentially squicky.

The ending here is kind of formulaic, but in a good way. It first made me worry, and then it made me go “Awww.”

So, I give By the River 4 stars, and I recommend it to fans of paranormal erotica who like their leading men hot and wet.