Stuart Jaffe's Blog, page 7

Cover Reveal – Southern Belle – a Max Porter paranormal mystery

Here it is, folks! The cover for Max Porter’s third outing, Southern Belle. Once again, the incredibly talented Duncan Long provided the artwork. The book itself is coming very, very soon!  Less than 2 months!!

 

The post Cover Reveal – Southern Belle – a Max Porter paranormal mystery appeared first on Stuart Jaffe.

BOOK RELEASE! REAL MAGIC – A TIME TRAVEL FANTASY

So, here it is.  After much work, the time travel fantasy novel I wrote with magician, Cameron Francis, is now out.  So, here’s the cover:

 

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And here’s the back cover copy:

Duncan Rose hustles his way through life, taking advantage of the foolish and overindulged. His weapon of choice – a deck of cards. Despite the dangers, he uses his skills with sleight-of-hand tricks to cheat at poker and tilt life in his favor.

But when Duncan steps through a strange door and emerges in the Depression-ravaged world of 1934, he discovers a dark underworld of magicians and card cheats who use their skills simply to survive another day.

Swindling his way through this bizarre new world, he searches for a doorway home, until a ruthless mobster takes notice – a man also looking for the strange door and not inclined to share the magic.

In a race to find his way home, Duncan will need all his card skills, but more importantly, he’ll need to trust those around him or risk losing everything.

REAL MAGIC is an exciting time travel fantasy packed with real card tricks designed specifically for this story by renowned card magician, Cameron Francis.

And here are links to get the book:

Kindle US

Kindle UK

Print US

Print UK

Amazon Prime members can loan the book for free!

I’m very excited about this book. It was a blast to put together and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Guest Post — J.M. Ney-Grimm

Hello! I’m J.M. Ney-Grimm, and I live with my husband and children in Virginia, just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I read Robin McKinley and Lois McMaster Bujold, play boardgames like Settlers of Catan, wrangle my twins, and write fantasy with a Norse twist.

I want to thank Stuart for hosting me on his blog. I’ve read through his thoughts on creativity and inspiration and found them . . . inspiring! He’s collected a treasure trove of ideas on how writers create – both his own and those of others – and I’m honored to receive a spot here for my reflections. Without more ado, I’ll get down to it: my thoughts on the artistic influences behind my novel Troll-magic.

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The Twelve Dancing Princesses? Superb, but no.

Rapunzel? Lovely, but . . . also no.

Beauty and the Beast? Getting closer!

Were they favorites? Very much so!

I imagined jewel-themed bedchambers for the twelve princesses and enchanted castles for the Beast. I wondered how the tale might have changed if Rapunzel’s wisewoman never did transform into the wicked witch. Or what if the woodlands of copper, silver, and gold in the underground realm transformed into writhing metallic hydras when the crystal palace shattered?

As beguiling as I found the classics, it was the Norse folk tales in East of the Sun and West of the Moon that evoked my greatest wonder. My copy of the 1914 edition belonged to my grandmother. My mother enjoyed its stories in her own childhood. Eventually the book came to me: a family prize passed down through generations. How bizarre were its villains! How alien its culture! Grotesque crones challenged resourceful young women and men to pursue adventures weird and wonderful. Fascinated, I read and re-read it. If only there were more!

The illustrations by Kay Nielsen were an integral part of the book’s charm. Their strange beauty and elongated style presented a cool landscape of alpine flowers and glacier-scraped rock. I wished I could step right into the paintings to wander the quirky meadows, to encounter the knights on their magnificent horses, to liberate the imprisoned sun from the castle dungeon.

Like C.S. Lewis, ravished by a cold clear magic of “northerness” that embodied the sacred for him, I too was seized. I did not chose my re-telling of East of the Sun and West of the Moon (the title story from the collection). It chose me! Troll-magic‘s opening scene cascaded into my imagination and out through my pen (I wrote the novel longhand) like a geyser, its flow challenging my ability to keep up.

The landscape, as much as the capable protagonists (and troll crones), was a source for my creative energy. Storm-tossed waves – from “The North Wind goes over the sea” – [image error]crashed against the spire of basalt thrusting into a frigid sky where a turreted castle surveyed the arctic expanse surrounding it. Who lived there? And how did she come there? The places captured me first, and then showed me their inhabitants and histories.

In spite of my fascination with setting, it’s the characters that drive my tales. I wrap their lives around me and see what they see, think their thoughts, feel their choices. The moments that really matter – when heroic compassion emerges or grievous mistakes are made or deep wisdom coalesces – arrive as I write the scenes, surprising even me at times.

I knew the results would be poor. But the intensity of her reaction was an astonishment to me. In ghost form, Helaina can see, hear, and touch the world around her almost normally. But her hands pass right through her own body as though it were not there. Her only certainty that she is more than a dream or a figment of imagination comes from her ability to touch things. After inducing a migraine headache, her herbal remedy erodes her sense of touch, starting at the feet and edging upward.The first such surprise in Troll-magic occurred with Helaina. She’s an herbalist trapped by a curse in the insubstantial body of a ghost, and she experiments with the wrong remedy to cure her malady.

Helaina panics. Totally logical, when you analyze it, but I didn’t arrive there through analysis. I was Helaina, feeling the sensation in her feet disappearing, feeling it fade from her legs. I felt her dread. I felt her mad run for the swimming grotto nearby, where she flung herself into its pool. The water counteracts the disaster wrought by her herbs, and her relief is as strong as her previous terror.

Then Helaina notices that her ghostly body is visible beneath the water, its boundaries delineated where the liquid ends and her incorporeal self begins. She revels in it, ecstatic. And I reveled in the wholly unexpected scene. This was creativity at its most exciting. I’d almost say, “This is why I write,” except that the first inklings of a story are equally fun. And pursuing my characters all the way through their adventures satisfies something deep inside me.

Ancient folk tales, art nouveau paintings, and the magic evoked by the writing process itself all inspired Troll-magic. Other wellsprings of inspiration contributed, but instead of exploring more of what generated my tale, I’ll invite you to experience the story itself. Here’s the opening passage in which we meet Helaina’s foster son, Kellor.

 

In darkness he touched his nose, felt his ears. Oh Sias! They were larger. More deformed. Horror shook his fingertips. What should he do? What could he do?

Chaotic memory gripped him. Stabbing tangerine light and agonizing pain. His body taken by unfathomable force and twisted, reshaped.

What was this? Where was this? None of it made sense. And the absolute blackness didn’t help. He took a deep breath. And another. There. He was steadier now. Some sort of solution existed. He could sense it, just out of reach. Closing his eyes against th

e dark, he stretched his mind. He’d done . . . something . . . last . . . night? It didn’t matter when. What was it he’d done? He tried again to call it to mind, pressing against the blankness in his thoughts. Breathing was part of it; patterned breathing. Which reminded him that holding his breath wouldn’t help. Someone . . . a teacher, had told him that tension inhibited . . . something. He sighed. Patterned breathing. Fine, he would do some. He breathed out to a slow count of three, then in for the same.

And then he had it. Patterned breathing and patterning. He was a pattern-master. Or, at least, an apprentice one. And he’d done . . . not patterning, last night, but a forbidden version of it. Something other. He should try it again. It had worked. Maybe it would work again. Could he do it?

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There’s more, of course. Most online bookstores, such as Amazon or Kobo, make many pages available for sampling so that prospective readers can decide whether a story is to their taste. And then there’s the whole book! If Norse folk tales intrigue you, if fabulous worlds excite you, and if surprises delight you, give it a look. Or visit my blog at http://jmney-grimm.com. I’d love to chat with you there.

Delayed Inspiration or Dealing with The Slog

I talk a whole lot on this blog about inspiration for my writing, but there’s an underside to that conversation that I haven’t discussed yet — what about the times when there is no inspiration?  Does that even happen?

Now, I’m not talking about the Muse.  Waiting around for that shoulder-rubbing, mind-blowing, exotic yet somewhat demanding gal to show up and “inspire” a story is like waiting for a taxi to show up in Nebraska.  I’m sure it happens, but it’s better not to count on it.

What I am talking about here is the inspiration for ideas in a story. Writers get asked about this all the time (as in “where do you get your ideas?”) and most of us say, in one form or another, that ideas are easy.  They’re everywhere. The trick is knowing which ones are good.  But if ideas are truly everywhere, then why do I find myself staring at my computer screen, clueless as to how to build the next scene?  I already know what needs to happen in general.  I work off a loose outline.  Yet some days, I sit down to write and feel so, well, uninspired.

Where’s that spark that got the whole thing going?  Where’s that idea to carry me through? Where’s the excitement I felt writing the last scene?  And if I can’t get inspired about this next scene, how will you folks, my readers, get into it?

Sadly, for writers, this is a common occurrence in the course of writing a novel. Many writers call this “the slog.”  For some, it’s around 1/3 of the way through.  Others hit at the halfway point.  And a few, hit the slog right before the finale.  For me, it changes from book to book — though more often than not, it hits somewhere around halfway.

In all my years talking with other writers on this subject, I’ve only discovered one method for dealing with this — push on through. Just keep going. Keep writing. Get through the ugly, no good scene and move on. And I’ve noticed two things happen.  First, when you go to revise the novel and you hit that scene, you discover it’s not so bad after all, and only needs a little touch here or there.  Or second, when you go to revise the novel and you hit that scene, you discover it’s every bit as bad as you thought, BUT now you can see exactly what needs to be done. In a sense, the slog is really delayed inspiration.  Painful to go through, but when you emerge on the other side, the inspiration is waiting for you.

My question is this: Do any of you go through this, too, or is it just writers? Do you have a “slog” in your work that you have to push through in order to find inspiration on the other side?

Oh, and can any of you guess what stage of writing I’m at with the latest WIP? [image error]

Productive Inspiration

While inspiration comes from everywhere, it can still take me by surprise.

Case in point: this past week, Dean Wesley Smith chronicled his writing of a 70k word novel-for-hire.  In other words, he was ghost-writing for someone and had about 10 days to write 70,000 words.  You can see it all here.

Now, there’s a lot that’s cool about this but the part that amazed me was how he accomplished this as a whole.  He didn’t sit down and crank out 7k words in a chunk of non-stop hours.  Nope.  He wrote for an hour, had lunch, wrote for an hour, stretch, wrote for a few minutes, watched tv, napped, ran errands, wrote more.  I don’t know why this shocked me so much.  On a smaller scale, I do the same thing.  I write an hour in the morning between getting the boy to school, answering emails, dealing with house chores, and then I write one or two sessions in the afternoon.  Not surprisingly, my output is not quite as high as his.

The inspiration is simply this: If I add just one more session somewhere in my day, I could probably write another novel a year beyond what I’m already doing.  That’s not a crazy burden to add.  In fact, that’s very doable.  So, I’ve decided to give it a try.  One extra session of writing every day.  Build it into a habit, and with any luck, I’ll see my productivity grow by leaps and bounds.

And, of course, that means more books for you all to read!

Who is Hack? — A Guest Post from D.J. Gelner

Hi everyone, I’m D.J. Stuart’s been kind enough to let me guest post today. If you’re interested in reading more, I’m giving away one of my books right now on Kindle: Hack: Innings 1-3. The main character of that book, Hack O’Callahan, is a crotchety old baseball manager with profane sensibilities. He’s also the topic of today’s guest blog. Enjoy!

If the American high school experience is as universal as a movie like Dazed and Confused makes it out to be, then we all had at least one old school, hard-assed gym teacher or coach in our pasts.

You know the type: they berated you to scurry up the rope climb a bit faster, or forced you to keep running well through dusk as the streetlights calmly flickered to life. Or they screamed at you for an errant pass or wrong technique in a sport in which you had absolutely zero interest.

I played baseball and football all through high school, so I had my share of these types of coaches. But as I got older and worked my way into leadership positions on those teams, I found that often the crusty, abrasive exterior often hid a genuine love for the sport that ran far deeper than any of their flaws.

Most of these men (at least they were men in my experience) certainly were flawed; you’d hear the odd rumor of a problem with booze, or they’d give in to politics at some point and play one of their buddy’s sons instead of a more deserving, yet less well-connected, player.

Yet perhaps it’s those very deficiencies that make for such interesting characters. In my experience covering pro sports, the higher up a coach gets, the greater the sacrifices he must make. Long nights away from family and friends, a relentless and obnoxious press (sorry about that…), and larger paychecks drive expectations ever-higher. These coaches operate under some of the most intense working conditions of anyone. It’s enough to break a man.

Of course, a coach who enjoys a lot of success can also fall victim to the pitfalls of ego and arrogance, more deficiencies to add to the pile until you have the potential for a character rotten to his core.

When we meet Hack O’Callahan, that’s exactly what he is. He’s set in his ways. He’s profane. He’s arrogant. He’s xenophobic.

And yet, there’s something endearing about him. He has a soft side that no one gets to see that’s similar to a lot of those coaches I had back in the day. He’ll fight for his players to the death, and even then he’ll plunge into the fires of hell to save them.

There’s something about that loyalty, that utter devotion to the idea of “the team,” even when a man’s personal life is in absolute shambles, that was the germ of the idea for Hack.

Not only that, but a couple of the anecdotes are based on real life events, namely when Hack berates the team and says, “Yer’ nothin’ but a bunch’a girls!” and expects the players to be horrified. That happened my freshman year on JV baseball. We were losing by ten runs in the third inning, and our coach (a real character) said that in the dugout.

You know what? We won the game by seven.

Another habit Hack shares with a different coach of mine is carrying his bat around and using it as a cane. Again, I took some liberties with the story; my coach never would use it the same way Hack did. But I thought it was a cool little detail that added a bit of authenticity to the story.

I love using those little extra bits of experience or research to really paint a vivid picture in the reader’s mind and create a connection that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

If I can also help folks have a laugh or cry along the way? Well, that’s just gravy.

 D.J. Gelner is a fiction and freelance writer from St. Louis, Missouri. His novel, Jesus Was a Time Traveler, is available on  Amazon , Nook, Kobo, iBooks and in Paperback . The first two installments of his second series, the Hack trilogy, are now available for Kindle (here’s the sequel). Follow him on twitter (@djgelner) or facebook (here). E-mail him at  djgelbooks@gmail.com

 

The Japanese Influence

From the time I was a kid, I’ve enjoyed the bits of Japanese animation and cinema that made it my way.  Back then, it was Speed Racer, Star Blazers, and every Godzilla vs whatever-creature-they-thought-up movie I could catch. When I got older, the incredible Akira found it’s way to the States via that new fangled contraption, the VCR. Nowadays, thankfully, we have the internet and our access to film and television from other cultures is both easy and immense.  Add to that the growth and acceptance of Manga in the US and it should come as no shock that these things are going to start have an effect upon us all.

For A Glimpse of Her Soul, I wanted to use some of the story-telling techniques that the Japanese have employed for years and see what happened when they were layered into a Western approach. For example, Japanese fantasy (manga, anime, film, and fiction) follows internal rules, like any good fiction, but those rules can live within a broad, almost limitless range.  In other words, Western fantasy often falls into the Tolkien world-building toolset.  And even as this is changing, newer sub-genres like Urban Fantasy have already codified a lot of what is acceptable — vampires, werewolves, witches, etc all follow set patterns.  But pick up any two Japanese fantasy stories and you’ll often find unique worlds with unique rules.  In fact, there are few constants among these worlds with the exception of cultural constants — honor and loyalty are highly regarded, plenty of attention to sword fighting and other samurai/ninja-influenced styles, etc.  So in Glimpse, you’ll find that I set up some rules for the creatures but made them wide-ranging rules, opening extreme and interesting possibilities within the story both to their appearance and behavior as well as their abilities and actions.

Another aspect of Japanese fantasy is scope.  While many of the stories will follow a small group of people, the scope of both events and enemies tends to be enormous.  This, of course, is not unique to the Japanese.  All story-telling hinges on high stakes (even if they are only high in the opinion of the protagonist).  But there’s an aspect to the Japanese way of approaching this that to me feels epic in a scale that goes way beyond massive armies or even having the fate of the world at stake.  Oftentimes, the smallest details can become enormous.  Thus, in Glimpse, I made the creature Spirit an entire universe in itself.  Massive in its scope yet small in its detail.  I’ve played with this in other ways, too, but I don’t want to put in spoilers.

So far the reaction has been great.  Whether or not the readers are aware of these influences, they are clearly having a good influence on the readers.  If you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this.

 

The Wonderful Con

The main thrust of this blog is to focus on what influences the things writers write.  And while I have and will continue to discuss the influence of the great Bluesmen, other writers, movies, and more, one thing I’ve yet to bring up is the social aspect of our lives.  In particular, SF Conventions.

See, I was at Mysticon in Roanoke, VA last weekend and I’ll be at Stellarcon in Greensboro, NC this weekend, and since these are the first of the con season for me, it hit hard just how much I missed going to cons for the last few months.  Cons are inspiring, rejuvenating, interesting, and simply downright fun.

As a writer, there’s always a bit of ego boost when at least one person comes up to me and knows who I am or (even better) has read and enjoyed my books. I had the delightful experience of a lady looking at The Way of the Black Beast and saying to her husband, “Oh, this is the book [so-and-so] was telling me about. She’s only halfway through and said I had to read it.”  Wow.  When you hear it firsthand like that — that people are enjoying your work enough to tell somebody else, well, yes it’s an ego boost.  But things like that also give a writer the push to keep doing the work even when it’s hard.  Because most of my time is spent writing alone.  An actor or a musician will eventually perform in front of an audience and get immediate feedback of what works and what doesn’t.  Not so for a writer.  If not for cons, I would only know if people like my writing from reviews or the occasional bit of fan mail.

Beyond that, cons are great for dropping all sorts of odd tidbits into my brain that will later percolate into a story or three.  The panel discussions, even the ones on subjects I’ve done over and over, always bring in a new person’s perspective or knowledge.

Oftentimes, I’ll do a reading at a con, and this has proven to be educational as well.  Hearing my words leave my mouth to be consumed by the audience gives a huge amount of feedback that no other method could achieve.  They laughed at this line.  They were all eyes up and intense focus during this scene.  On that paragraph, they were texting.  It’s the closest I can get to a performance and I eat up every bit of it.

Because when the weekend is over, I’m headed home.  I’m back in my office.  I’m staring at a blank page.  And I need to draw on the inspiration and influence of knowing there are real people out there who will be reading these words.  I know it for a fact.  I’ve met them.

So, thank you all for your constant support.  And if you’ve never done it before, jot off an e-mail to your favorite writer.  A few kind words can inspire a few wonderful stories.

Book Release! A Glimpse of Her Soul is now out!

Here it is.  I took all the comments here and elsewhere regarding the cover and retooled the whole thing.  And with the cover done, the rest of it was ready to go, so here we are:

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And here’s the official description plus links:

When 16-year-old Gillian Boone discovers that a secret message has been etched into her soul, her world of normal teenage life is destroyed. Now, bizarre monstrosities seek to kill her so they can read this message as her soul departs and use its information to escape back to the world they came from.

Though she has the aid of her father and some new friends, there is only one who has the real power to help. A rogue monster named Jackhammer Jack. But he might want her secret, too, even as he helps her evade the clutches of those pursuing her. With threats surrounding her, Gillian will have to lead her allies in a struggle for survival – a struggle all the more treacherous when her allies are just as dangerous as her enemies.

Filled with action, excitement, magic, romance, and mystery, A Glimpse of Her Soul is a pulse-pounding ride you’re sure to enjoy. And just the kind of genre bending you’ve come to expect from a writer whose motto is Fantasy Knows No Bounds!

Links:

Amazon: Kindle | Print

B&N: Nook | Print

Kobo: Coming Soon!

And now that the book is out, I can start writing some posts on the influences behind this wild story.  More to come soon.

 

Which Cover? You Decide!

There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes at Stuart Jaffe-land.  Books in various stages of production are working their way toward you.  One of them, A Glimpse of Her Soul, is in the copy-edit stage and should be out next month.  Normally, at this point, I’d be doing a cover release, but today will be a little different.  The cover art is done and the very talented Renu Sharma did a fantastic job on it (check out her website for more cool images http://www.thedarkrayne.com/). As always, I’m doing the lettering on my own, but this time I’ve yet to find a font for the title that people agree on.  Renu, my son, my wife, and myself have all chimed in with differing opinions.  So, I figured, why not let the readers decide?  Below, you’ll find three covers with different fonts.  Please leave a comment or e-mail me or comment on Facebook, whatever form you like, but your feedback is going to determine what happens here.  I leave it all up to you!

Here’s a little blurb about the book to help guide you for the feel:

Go on a wild adventure when a 16-year-old girl learns a secret has been etched into her soul! Now all kinds of bizarre monstrosities chase after her, trying to kill her so they can read this secret as her soul departs. But with the help of her father, some friends, and even a rogue monster, she tries to save herself from the clutches of those who are after her. Filled with action, excitement, magic, and mystery, A Glimpse of Her Soul is just the kind of genre bending you’ve come to expect from a guy whose motto is Fantasy Knows No Bounds!

Cover A:

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Cover B:

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Cover C:

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Let me hear your thoughts.  Cover A, B, or C — which do you like?