Jessica Knauss's Blog, page 57

New Review of the Sailing Italy Series and More Free Stuff

If you look at my books on Goodreads, you'll see a new review of my silly little Sail To Italy and Sail From Italy:

I was lucky to get an advanced reader's copy of this book and I'm likewise lucky to be very familiar with Knauss' work. Even though I was off the radar and left this up as a current read for a while, the truth was I blazed through it in a few days. Like many of her short stories, this longer Sail to Italy and Sail from Italy is a whimsical and magical tale that will remind you of your childhood fairy tales--but with empowered and intelligent female protagonists, instead of passive princesses. 

The lighthearted nature of the story also makes it totally appropriate for a younger audience, so don't hesitate to share it with the teenagers in your life. After all, youth today deserve better fairy tales than we were told.

As you might have gathered from the text, I know the reviewer personally. She is an incredibly talented writer and I'm tremendously flattered by her words. What's with the star rating, though? They're not Michelin stars, honey! ;) But really, thank you very much.

I've also recently learned that my target audience for this book is actually women over 75 years of age. They have seemed to enjoy it more than any of the younger readers I've tested. That presents a problem, as the only marketing capabilities I currently have are internet-based, and, well, I really don't know that many septuagenarians who go online regularly. If you see this post and have an idea, please share it with me!

In the meantime, anyone who promises to write a review can receive a free copy of this book through the end of the year. Just write to acedrexpublishing at yahoo dot com. Wow! Free stuff!

SAVE A TURKEY: GOBBLE A BOOK BLOG HOP TOUR (NOV 14-21)

Hooray! The next hop is here!

I've been gobbling up some really great books in spite of everything else, and I'd like to share with you.

All prizes are a choice of three amazing items:

1. A beautifully-designed hardback copy of the new historical novel The Time in Between by María Dueñas. See my review of this treasure here. OR,

2. A new paperback copy of the amazing contemporary novel Best Kept Secret by Amy Hatvany. See my review of this heart-wrencher here. OR,

3. The choice of any digital book in mobi or epub formats from the incomparable Açedrex Publishing. Choices in English are available here, y en español aquí. This option includes all of my published work -- not to sway your choice.

First prize winner gets to pick first, and so on. I expect to choose four winners.

Don't forget to vist all the other great blogs in this hop! The official link is here.

HOW TO WIN

Join the site if you haven't already (and become a Truly Awesome Person!), like my author page, like Açedrex Publishing, or become my fan (not friend, sorry) on Goodreads.com (search for Jessica Knauss). Most importantly, comment on this post indicating whether you have done any of these other things. Each action counts as one entry. Good luck!

OFFICIAL RULES

1) HAVE FUN!!!

2) INVITE ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS!!! SPREAD THE WORD!!!

3) THIS TOUR STARTS: Monday, November 14, at Midnight (Arizona Time)
    THIS TOUR ENDS: Monday, November 21, at Midnight (Arizona Time)
    Winners will be drawn and posted November 22nd! ***

4) MEET AND MINGLE WITH ALL THE AUTHORS & BOOK PAGES! EXPERIENCE A NEW DESTINATION AT EVERY STOP! PARTICIPATE IN EVERY BLOG CONTEST AND BE ENTERED FOR CHANCES TO WIN MULTIPLE PRIZES! EVERY BLOG VISITED IS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO WIN!!

5) PARTICIPATION AT ALL BLOGS IS RECOMMENDED, BUT NOT REQUIRED. REMEMBER, THE MORE BLOGS YOU HOP, THE BETTER YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING PRIZES. EVERY AUTHOR & BOOK PAGE IS WAITING TO MEET AND INTERACT WITH YOU, SO PLEASE BE SURE TO SHOW THEM SOME LOVE!

6) DID I MENTION TO HAVE FUN? WHOO! HOO!! HERE WE GOOOOOOOOOOOO!
***Authors & Book Pages have full discretion to choose an alternate winner in the event any winner fails to claim their prize(s) within 72 hours of their name being posted or after notification of win, whichever comes first. Anyone who participates in this blog hop tour is subject to these rules***

Six Sentence Sunday: Terse Romance

Image courtesy The Daily Green, 2007
Today -- two years, two months since I got married -- I'm hoping for some feedback on a piece of microfiction. It honors the tribulations of a couple who never lose sight of the importance of being together (in honor of my husband, of course). Are you convinced of the love in these six? This is the most effusive passage, because to me, real love is so sacred, it's hard to put words to it, especially without sounding trite. The man is rowing a boat through the couple's flooded town while it's still raining, and the woman is using a pail to lessen the bilge.

* * *
We progressed down the river-like street past rooftops that appeared to be sinking. My shoulders developed a grinding pain, as if they were on fire. I couldn't stand the thought that Herbert might feel the same pain, so I set my jaw against it, abandoned the bailout and sat on the bench next to him. "If I stop rowing, my love," he said, "it will be too hard to start again." I put my hands over his on the oars. I loved the way the incessant droplets scuttled straight down his nose and lingered at the tip for a full second before releasing their grip.

* * *
Thanks so much for stopping by. I appreciate your comments more than you'll ever know and I'm sure to vist your six in return. Visit all the amazing excerpts here.

New Today: The Time in Between by María Dueñas

Every once in a while, a long novel takes me on an emotional roller coaster, and I enjoy every minute. The Time in Between by María Dueñas is one of those novels. On only page 142, the main character can summarize her life thus: "I'd stopped being a humble dressmaker and transformed myself successively into a whole heap of different women. A civil service candidate, heiress of a major industrialist, globe-trotting lover to a scoundrel, hopeful aspirant to run an Argentine company, frustrated mother of an unborn child, a woman suspected of fraud and theft in debt up to her eyebrows, and a gunrunner camouflaged as an innocent local woman." As I progressed through the years and extraordinary events in the main character Sira's timeline, I would blithely update anyone who would listen about what kind of mess or adventure she'd stumbled into now.

Sira is an ordinary girl with whom the reader can sympathize strongly, but she comes of age in a turbulent time and place: Spain in the 1930's. From her humble perspective, her only talent is sewing. She is distracted from her calling by a man who unwittingly sets the stage for her to regain her financial security and self esteem by becoming the most fashionable seamstress in Tetouan in Spanish Morocco. There, she meets rich and posh clientele and becomes friends with the lover of the most important man in the Spanish Protectorate, Colonel Beigbeder. Through plausible vicissitudes, her friends rescue her mother from war-torn Madrid, only to send Sira back there in the guise of a Moroccan seamstress who encodes messages about her Nazi customers to British Secret Intelligence in her dress patterns. Surprise visits from her past launch her into her most dangerous mission yet, where she can prove her abilities as a spy. The mission reunites her with the Englishman she loves, but can't allow herself to trust with her secret life.

Sira's naivete throughout most of the first part is not only accurate for her historical context, but also allowed Dueñas to insert just the right balance of that historical context for the reader without ever being dry or overbearing. Overall, it's a balanced, factual approach while still showing the way the events may have impacted the lives of real people. The one place it goes wrong is around Chapter 35, when the narrative gets away from Sira to detail the anguish of Beigbeder when he returns to a not-so-friendly Madrid. This could have been handled differently or taken out all together without taking away from information necessary to understand the story.

I would have liked to read this in the original Spanish, but the translation is well done. Only occasionally did it seem a little too literal, and with so much going on, that sin was easy to overlook. The character Rosalinda Fox's multilingual mishmash presents a special challenge to the translator and Daniel Hahn does a decent job scrambling languages while making her dialogue intelligible to the reader.

The original title, El tiempo entre costuras (literally, "The Time Between Stitches") is more relatable to the story. The reader in English doesn't find out what The Time in Between refers to until the very last line. While the end of the book is a relevant reflection of what has gone before, I can't help thinking there must be a more catchy title to go with this amazing journey.

This is the cover from the Advanced Reader's Copy I received, which I believe was created especially for the book. It beautifully captures Sira in one of those quiet but life-changing moments she has so often throughout the narrative, complete with her antique scissors and a view of Spanish Morocco in the 1930's out her window. (The rainbow on the fabric is an unintended effect from my camera flash.) The new, official cover is based on a painting done long before the book was published. Overall, the book is gorgeously designed, with Moroccan postcards on the endpapers and photos of emblematic monuments from the most important city in each part at the beginning of the section. It's a great investment in an object that is both history and literature embodied.

Six Sentence Sunday: Post Halloween Chills

Thanks so much for all the encouragement last week for the final snippet from my work-in-progress, The Seven Noble Knights of Lara. I'm working on it very hard for NaNoWriMo, so the dream of finishing it some day is getting that much closer to reality.



Today, still imbued with Halloween spirit, I thought I'd remind everyone about the first paranormal story I ever published. You can read the whole thing here.

* * * 

We were at the gates of the cemetery. The moon was shining down on us, illuminating our fear and superstition. I peered past the tall monuments to important families, looking for the place where Edelmira had been laid to rest that morning. "It's that way," I said. "Let's go." But none of us moved.

* * *
Thanks for stopping by and don't miss the other great excerpts at Six Sentence Sunday!

Six Sentence Sunday: The End of Chapter 5

These are the last six I'm posting from Chapter 5 of The Seven Noble Knights of Lara. I hope you've enjoyed the extended excerpt! This takes place soon after where we left off, with just a few words in between showing that both parties have agreed to the Count's arbitration.

* * *

With dutiful nods, six brothers each knelt at Ruy Blásquez's feet and kissed his hand. Doña Sancha said, "Gonzalo will do it some other time since if he kneels now, he may not be able to get back up." She dabbed at his head wounds with her maid's handkerchief, although they were beginning to stop bleeding at last.And with this, the men seemed well pleased. Sancha looked at Lambra, who refused to look back at her, but crouched down and began collecting Álvar Sánchez's gore-covered teeth in an improvised pouch of her skirt. The blood and soil seeped through the yellow silk, spattered sinister flowerlets on Álvar's tunic and sank deep into the earth.

* * *
I expect that's sufficiently creepy or gory for Halloween tomorrow. Thanks so much for stopping by. I so appreciate your comments! Don't miss out on the other excerpts here.

Historical Wednesdays Halloween Countdown - Witch Hunts

[image error] For the last Wednesday of the month, we remember the scariest incidents in history for women and the men who loved them: witch hunts.

Although some men were also persecuted from about 1450 to 1700, when witch hunts were at their height, the overwhelming majority of people accused, prosecuted, and executed were female. "Witch hunt" has become a general term for any mass hysteria resulting in metaphorical and literal lynching of perceived enemies, because now we recognize the original 250-year craze as a last gasp of panic in the face of the unknown and uncontrolled before a (supposed) Enlightenment through reason. Whenever something went wrong during this time, women, especially women with certain knowledge or abilities, became the scapegoat through which misguided people attempted to expiate society. The possibility that anyone might accuse you at any time and put you through a legal system in which it was nearly impossible to prove your innocence is a much scarier prospect than meeting a green-faced lady with a conical hat and a broomstick.

The witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 -- a legacy that now brings the town most of its tourism revenue -- made up the last big witch scare in the Western world. Even scarier is the thought that this kind of thing still happens in some parts of the world.

This concludes our scary countdown. Happy Halloween, everybody!

NaNoWriMo and Things To Do

NaNoWriMo is about to come roaring down the highway at us. At least it doesn't sneak up.

These are the items I need to get done in November, in no particular order:

1. Write 1,667 words per day of The Seven Noble Knights of Lara as an unofficial NaNoWriMo. If I don't make a really big push now, the project could languish for a few more years, and no one wants that. 1,667 words a day is a lot for me, and I'll probably have to rigidly schedule a time to sit down and do it until it's done. I've resisted rigid schedules because I now have so many demands on my time, with priorities that change more often than I'm used to.

2. Fireship Press: Acquisition work. At a meeting this week, the new COO said we needed to shift acquisitions to someone with fewer qualifications than me so I could get back to higher-level editing. The thing is, I love acquisition work! Deciding whether a piece has what it takes to make us request a full MS, and then deciding how much editing the full MS would require before it was ready for publication can be the most thrilling part of the entire publishing process. So far, if I've had a hand in approving a book, it's then been assigned to me for the aforementioned high-level editing, and it's tremendously satisfying to take a book all the way through, from MS to the exit gate. Acquisitions is probably the least time-consuming of all the tasks here, but it does mean that much less time to do everything else.

3. Fireship Press: Editing work. Currently, I have four books I need to pay huge amounts of attention to in order to ensure their overall quality. I prefer to do them one at a time or I'll become distracted and irritable, because I typically have intense consultations with the author in order to better understand his or her vision and shape it as changes come through. I also love this part of the process because it's where the real metamorphosis takes place. Needless to say, it's the most time-consuming aspect of my Fireship work.

4. Fireship Press: Copyediting. Exciting, higher quality standards and a severe dearth of staff mean I have to take on a lot of the tasks Tom taught me how to do, although they aren't officially in my job description. We already have a new copyediting system in place that should eliminate misuse and mistakes, but if I see a mistake myself, I can't help but correct it. Hopefully, that instinct will lessen the work load of the official copyeditors.

5. Fireship Press: Production. This includes all aspects of formatting. I don't mind this at all and would gladly keep doing if it weren't so time-consuming. Again, the company is working on offloading these tasks, but for now I either have to do it myself for the books I'm editing or work closely with the other staff members to get it done right. One important task this month is to "teach" everyone how to upload the book for the printer. Which brings me to:

6. Fireship Press: Admin. We're working most of the time from our own home bases, but meeting once a week to update each other and teach each other about all the little details no single one of us has complete control over. Yet. At these meetings I also tend to be assigned more tasks.

7. Blog. In November, I will have to reduce the blog to excerpt days on Saturdays and Sundays and the occasional book review I'm already preparing. I'd love to provide much more exciting content for you, but as you can see, I'm stretched a bit thin at the moment.

8. Açedrex Publishing. My company isn't the cash cow I was promised, but my theory is that hard work will pay off eventually. My strategy is to keep increasing the catalog with irresistibly fascinating titles. Of course, the timing is perfect (not!) and I'm now working on a couple of especially intensive projects, which I will unveil when the time is right. In the meantime, you can always help by purchasing inexpensive but high quality titles! Acedrex.com

9. Publicity. In a perfect world, I would have the financial and time budget to promote my writing and my company. I don't need to point out that this is no perfect world.

10. Keep reading good books in order to keep gaining exposure to good writing for my own uses. I also enjoy being of some help to talented writers by putting my reviews out there.

11. Taking care of my husband. He doesn't literally need taking care of, but mainly emotional support as he works just as hard as I do, but at a job he doesn't feel drawn to, just to keep a roof over our heads. And save to get our stuff in storage back to us some day. He's easy to please: he's thrilled just to spend time with me. For that reason, I can't be working on any of these other items at the same time I'm taking care of him. No, all that other stuff has to be done when he's at work. Such "rules" help to keep me grounded. I love my work, but it's important to work to live, not live to work. Also during November is my husband's birthday. I wish I could seize the moment to show him how much he means to me, but a card and a restaurant visit will have to do.

12. Thanksgiving. We'll probably be pretty pathetic. We can't travel to be with loved ones, but at least I assume my husband will have some time off to cook a turkey breast and give thanks for all our blessings. It's a great opportunity for calm and attention.

13. Staying sane. Under this umbrella fall eight hours of sleep per night, going to my writers' group meeting, keeping a private journal, and taking a moment to cook a nice meal once in a while. Some kind of contact with my actual friends would help, too, but I guess I'll put that off until December.

If we could assign a universal effort unit to each of these tasks and total them up, I think we would be looking at several months of work. The effort I put into each task is pretty intense, with the result that I'm a slow writer and a pretty slow editor. I always want to get it right the first time, which obviously doesn't apply to the writing process. Oh, the incessant push and pull of my different instincts!

So, November will be an experiment in quantity/quality balance. Wish me luck!

No Six Sentence Sunday

I didn't have more sweet material for Saturday, and this week there is no Six Sentence Sunday, so that means no excerpt this week.

The apparent reason the organizers cancelled this Six Sentence Sunday is because people have been having trouble following the simple rules. See the admirably civil reasoning here. Try a little harder, folks, so everyone can play.

Historical Wednesdays Halloween Countdown - The Black Death

Don't look up "black death" in an image search unless you have a strong stomach.What could be scarier than the plague that overran the entire known world, attacking with bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic strains, and obliterating one quarter to one half the population?
These victims were lucky to get coffins. No satisfactory explanation and no useful advice about avoidance or treatment were available. It struck you, or it didn't. Some people refused to have anything to do with the sick, sometimes saving themselves but creating chaos in the social order that had lasting effects into the modern age.
Some people today make predictions about super-diseases that will be spread even faster by transportation technology, and it's a great premise for horror/thriller movies. The Black Death is one reason I prefer to study the European Middle Ages before 1348. Before, optimism, color, and a sense that all was right with the world abounded. Afterward, things got truly scary.