Keryl Raist's Blog, page 47

The Fantasy Sage Speaks: In The End

We've talked about plot, and about the promises we make our readers when we publish a story. We've talked about magic and power balance, and how they contribute to the tension that keeps a story going. So now it's time for the end of the story.

Once again, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to call the major teams of a fantasy novel Team Good, lead by the Hero and Team Evil, lead by the Villain. I recognize that fantasy protagonists and antagonists come in a lot of different shades (Next Post: The Cast) but these terms will do the job for the sake of today's discussion.

Here's the claim that might get a lot of comments: in a straight fantasy, Team Good always wins. The readers do not want to spend however many hundreds, if not thousands, of pages watching Team Good get to the point where it can defeat Team Evil and then lose. Not in the final battle. If Return of the Jedi had ended with the Rebel Alliance being annihilated, and Darth tossing Luke off the bridge while the Emperor cackled in the background, fans would have rioted and Lucas would have never made another movie.

Now for the huge mess of caveats:

Team Good must win is not the same thing as the Hero has to come out alive, or that there is any guarantee of a happy ending for any individual member of Team Good. As long as Team Good wins, or the actions of Team Good assures a future win, you can kill every single member of Team Good and it's still a satisfying end. If you re-wrote the movie Glory and set it with a troop of Dwarves looking to be taken seriously as real members of Elven society, the ending where almost everyone dies, but the first spark of Dwarven equality bursts to light, then the ending works. Likewise, if your Hero comes out of the final battle wounded, disillusioned, broken, having lost everything but his ability to breathe, as long as whatever he was trying to accomplish gets done, all is good.

Team Good must win only applies for the final conflict. You can write a fifteen book series and have Team Evil happily torturing the Hero at the end of the first fourteen of them as long as the Hero triumphs at the end of the last book. Romances demand a Happily Ever After for each book in the series. Fantasy demands that Team Good has to win in the end.

Winning is entirely dependent on how you defined the problem. If the issue is Dark Lordenstein is big, bad, and EVIL, any end where Dark is no longer those things flies. Team Good can kill, convert, imprison, or do any other thing you can imagine to Dark, as long as Dark is out of the picture as the Villain in the end.

You'll probably notice that I'm dealing mostly with the man v. man version of fantasy. Now, while it is true that man v. nature and man v. society do happen in fantasy, they are almost always secondary plot lines or some level of meta problem that's being explored in a micro man v. man setting. But, if you've got it set where your protagonist is fighting all of society, or magic, or whatever external, non-person (using person loosely here, by this I mean a thinking creature, not necessarily human) problem he or his team still has to triumph in the end.

If the problem is societal, like racism, winning can be defined as any step that causes the society at large to seriously consider change, but does not require immediate change. If the fight is the main character versus his nature (he's a werewolf or vampire or whatever) whichever side you've set as the protagonist needs to take the day.

If you've written the sort of epic where there are seventeen main characters, no clear protagonist, and all of them are dingy shades of gray without a Team Good or Team Evil, more power to you, 'cause that's a bugger to write a satisfying ending to. No matter how you end that, someone is going to be pissed because his or her pet character didn't get the ending they were looking for.

Basically, the more clearly defined the problem is, the easier it is to write a good (once again, good is defined as the ability to satisfy the majority of readers) ending.

Okay, so here's the one big exception to this rule: tragedy is an acceptable version of fantasy. There are a few main variations on this where Team Good doesn't win and the readers don't mind.

Tragic Fall: call this Macbeth style fantasy. You're writing about the fall of someone who did something stupid. Usually in this case the Hero is very dark gray if not outright black, but he's still a compelling POV character. These are often morality tales about the love of power and how it destroys people. You can do any horrible thing you want to Hero, and the readers will appreciate it.

The Sacrifice: This is the story where the chance of Team Good winning was one in a million at the beginning of the tale, and it's still one in a million at the end. Call this Les Miserable style fantasy. Everyone knows from page one that this is not going to end well for Team Good, but that they're doing something that will get them all killed because it's important. The story here is about the struggle, character development, and then breaking the reader's hearts by crushing those characters. Usually this ends with the goals of Team Good getting more attention and the possibility of a future win for Team Good, but the immediate Team Good has failed and is dead.

The Anti-Happily Ever After: Romeo and Juliet style star-crossed lovers flies in fantasy as well. But this is usually a microplot. Team Good usually wins whatever it is that's going on in the metaplot, but doing so requires the star-crossed lovers to put each other aside/die. This is tragedy for whichever characters, but the greater Team Good still wins the day. If Romeo and Juliet both die, followed by the Montagues and Capulets immediately going to war and annihilating each other, your readers will feel cheated. The micro tragedy has to have a bigger meaning and value than the immediate characters.

Having read all that, you know what to do, right?  Exactly, do not write the story where everything is going swimmingly, the odds are evening up, the final conflict is looming, and then slaughter all your characters, crushing their goals. If you are writing a tragedy, you need to let your readers know it's coming. By the midpoint of the story you should have several clues and a good bit of foreshadowing in place to let them know things are not going to end well for Team Good. In fact, though I'm not generally a huge fan of the preface/first chapter that shows how the story ended, if you've ever been tempted to use it, when you're writing a tragedy is the time.

Otherwise, set up the plot, even up the power balance, and to quote a wise man, "Have fun stormin' the castle!"

SOPA

So, I usually try to keep this a politics free place, but this one hits home.

I am a copyright holder. I've got one book out, and hopefully two more out in the next year, all in electronic format. And trust me, I want to get paid for those books. But here's the thing, there are better, easier, and more importantly, effective ways to battle copyright infringement.

SOPA is using a tank to battle a mosquito infestation. You blow the shit out of everything nearby and don't do a damn thing to the mosquitoes.

We are a representational democracy. Let your representatives know this isn't the way.

The Fantasy Sage Speaks: Power Balance

In the last Fantasy Sage post, I wrote about the rules of magic in fantasy writing, and in that I mentioned that there was one very specific time when the To Thine Own Magic Be True rule could be broken, as the object of a High Quest, for the purpose of providing a decent power balance in the last conflict.

What is power balance? This is the odds of Team Good or Team Evil winning. This is one of the most important aspects of your novel, because a well done power balance provides the thing that keeps your readers turning pages: tension. Basically, if you stack the deck too far on one side or the other, the tension in your story is shot to pieces, and you end up with bored readers.

So, let's talk about our next rule for good fantasy writing: Thou Shall Balance Power Between Team Good and Team Evil.  Though I'm playing fast and lose with Good and Evil here, Protagonist and Antagonist is probably more accurate, because lots of fantasy readers like a great Anti-Hero, gray Heroes, and darker gray Villains. But let's call them Team Good lead by the Hero and Team Evil lead by the Villain for the sake of amusement.

Now, at the beginning of the story Team Good can have a one-in-a-million shot of winning this thing, but it's got to have that shot. And by the end of the story, you've got to get things close to one to one. If it's still one in a million when you hit the final conflict, you're A: writing a tragedy (Which plays by it's own set of rules, but is an acceptable subset of fantasy. More on this in the In The End post.) or B: your readers will not believe it when Team Good wins.

Once again this is where plot wrangling comes in. Many fantasy novels, when broken down to the most basic plot level work something like this: Team Evil has the power. This is intolerable. Team Good decides to do something about it. Adventure allowing Team Good to make up most of the difference occurs here. Final conflict. Team Good fights hard, looks like all is lost, but triumphs in the end. (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, DragonLance, and on and on and on: they all follow this basic plan.)

The problem is that many writers forget how tension works in a fantasy story. A really bad Team Evil is a lot of fun to write. And many writers are a little too attached to Team Good and make them too strong. But, if the odds are too firmly stacked on either side, the story is boring. If Dark Lordenstein is not only a murderous-paranoid-psychopath, but psychic, with a doomsday weapon, no limits on his magic, and an army of loyal-unto-death Super Ninjas, and the Hero is played by the gangly thirteen-year-old Farm Boy, that's just not good reading. None of us are going to suspend our disbelief far enough to make that work. Likewise if Skippy Von Goodandstrong is playing the role of Hero, and he's well nigh invincible, in addition to handsome, kind to puppies, and just so perfectly perfect, he'll be labeled a Gary Stu before the third chapter is done, and the readers will depart shortly thereafter. In fact, the only way Dark or Skippy is even remotely interesting is if they're facing off against each other in a satire.

There are a lot of lessons we can all learn from Star Wars, here's the first one: Luke Skywalker V. Darth Vader isn't much fun to watch until Luke has his powers and Darth is weakened by doubt about his vocation. Luke V. Darth in Empire is fascinating as a character study, but it was terrifying as a fight. Anyone who was paying attention watched Luke go into that fight and felt their stomach drop. If Luke won the fight it was going to feel like a cheap shot, and if Darth won... Well, before seeing it for the first time, none of us wanted to think about what would happen if Darth won.  Compare that to the time they face off in Jedi: the odds are still on Darth's side, but not so far on Darth's side that we cannot believe Luke can win. Which is why we sat on the edge of the chair, trying to see Luke in the gloom, wondering how he was going to best Vader.

So, by the time you get to writing that final conflict, I'd say you want no more than a ten to one shot against your Hero winning.  That still allows for the underdog takes the game sort of sense, but isn't so far out in the realm of impossibility that your readers don't bother to finish the book.

Getting the ratio close(r) to one to one is usually where a lot of the story part of the story takes place. It's the entire point of the Hero's Journey. It's the reason why the farm boy comes into his powers, and the old mentor has to die/vanish before the final conflict can occur. If the mentor is still around, the power is too strongly stacked on Team Good's side.

In the High Quest variation of fantasy, some level of evening things up happens during the quest, and then the Object of the Quest finishes up the deal. If Dark Lordenstein is cackling away, rubbing his hands with glee, and summoning the Minions to destroy Farm Boy, then Farm Boy needs a real weapon to take to that fight. So this is the time where whipping out the +5 Holy Avenger of Villain Smiting is perfectly okay. If it comes out earlier in the plot, where Farm Boy is still fighting rats and ruffians, there's no tension in those fights. If Farm Boy never finds his super weapon, and Dark trips on his Minions, causing the doomsday weapon to fire upon himself, thus killing him, the reader is let down because there's no triumph for Farm Boy. (This is part of why Harry Potter, with the rebounding curse of doom, was less than perfectly satisfying. Voldie kills himself in the end is just sort of flat. It's not terrible, but it's not very rich, either.) But if Farm Boy finds that +5 Holy Avenger of Villain Smiting a chapter or two before going into the final conflict, then he's got just enough time to get a feel for it, but not enough time to become the absolute master of it, and we get to enjoy seeing him and Dark battle it out, with both sides powerful but not invincible.

In the tragic folly sort of fantasy plot, (this is where Dark Lordenstein is a major POV character, being set up to fall as a tragic figure) this is where his Minions are betraying him, getting killed off, etc... In this case it's not necessarily so much that Team Good is gaining power as that Team Evil is losing it.

And in many fantasy stories, there's a bit of all three going on, and probably a half dozen or so other templates, but they all work out to the same thing, when Team Good and Team Evil clash for the last time, it's a toss up as to who will win.

Who wins in the end? Team Good. This isn't as hard and fast as the Happily Ever After is for romance readers, and I'll go into the variations on it in the next post. But in the end, Team Good has to take the day.
 
Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Magic, Contract, Plot

Indie Book Review: The Wars of Gods and Man

I'd like you to imagine for a moment Macbeth blended with an Old Testament, henotheistic, my God-is-better-than-yours battle. Cool, yes? I thought so.  And that's precisely what The Wars of Gods and Men delivers.

The Wars of Gods and Men follows three main characters, Eboric, Ayren, and Kolrig, through the creation of, destruction of, and re-creation of an empire, that mirrors a meta battle between warring Gods. If micro-scale political fantasy is your idea of "Oh yes! Give me more!" this is the book for you. If humans flailing about, unsure of their place in the winds of destiny makes you happy, pick this book up.

If you're familiar with Macbeth, you'll recognize one of the major plot threads, betrayal, destruction, and tragic endings for the traitors. But that's not all that's going on in here. The War of Men is but a micro version of the War of Gods, which we get hints and glimpses of, but never see in full. The tantalizing glimpses of what is going on beyond the human characters are well-rounded enough to keep the readers happy, but mysterious enough to maintain a nice tension to the tale.

Now, many of us are familiar with Christian fantasy, where the writer draws a made-up world with a Messianic figure and a message that looks awfully familiar to just about everyone raised in the West. The Wars of Gods and Men is a sort of twist on this. I'd call it Jewish fantasy, because the war of the Gods aspect looks a whole lot like the Old Testament. A Prophet foresees destruction of those who do not follow his God. He and those who believe with him are persecuted for their faith. Miracles abound as the Prophet puts those other godlings and their worshipers in their places. There's even a mist that kills everyone who happens to be outside of their tent when it creeps into camp. Cenred, the Prophet, might not be an exact match to any specific OT Prophet, but the parallels (down to his bald head) are certainly there.

I'll admit I was very pleased to see that. Pretty much, if there are five great influences on Western literature, the Bible and Shakespeare are, if not the top two, then definitely on the list. So, put them together, execute it with grace and dignity, and wrap it up with a spin on nation building, and well, I was a happy reader.

Speaking of grace and dignity, this was a tidy little book. Characters are rounded and three dimensional, their motivations clear, voices distinct, and actions true to their personalities. (I might have wanted just a tad more depth on Kolrig, but the somewhat brief moments of his inner life fit the character's lack of introspection nicely.) Though this is the first book in a series, it stands alone without any problems. The story arc is complete in and of itself, while still leaving room for continuing adventures. Description might be a little minimalist for some readers, but I'm not much of a visual processor, so the lack of intricately wrought description didn't bother me at all. I had a pretty good idea of what everything looked like, and I didn't need page upon page of description.

And, though it should go without saying, any book on the market should be competently proofread and formatted, but after reviewing so many in a row that weren't, I'd like to specifically mention that The Wars of Gods and Men is cleanly formatted, easy to read, and I didn't notice any major foul ups in the grammar or punctuation department. In a nutshell, it looks professional. And that was a very, very welcome change from some of my most recent reading experiences.

So, all in all, I was quite pleased with The Wars of Gods and Men. I'll happily recommend it to anyone who is looking for a twist on a familiar tale.

The Fantasy Sage Speaks: Magic

A bit ago I wrote about the responsibilities of the fantasy writer to his readers. The unwritten contract between us and them. On one of the places I posted that article, I got a comment along the lines of the contract I had talked about was pretty generic and could stand in for almost any type of fiction.

So I'm back, with a series of issues specific to the fantasy writer. Now, none of this is written in stone. A great writer, or even a really good with the right attitude can get away with violating these "rules." But please, bear in mind, if you're going to break them, A: You will annoy a fairly large segment of your reading audience. B: Don't just stumble into it. Do it on purpose, knowing you're going to do it, and do it with style. Readers will be much more likely to forgive a breach of any of these if it doesn't look like sloppy writing.

That said, let's talk magic. 

Think about it for a minute, why is there magic in your story? Put succinctly: the point of magic in your story is not to cover up sloppy writing. It is not your get out of plot holes free ticket. It's there to add mystery, wow factor, to push your characters out of their comfort zones, and even up the power balance (more on power balance in a later post) between your protagonist and antagonist. It is there to color your world, and provide bounds to your reality.

And this is why it annoys people when you muck with that system. It's like reading a historical romance where the main character is constantly texting. You cheapen and violate the strength of the reality you've created when you mess with your magic. So, for the most part, don't do it.

This leads us to the number one, hard and fast, do-not-screw-with-this-if-you-want-happy-fantasy-readers rule: To Thine Own Magic Be True. Seriously. Tattoo this on the backs of both of your hands so that it's staring up at you while you write. Want to annoy your readers? Set up a multi-book series where you suddenly decide that the magical laws you spent so long creating no longer hold true.

Now, of course, there are exceptions to all rules, so there are ways you can muck with your magical system and have it work: Take your characters to a new world. All the rules can go out the window then. If the point of your story is to find some sort of universe altering magic, then the readers are unlikely to be annoyed if, when your characters find it, the magic changes.  Or, any variation on the theme of your main character is Super-Duper Special, The One Whose Coming is Foretold, and part of what makes him super-duper special is that upon fully coming into his power, all the rules get tossed out, works as well. (Though there does seem to be Super-Duper Special Character Fatigue among certain segments of the fantasy reading world.)

But for the most part, if you can't summon food out of the ethers in chapter five and suddenly you can in chapter forty-five, you will have annoyed writers. And, if you keep your plot in line, you won't find yourself in a situation where you have to use your magic as a rescue.

Rule number two: Be very, very careful with powerful magic. Very powerful magic is a really easy way to wreck a perfectly functional magical system. The most famous example of a bit of fantasy magic that the creators didn't properly think through, and that blew the power balance out of the water was the Teleporter in Star Trek. (I come down on the Star Trek is fantasy, not science fiction side of the debate.)  The Teleporter is a nifty idea, and it looks really cool, and it does solve a real problem for the Trek verse, but it's so powerful that the Star Trek writers ended up having to make it malfunction or make whatever away mission the crew was on Teleporter-proof in just about every third episode, otherwise the solution to the problem is: Beam Me Up.

If your magic is so powerful that it's potentially the answer to any problem your characters run into, tone it down. Your story needs tension, and if you let the characters get too powerful, or create an easy answer to whatever problems they have, you'll have bored readers.

If you are happily writing away and are thinking of adding in a really cool +5 Holy Avenger of Evil Smiting and Bad Guy Destroying, think about it long and hard. You're probably better off without it. Because if you leave it in there, the likelihood is you're going to have to muck with your magical system to compensate. In fact, there's only one reason a +5 Holy Avenger of Evil Smiting and Bad Guy Destroying (or any other ridiculously powerful magical artifact) should ever show up in a book, and that's as the object of a High Quest.

Now, the object of a High Quest can break any magical rule you've got and solve any problems your characters might have because it's there for an entirely different reason than the rest of your magical system. The Quest Object is about evening up the power balance for the final confrontation. Which I'll write about in more detail in the next installment: The Power Balance.

Indie Book Review: Beside the Still Waters

I love a good family saga. I love historical fiction. I loved the gilded age, and the turn of the twentieth century. I'm a massive WWI wonk.

So, when Beside the Still Waters, a family saga set in 1904 to 1938 landed in my review pile, I was a happy little reader. Probably a little too happy, I was so excited to see it, I put it in the to review pile even after thinking the beginning was a little choppy and rough.

Let's take a minute and talk about what a historical family saga entails. There should be a huge, sweeping collection of deeply rounded characters, in a vibrantly alive piece of time. John Jakes and Herman Wouk wrote my two favorite sagas, and those tales are massive, fully alive and breathing pieces of interactive history.  Basically, if the author is doing her job, you get to join a family and live with them through some fascinating bit of history.

There should be a main story arc, this is usually the sweep of the chunk of history the book is set in. On this plot line the characters or more or less acting like tour guides, giving us an intimate view of life during whenever the story is set. This is the plot line that ties everything together, and should be a meta image of the smaller individual conflicts going on in the secondary and tertiary plot lines.

The secondary plot line will be some level of specific conflict involving different members of the family.  This is usually the motive plot for the 'story' and will usually involve breaking different bits of the family off into different camps. The historical aspect of the story is often the fault line that divides different bits of the family into different camps.

Tirtiary (and on and on, a real saga can have at least one main plot line per main character, and often side ones for the side characters and so and so forth. After all, it's a SAGA; no one's worried about it coming out too long.) plots involve romances, coming of age stories, individual conflicts for individual characters.

And, if it's not clear from the above, or the fact they're called sagas, a family saga should be long.

So, basically, when I read a historical family saga, I want a huge, complex, well-researched book, brimming with fascinating characters, in depth locales, plot twists and turns, that all wrap into some sweep of history and a satisfying conclusion for all surviving family members.

Besides the Still Waters is well researched.  In fact, I would have very happily read a straight up history of the Quabbin Reservoir by Lynch.

It fell well short on all of my other criteria for a good family saga.

"A rift between two brothers, Eli and John Vaughn, at the turn of the 20th Century continues through to the next generation as John tries to use Jenny, Eli's daughter, in a plot to regain the family farm from Alonzo, who now runs it, who is Jenny's love. John is broke and eager to sell the farm to the state, which is buying up area property for the coming reservoir. Both Alonzo and Eli refuse to sell their properties, and protest removal by eminent domain. Torn between loyalty to her family and heritage, and the allure of a future beyond the valley, Jenny refuses to remain powerless like the men she loves, but looks for a way to take control. A disastrous decision may prove fatal in a race against time."

That's the back of the book blurb.  It's a little choppy, but promising, right?  I thought so.  Here's the problem: at fifty percent through, the plot, as stated in the blurb, is just, barely beginning to get rolling. To use a historical example that most people are familiar with: if the main plot of this book had been wrapped around the American Civil War, the story would have started with the writing of the Declaration of Independence to get us familiar with the fight over slavery.  Jenny (who is identified as the main character earlier in the blurb) isn't even born for the first third of the story.

The antagonist, John, shows up for less than three pages of on screen time, and then vanishes for a third of the book. Once again, a family saga should be long and complex enough to follow the antagonist as he runs away, blows his fortune, and then take him back to the main swing of things, so that by the time we get to the conflict, we're deeply attached to both sides of the argument. A family saga needs the depth to follow multiple characters through their lives while still pushing the main plot line forward.

The writing style is choppy. I'd be reading away, getting a little plot and character development, then into straight history, and back to plot, and back to history. From what I can tell this is intentional, but instead of highlighting how the meta history compliments the individual lives of the characters it's jarring and breaks the flow.

The writing style is non-fiction. As I said, I'd happily read a straight history by Lynch, but I don't want to read fiction by her. In non-fiction it's perfectly acceptable to tell your reader what happened, showing them is nice, but usually not the goal. In fiction the idea is to show your readers what is going on. But, if you pick 3rd person omniscient as your point of view, (the narrator voice) it's very easy to slip into telling your reader what is going on. And tell she does. So much telling that it's actually pretty rare to run into a scene that really is showing something, but when one does occur, a chunk of straight history will show up in a page or so and stop it dead.

And, just to make me grit my teeth, the formatting is wonky.  I just wrapped the beta version of my latest novel, and my hubby wanted a version for his Kindle. (He doesn't like reading on his computer, so no Word doc for him.) Anyway, I put the beta version through the Smashwords' Meatgrinder with no prep at all, and got precisely the same sort of wonky formatting Beside The Still Waters has.  Basically, it looks fine, and then for no real reason it suddenly changes font, and changes back, and forth again, all through the book. 

As I said in the email I sent off to my beta readers, the kindle version looks like it was formatted by drunk weasels, drunk weasels that like Courier.  It's not illegible, but it is annoying. Deeply annoying. And maybe part of the reason it annoys me so much is that I know how much work it takes to fix this (about an hour-hour and a half), and how ridiculously lazy it is to just leave it that way.

So, all in all, I'm not impressed by Beside the Still Waters. I wish it had been a straight history of the Quabbin Reservoir. I think I would have enjoyed that quite a bit.

Indie Book Review: Snap

Like every reader, I've got pet peeves. And due to my current run of sloppy books, I've developed some new ones regarding formatting and editing over the last few weeks. This is unfortunate for Mario Molinari, the author of Snap, because he decided to send me a book rife with my newest peeves.

To make matters worse, I know Mario can write. The reason I know this is because  the first chapter of Snap absolutely rocks in the Mission Impossible, James Bond, glorious action galore tradition. I was really, really looking forward to this. The cover is beautiful. The first chapter is great. And then it falls to pieces. And on a scale of one to ten, my disappointment after that first chapter was at about sixteen.

Either Snap desperately needed a whole bunch of extra section breaks, or it desperately needed someone to explain that random POV/scene hopping is not appropriate. It often needed dialog tags. These are all the sorts of errors that having one or two other sets of eyes on the book would have taken care of. This book could have rocked. It should have rocked. But no, it's sitting firmly in the sad sack section because Molinari didn't bother to actually polish the damn thing!

The punctuation is rough, the sort of thing I expect from first draft by an okay writer. Not what I want to see in a published book.  Word flow is okay, with occasional wonky word choices or missing words, the sort of thing a proof reader would have seen and fixed. (I write these reviews over the course of several days, and on one re-read I was wondering if I was being too harsh. So I opened Snap back up, and the first sentence I read had no period.) This is a published work that is available for SALE. I got my copy for free because I'm a reviewer, but Molinari expects everyone else to give him money for this, almost five dollars, and it's not good enough.

If you'll allow me to fully get into rant mode here, I am a self-published writer. Now, is my book free of errors and perfect in every way? No. Do I expect anyone else's book to be perfect. No. I don't expect perfect. I don't expect near perfect. But I do expect the book to have been edited, proof read, and gone over by the author, thoroughly, to make sure it's as good as can be. And I expect absolutely glaring errors to be taken care of before the book hits print.

I went to Amazon to see what other reviewers were thinking of Snap, and gosh, it's got twenty five star reviews, and though they are all fairly similar, none of them mention the formatting.  So I begin to think that I've got a wonky ARC. That happens; a perfect polished version isn't always part of the review process.  So I download a new copy for Kindle, and head over to Smashwords to see what's up there. The Smashwords HTML version looked okay. The line breaks were there, at least. Though the rest of the sloppiness is still visible. I start to calm down some.

Then I checked on the new Kindle version, and it's a mess. That's where I started to see red.

Here's an example: the plot is happily skipping along, tension is rising, and then we'd be, with no warning, in a new POV in a different scene, and then back to the first, and back to the second, and back to the first, and there's no scene breaks, and sometimes no dialog tags so you don't even know who's talking.  ARGH!  DID NO ONE ELSE EVER READ THIS? Since it's right in the Smashwords version, I know Molinari knows that there need to be section breaks, and that pisses me off even more.  This is an author wasting my time and the money of anyone buying this by being so ridiculously lazy that he didn't bother to check his .mobi format before clicking on the publish button.

And maybe I could have gotten past this, except Snap hit another of my pet peeves. I do not enjoy watching non-psychopathic characters get other people killed like it's no big deal.

Spoiler territory here: Wade (the hero) is trying to rescue Sarah (female lead 1) and Brad (her soon to be ex-husband) from a hired psychopath. He's supposed to meet the psycho, alone, and trade himself for Sarah and Brad. So, instead of showing up alone, he hires 20 actors to look like they just happen to be having a party at the exact same time and location as the swap, dons body armor, and mingles with the actors. Purposely using them as human shields. (The idea being psychopathic killer will decide he can't take the shot and go to the hostages. I guess. This is where the plot was starting to get loose. The plan was really fuzzy, and Wade is packed into as much body armor, including a helmet, as he can get. Obviously he expects bullets to fly. And no, none of the actors know they're risking their lives for fifty bucks and all the alcohol they can drink.) Amazingly enough, one of the actors is killed, because psycho-guy is not even remotely bothered by trying to take a shot through someone else. And then Wade just leaves like it's no big deal.

I gave up. I don't need my good guys sparkly clean, but I don't want them thinking innocent human shields are appropriate either. And I'm really not willing to trudge through bad formatting and clunky mechanical issues for a character I don't love. With that scene there, any chance I was going to love Wade died, just like the unnamed red-shirt in the above scene.

The Indie Book Review: Catalyst The Passage of Hellsfire

There are, maybe, seven basic fantasy plots. The readers know this. They know that just about every fantasy they open will be a variation on one or another beloved theme. This is not a shock to them. So, when a fantasy reader says a plot is predictable, they don't mean: I've seen a variation on this before (because we all have) they mean the author didn't do a good job making an old plot interesting, setting it in a well crafted world, or giving us fantastic characters to adventure along with.

Catalyst: The Passage of Hellsfire, was predictable. It's not bad, but it's also not really engaging.  Hellsfire, yes, that's the name of the main character, reads like a hybrid of Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter. He's a boy with a destiny and a special power. He's also bit flat. Not obnoxious, but not fully rounded in any meaningful way either.

In fact, the whole book reads like a hybrid of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings.  The Hero is young, stupid, and The One Whose Coming Was Foretold. The Wizard is old and wise, and takes him under his wing for training. The Princess is beautiful, spunky, handy with a sword, but still in need of rescuing. The Good King is being taken advantage of by his Evil Adviser. The Evil Adviser has plans to find the magical plot device artifact and use it to take over the world. You've read this story before. I've read this story before, and both of us turned each page with baited breath when it was populated with fantastic characters in an expertly built world.

And, alas, this is not an expertly built world, either. Quick example: The Wizard is explaining how magic works in their world, how each person has six sorts of mana (Okay, how many of you immediately flashed into gamer mode there? It gets worse.) and each mana has a different color: white for life magic, black for death magic, red for fire, blue for air, blue-green for water, green for earth. Sigh. I played that game, I don't need to read it.

On top of that, Catalyst sorely needed a proof-reader. The punctuation is rough. Missing/wrong words pop up at least once or twice a chapter. It was often enough, and bad enough, to toss me out of the story on several occasions. Wonky descriptions showed up just as often. Another example: We finally get to a combat scene, and it's going well, I'm liking it, but then one of the fighters uses his "sword like a snake." Now, I get that not every sentence in a book should be read literally, but even on a figurative level this doesn't make much sense. Snakes don't use swords. And if you were holding a snake by the tail, and attacking with it, you'd be using it like a whip, not a sword. I think, from context, he meant something along the lines of: his sword flicked quickly, like the tongue of a snake... but he didn't write that, and using the sword like a snake really tossed me out of the story to figure out what was going on. (My immediate mental image of the character holding the sword in his mouth, arms and legs pressed to his sides, as he wriggled on the ground, made absolutely no sense.)

It also needed a beta reader. In the above scene, Hellsfire, who's been warned to use his magic sparingly and not tell people he's a wizard, uses his magic to burn his way out of a net, uses his magic to blow the head off an ogre, hands a stabilizing potion to a wounded man, and then thinks that he shouldn't mention he's a magic user. He wouldn't want to tip his new companions off. Apparently his companions are massively stupid and didn't notice the fire flashing about, or even though he's describing everything in glowing red flames, the magic is somehow, unbeknownst to us, invisible. Between that and the snake sword, I had a really hard time with that scene. And it's not the only one.

So, as I said, Hellsfire isn't terrible. It's rough. It's very familiar. By halfway through I was skimming along, hoping to find something to get my attention. At three quarters of the way through, I still hadn't found anything that kept my attention for more than five minutes at a time. My guess is, if you've read very little fantasy, or are quite young (The Catalyst is technically a YA book, but I'd be more interested in aiming it at the six-to-eight-year-old market. You'd have to read it to them, but I think they'd like it.) this book might be a lot of fun. But it wasn't doing it for me. I gave up without finishing it.

The Indie Book Review: The Death of Torberta Torchin

I don't usually review YA books.  About one in seven of the submissions I get are YA, and usually, before I even get to the sample, the general plot line has turned me off.  See, I didn't enjoy being a kid. I got done with it as soon as I could. So, getting to spend more time in high school or junior high isn't my idea of fun. Add in two of the main YA tropes, angst for the sake of angst, and brainless first love, and well, it's just really not my genre.

So, The Death of Torberta Turchin just about got tossed out of the to be read list without getting much of a hearing. But...  Well, the cover is pretty cool, and very much not the usual YA cover art. So I read the back. No angst for the sake of angst. No mention of romance. Hmmm... I began reading the sample.

The Death of Torberta Turchin opens with a fourteen-year-old girl, Torberta, who lives in a boarding school for psychologically disturbed kids, discussing the balancing act the students go through with the doctor. St. Christopher's is a pretty sweet gig, and if you want to stay there you've got to walk a tightrope. Look like you're making too much progress, ie: get better, and you get sent home. Not sufficiently crazy, ie: faking it, and you get sent home. Act too crazy, and they put you on drugs and send you to a higher security place. So, if you want to stay at St. Christopher's you've got to be just disturbed enough to make your family want you away, but not so crazy you're a danger to the world around you.

Reading those first few pages was like reading the first bit of Ender's Game. I knew this book involved a character I'd sympathize with and want to spend time with.

Torberta is in St. Christopher's because she hears voices. The voices say they're ghosts. And, while she can hear them without anyone else hearing them, she has to respond out loud. Talking to voices no one else can hear is embarrassing and troubling to a family that loves you dearly, but Torberta is an orphan raised by people who barely tolerate her. They packed her off as soon as they could.

I love the fact that is book is paranormal, but there is some genuine doubt as to what Torberta is hearing. One of the things that often puts me off paranormal stories is that they're supposed to be set in the real world, but everyone acts like the paranormal aspects are just no big deal. So, even though Torberta is pretty sure what she's hearing really are ghosts, she does have moments of doubt, and to me that's a very realistic, very welcome touch.

I love a good romance, that's not a secret. But in many YA novels a good romance is nowhere to be seen. Sad, abusive, obsessive, unhealthy romances are scattered about like glitter at a drag convention. Romances that make no sense (The world is about to end, monsters are eating my family, but all I can think about is how much I lurve the hot boy who may or may not be the cause of the monsters...) at all are even more common. The sorts of relationships you think might actually go somewhere are usually pretty scarce. My sense is we see so many of these 'relationships' because they add easy drama, and because many writers have a hard time writing girls without defining them by how they relate to boys.

There's no romance in Torberta, and I was thrilled to see it. It's deeply satisfying to see a story where the focus of a fourteen-year-old girl's life isn't some boy. Even more welcome to see a story where romance isn't some sort of magical elixir that makes all the problems go away.

The angst level is minimal, and what angst Torberta has, she certainly deserves. Her parents are dead, the family that's taking care of her considers her a massive embarrassment, and everyone, even her friends at St. Christopher's, think she's insane because she hears voices. This is a girl who deserves a little self-pity. And while she does get a little angsty, she never gets whiny. (Have I mentioned that I love this character? I do, I really do!)

My only quibble with this story was at the end. Let me make it clear, this is just a personal preference, Mawhiny set up the ending properly. She laid all the groundwork, so the ending is a surprise, but not from out in left field. But it's a tad rushed and a little too much coincidence all in one place. Torberta talking to ghosts was a lot easier for me to believe than the timing of the actual incident that killed her.

Still, on the whole I really liked this book and loved Torberta. I'd say it's appropriate reading for anyone over the age of ten. (Maybe eight if you've got a good reader able to handle ideas on mental issues.) The main character is a girl, but there's nothing particularly girly about the book, so it shouldn't put boys off. Like Harry Potter and Ender, Torberta will appeal to both sexes.

This is a solid four star book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loved Ender or girl characters with their heads on straight.

Indie Book Review: For the Sake of the Future

And, after a rather long delay, the Indie Book Review is back! (I know all three of you were waiting with baited breath for the next installment.) Today we're going to look at For the Sake of the Future.

One of the online communities of writers I hang out at has been bouncing around the idea of whether or not you should hold onto an idea if you don't think you're a good enough writer to tackle it yet. Now, I'm a big fan of not waiting. I think you'll lose a lot of what you want with the idea if you just set it on the shelf. At the same time, I don't think you should publish that work until you are a good enough writer to do it proper justice.

Why is this relevant? For the Sake of the Future is a great idea. I wish I had come up with the plot for this story, it's so good. Val Panesar unfortunately is not a good enough writer to do it justice, yet.

The plot: The Big Bad wants to change the world. He's gotten a hold of eight people right after they died, The Undying, and offered them the chance to go back in time and rewrite the world, to make human existence 'meaningful' by going to war and making sure the 'right' people die. Apparently his main characters are a little stupid, and a little shook up from just having died, so they all agree. They start changing the past. From there we get twists, turns, crosses, double crosses, paradoxes, and the fun that time travel allows.

I really wish I had thought of this plot. And that I was or knew a really good graphic artist. For the Sake of the Future would have made an incredible graphic novel. There's action galore, and the main character, Neelam Lochan, is a huge manga fan. Starting this plot off in a fairly realistic drawing style and slowly morphing it into a manga style would have worked really well.

I liked the characters. Neelam is engaging and pleasant. Greg, Sean, and Marid, back up characters, are all interesting. As I mentioned above, the characters are a little dull, but unlike a lot of writers who indicate their characters are the smartest thing ever, and then they start doing stupid things, Panesar never tries to sell us on the idea that his characters are brilliant. They're regular guys (sort of, this would be one of the twists mentioned above) dropped into an extraordinary circumstance, and it takes them a while to realize this is not a good plan.

So, that's the good points.

The bad part is that this book desperately needed both an editor and a proofreader.

An editor was necessary to reign in the point of view hopping, chronology hopping, and chop about a quarter of the story out. Now, I don't hate head hopping in a book, as long as it's not done mid-scene. One point of view per scene takes care of the job nicely.  And I understand that parts of this book are supposed to be confusing, but randomly hopping about in the chronology, swapping POVs only makes the confusion worse. The idea is to write the story so that the confusion of the characters shines through, not to write the story so that the reader is scratching her head going, "What just happened there?" On top of that this is a long (and trust me, I write long books, I know long.) book, and it doesn't need to be quite that long.

A proofreader needed to go through and fix up the grammar, typos, and formatting issues. Now, I'm not going to be winning any awards for Grammarian of the Year. On top of that, I don't much care about grammar mistakes that don't jump off the page. But there were enough issues with For the Sake of the Future that I was irked by them.

Basically it's a rough draft.  It's a rough draft of something that could become a good book. On Goodreads two stars means the book was okay, one star means I didn't like it. Neither of those options really work. This book isn't okay; it's not well enough written to get an okay. But I did like it. I'd really like to see what it might look like after Panesar takes a few years to really study how a story hangs together and gets a good editor. So, no stars for For the Sake of the Future, just a review.