Keryl Raist's Blog, page 49

The Indie Book Review: The Eternal Messiah: Jesus of K'Turia

I'd like to start this review with two related thoughts.  First off, it takes a lot of guts to write about Jesus.  Almost everyone, and all Christians, has an ideal of Jesus, a set of mindsets and actions, and any deviation by the author is likely to annoy some readers. 

Secondly, though I have a degree in Religious Studies with a focus in Christian History and Theology, I'm not actually a Christian. 

Which I guess is my way of saying, I'm well versed in the ideas this story deals with, but I have no dog in the fight.

So, what is this story about?  The title would seem to indicate a hybrid of the Gospels and Star Trek.  And I'll admit that was what I was expecting to read as I got into the book.  So, I was pleasantly surprised to find an elegant and gentle treatment of the transformative power of faith. 

The theology is clean and simple.  Anyone who possesses a faith and works mindset should be pleased.  Anyone who is a fan of Paul's criticisms of the Law will probably enjoy this as well.  If you too believe the Law is old and dead, and the heart of the Christian message is drop everything, love your fellows, and follow Jesus, then you'll probably like this book, and be sold on it's main premise: that that message can immediately change, heal a man.

But I'm not sold on that message, so I would have liked to seen a bit more emotional depth of transformation.  The main characters find Jesus, literally, and are changed.  They see Him in action, feel the healing balm of His presence, and in less than two days, are ready to completely change their lives.  Now, perhaps that's the point, interaction with the real Jesus is so powerful, it immediately changes you.  But it didn't feel real to me.

There is a phenomena with hard core Star Trek fans.  If you ask them what happened in any given episode, they can tell you not only what happened on the screen, but they also fill in extra bits of story that weren't really there.  Parts that are emotionally meaningful to them are amplified, more detail added, occasionally entire extra scenes or bits of dialog take place.  The result is a much rounder, more fulfilling story than the actual TV show on the screen.

I have a feeling actual Christians will have a similar response to The Eternal Messiah.  People who already believe the message, who already have felt the power of Jesus in their own lives will likely have no problem connecting the dots of this story and adding in the extra bits of depth necessary to make it great.  People like me, on the outside looking in, will likely find the transformation a bit shallow.

Which is not to say it's badly written.  It's a solid B effort.  But it's not the sort of change where you slide effortlessly into the characters and accept what is going on.  This isn't Michael Corleone joining the dark side. 

I would have liked to have seen a more defined climax to the story.  I know when the plot is character change that a major, well-defined climax is problematic, but this story ended almost tentatively.  Yes, it wraps at a logical point, but it feels like the first book in a series.  

All in all,  I liked The Eternal Messiah.  I enjoyed reading it, and wanted to know what came next.  There are shades of Dune as well as Star Trek in this story, and I appreciate a bit of sci-fi in my theology. 

Indie Book Review: McCarty Griffin

In thinking about this review, I've got the music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in my head.  Before anyone thinks I'm calling any of these books bad or ugly, let me say what I mean.

The Good:  The Tribe is a sweet story about a group of feral cats and the humans who move onto their farm. 

The Bad: Monster Story is a "Good Lord! By all that's good and holy, DON'T GO INTO THE WOODS!" sort of tale.

The Ugly: Half Inch is a story of a battered woman planning to and murdering her ex-husband.

So, it's on the level of choice of topics is where these terms fit.

The Tribe brings us into the minds of a collection of feral cats left to their own devices on a farm, and their adventures with the humans who decide to move there.  It's cute.  It's sweet.  It's begging to be made into a live action movie for the 5-10 year old crowd.

I think The Tribe is technically a book for adults, (none of the characters are children) but I'd highly suggest it for reading with your kids.  Especially if they're old enough to be begging for pets.  This would be a great start to conversations about what it means to take care of an animal, about how they aren't just furry toys, and how to respect the small, fuzzy lives around us. 

I'll have to admit that I didn't finish Monster Story, but not because it was low quality.  For personal reasons I've been in a place where horror just isn't settling well with me.   The set up was strong.  The creepy factor was ramping up.  Horribly dead people were being found, well, pieces of them, and I hit the point where Monster Story was just too much.

I'm not usually a wuss when it comes to horror, so I'll probably take a stab at it again later.  But for the third of it I read, I was impressed, so impressed I didn't want to know what happened next.

And then comes Half-Inch, which was one of the most wonderfully ugly stories I've read in a long time.

I've always felt the true horror of Silence of the Lambs comes from the fact that Hannibal Lecter seems so reasonable.  You read the books, hear him speak, and suddenly you're thinking murder as art doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Pammy (Half-Inch's main character) might not have the same motivations as Lecter, but as you steep in the story the reasonableness of her actions grows and grows.  Toward the end you're sitting there, nodding along, more or less thinking, 'Yep, he had it coming.' and that's when you pull back and realize exactly how ugly this story is.

All in all, I'm quite impressed by the range McCarty Griffin was able to pull off.  Besides basic setting, these three stories have very little in common, yet they are all very believable.  She understands the mechanisms of thriller, horror, and non-genre fiction.  Stephen King is the only other author I can think of who's managed to pull off all three convincingly, and he's not bad company for an author to keep. 

Indie Book Review: The Egyptian

I'm about to make a pretty bold statement here.  Layton Green's The Egyptian is the strongest, best written indie book I've ever read.   Now, it's not my favorite indie book, I prefer a bit more humor in a book, but the basis of pure technical writing skill, on the ability to craft a story and have it hang together, The Egyptian is the best one I've seen so far.

What makes the Egyptian so great?

Let's start with the characters.  Dominic Grey, the leading man, is back from The Summoner, older, and a bit wiser, and ready to start on something new.   He's working for Viktor now as a full time investigator of situations where religion/cults and the real world mix in unfortunate ways.  And, while Dominic isn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination, he is, in this partnership with Viktor, the muscle man.  He does the legwork, the investigation that involves going to scary places and dealing with creepy people, and occasionally showing us that Jason Stratham has nothing on him when it comes to martial arts.  Which brings us to Viktor, who is still my favorite of the crew, who is for lack of a better term, the brains.  Viktor is the Religious Phenomenologist, the guy who actually knows what they're looking for.  Dominic finds the pieces, Viktor puts them together.  New to The Egyptian we get to meet Veronica, who is basically a Bond Girl.  If you've ever read/seen a James Bond story, you will understand her role in the book.  (Look good, move the plot along, have sex with the hero).  Lastly, Jax, also new to the cast, adds an extra layer of brightness to the story with his jaded character and devil may care attitude.  (He put me in mind of a mercenary version of Han Solo.)  These four very different characters are expertly balanced throughout the story to keep the plot running, the tension high, and the reader caring about what happens next.  Getting to spend time with them is a joy.

From there we go to the plot.  The Egyptian is solid.  Each aspect of the book makes sense, each scene flows into the next, there are no moments of wishing someone with a delete button had gotten a hold of certain bits, and no sudden wondering what happened in a given scene.  I had a small complaint with The Summoner, where on occasion it was a little too obvious that the characters were doing things because Green needed them to to keep the plot going.  That never happens in the Egyptian.  All the action, all the motivation, it all flows naturally.  You never see the hand of the author in this story.  The groundwork is properly laid, the middle adds new interests and possibilities, the climax takes care of business, and then we wrap up with a tidy ending.

Wait, you actually want to know what that plot is?  Okay.  On the surface level, it's about returning some stolen property.  Deeper in, that stolen property is a vial of the water of life, a serum that stops people from aging.  Who are the thieves?  An anti-aging biotech firm.  Who lost the vial?  An Egyptian eternal-life cult complete with mummies, who also happens to be an anti-aging biotech firm.  And they're willing to do anything to get it back.  Who are the bad guys?  That's one of the great twists in this story.  And this story has twists, it has turns, and mummies, and a hunchback, and...  I mentioned James Bond earlier.  Well, if James Bond and the X-Files had a love child, this book would be it.

The romance is once again a guy's romance.  But it's a guy's romance with a bit more introspection than I've usually seen in guy oriented books.  I like the fact that Grey is still dealing with the emotional fall out of The Summoner, but willing to move on to new things as well.  It's realistic in a very good way.  (It's also realistic in a way that some women might find exasperating, but that has more to do with how they deal with men, than anything about the book.)

Dialog is well done, competent, but not outstanding.  Call it a B+.  And honestly that just might be a matter of my own taste in the matter.  There's a sort of balance between wit, snark, and stoic (think NCIS) I'm especially fond of, and this book didn't have that.  But what it did have is dialog that works for each character.  There's never a second spent thinking, 'Huh? Why did he say that?'  There's not a single phrase in the entire book that drags you out of character.  And with characters as different as these four, plus the villains, that's a marvelous job.

Like The Summoner, this is a serious book with some dark topics, and Jax was a much needed glimmer of light.  In my previous review I equated The Summoner with 90% cocoa chocolate, very dark, very bitter.  And sometimes you want dark and bitter.  But you can't make it your entire diet.  The Egyptian, were it dark chocolate, would probably come in around 60%.  And for me, at least, this is a welcome change.  I can only deal with so much terrible darkness in a series before it gets too depressing to continue on.  The Egyptian not only gives the characters a break, but it gives the reader one as well.

I am extremely pleased that Layton Green asked me to review The Egyptian.  I look forward to seeing his further works.

The Indie Book Review: The Days and Months We Were First Born

"It's the end of the world as we know it... And I feel fine..."

Okay, not literally, but close enough.  I like apocalyptic fiction, and with a mysterious plague, people dying in droves, and society falling apart almost as fast as a roller coaster on the down slide, The Days and Months We Were First Born: The Unraveling certainly qualifies.

I liked The Days and Months We Were First Born: The Unraveling, but I didn't love it.  To some degree it felt like a sketch of a book I could have loved: rough and in need of focus. 

The Unraveling is a quick read.  It comes in at about 150 pages, making it a very short novel or a novella.  In serial fiction the job of the author is to make sure each book has a complete plot arc, but at the same time the book moves the larger story arc forward.  Jim Butcher's Dresden Files is excellent at this.  Burn Notice (a TV show) is fantastic at it.  With The Unraveling, I'm just not sure where the larger arc is going.  Though we get the sense that Martin, the main character, is telling us the story from a vantage point later in time, we don't get enough sense of that later point to have a good idea of what the larger focus of the series is.

The Unraveling could just as easily be called: Escape From New York, because that seems to be the main plot.  We get the set up: almost everyone dies horribly.  We get the baby plot arc: adapt to the new world.  We know there has to be a larger plot arc because it's book one in a series, but beyond Martin survives long enough to tell his story, we don't have much of an idea of what it might be.  I think, if Hunter had stayed with just that arc, and left the reader with only the information that Martin could get for himself, this story would have been a lot stronger.

But he didn't leave it there.  About half way through the story we suddenly break away from Martin and start following a group of scientists.  Why?  I have no idea. Let me get into spoiler territory here, by the end of the story New York City will be blown up in a nuclear blast.  Now, there is no way for Martin to know why this has happened.  So Hunter breaks off from Martin's tale, half way into the story, to start adding the second plot line.  And it's not that either plot line is bad; it's just that there's no real reason for it.  There doesn't seem to be any reason for NYC to blow up.   Ninety percent of the population is dead, more is dying, everything else is devolving into chaos, there's no reason for a spectacular boom.  If it was important to the larger plot arc, we need more information to help us find that.

From a technical aspect of putting words together, Hunter's writing ranges from quite good to shaky.  Martin is telling us the story, and he's alone in a lot of it.  There's a lot of telling.  I like Martin's voice so that's not too much of an issue, but I found myself thinking a bit more showing and less telling would be nice.

When the plot line suddenly jumps away from Martin to follow the scientists, the story gets quite confusing.  Who is telling us this?  Is Martin recounting something he saw?  How?  Do we suddenly have a new omniscient narrator?  Who is the newscaster?  How do they have the power to broadcast and run a helicopter? (Electric power is almost gone, people are living off batteries.  If power is that precious, why are you using it to do newscasts?)  To add to the confusion the scientists are almost interchangeable, so keeping track of which one is which is tricky.  Then throw battle scenes on top of that.  Wrap that all up in the fact that there seems to be no reason to know what is going on, and I ended up thinking diverging away from Martin is just bizarre.


Maybe the problem is that Hunter wasn't quite sure if he was writing an apocalyptic thriller or literary fiction.    If we had stayed with just Martin, this would have been a lot closer to the lit fic side of the spectrum.  If we had met the scientists from the beginning of the book, and a reason for why we were learning what was going on had been there, it would have been a lot closer to apocalyptic thriller.  But the story with how it turned out doesn't have a snappy enough plot for an apocalyptic thriller, and the writing and emotional development isn't strong enough for lit fic.

Which is another off aspect of dealing with Martin.  There's a certain detachment to his tale which seems a bit incongruous with how he tells the tale.  He's too in touch with himself and his emotions to be shocked into numbness, yet his emotional response is too flat for someone experiencing what he's going through.  I'd believe this was Martin telling his father's story.  A story he had grown up with, but didn't personally experience, more than it's Martin telling his own story.

On Goodreads.com a two star rating means, "It's okay."  And that's where I am with The Days and Months We Were Born: The Unraveling.  It was okay.  It had the bones to be great, but didn't make it there.

Trad Book Review: Glass Houses: The Morganville Vampires 1

So let's talk a little about young adult paranormal fiction.  Let's talk a little about suspension of disbelief.

For the fantasy writer, suspension of disbelief is your best friend.  Your job as an author is to do such a good job creating your world so your reader thinks, "Vampires, werewolves, things that go bump in the night, sure, I buy it!"

There are lots of ways to go about doing this, but part of the bedrock of a good set up is that it's completely believable.  Part of what makes good horror, good fantasy so compelling is that the non-fantastic parts feel real.

So, the introduction to your world has to have an internal and consistent logic.  It has to make sense.  If you toss the reader out of the reality of your world before you even get to the fantastic/spooky stuff, you've achieved EPIC FAIL.

For example: try to imagine the first episode of the X-files with a twenty-two-year-old, gum snapping, blonde in five inch heels and a tiny tank top instead of the lovely Gillian Anderson in the role of Scully.  Most of us would stop watching there, because we can't suspend our disbelief far enough to wrap our minds around the idea of that woman as a doctor/FBI agent.

And now to tie this to Glass Houses.  Claire, our main character, is a sixteen-year-old wunderkind, who whipped through high school in two years (Although she tells us she got there a year early and ended a year soon, which adds up to three years of high school and two years of middle school, but hey, who's counting?  Oh yeah, Claire, who told us she did it in two years... how smart is this girl again?) and is now in college.

Alas, because her parents are criminally stupid (and apparently enjoy setting fire to money) they sent her to Texas Prairie University, after allowing her to apply to MIT, Yale, Harvard, (and a slew of other high power schools) and getting her acceptance letters to said schools.  Apparently they want to keep their sixteen-year-old baby close to home, but living in the dorm of a notorious party school. 

See at this point I'm already out of the story.  I did finish high school a year early.  Guess what, you can't do that without mommy and daddy's help, which means mom and dad have to be on board with this whole getting a good education thing.  Here's another thing, mom and dad are not going to pay the money ($75 for an application to Harvard alone) to apply to all those schools if they have no intention of letting their little girl attend those schools.  And lets wrap this up with this idea: if you want your baby to be close because you're feeling protective of her, you are not going to send her to live in a creepy party dorm!

In the modern world, if mom and dad want you close after you've graduated high school, they can do this wonderful thing known as let you live at home and take courses online.  The entire MIT catalog is available online.  If mom and dad think you're too young for college, Harvard has this wonderful program that lets you get accepted to school and then defer your attendance for a year.  Schools will work with prodigies and their parents to make life easier for them.  The thing that doesn't happen in the real world these days is mom and dad decide to send their precious little genius to Party U for a few years because it's close to home.

Here's where the discussion of YA fiction comes into play.  There's a problem almost all YA books have to deal with: how to get a young person into situations of danger and adventure without mom and dad jumping into play to keep them safe.  In real life, most kids have the sort of parents who are actually trying to do well by them.  In the YA world there are gobs of orphans, boarding schools, and criminally absent parents because they're needed to make the plot work. 

So, the author wants a plot where Claire has to deal with human adversaries and supernatural ones.  For whatever reason the author wants Claire to be sixteen.  Sending her off to college early was an interesting twist on boarding school, and opens the potential for living off campus and getting into more contact with the supernatural baddies.  She made Claire super smart because that increases friction with the human baddies.

This book was written around 2008.  It appears to be set around 2008 as well.  The level of bullying Claire takes at both high school and college would easily get both institutions sued into bankruptcy.  And in the post Columbine/Virginia Tech world, one might think that possibly, if you are being assaulted by the other students, the kind of violence that involves being tossed down a flight of stairs and left unconscious, that possibly someone would call the cops.  Just maybe.  

But of course, no one does anything like that, giving Claire the motivation to move out of the dorm, and into her new home with her new roommates. 

We didn't even get to the vampires, and I already don't believe this story.  In fact, unless they're pink and sparkly (which I've heard isn't true about this book) I believe the vampires more than I do the set up for this book.  The entire set up is a series of glowing neon plot devices for the purpose of putting the main character into the situation author wants her in.  There is nothing subtle or elegant about the first few chapters of this book.  Nothing that shows any real desire to engage in serious world building on the part of the author.  In short, it's lazy, and has done nothing to make me want to learn more about what comes next.

And so, Congratulations Glass House!  Welcome to your shiny new spot on my Did Not Finish List.

Indie Book Review: Thaloc Has A Body

Anyone who read the review I did of knows that I'm a Brodie Wade fan.  He's that perfectly adorable combination of vulnerable, unstable, wounded, and sweet that just makes you want to take him home, clean him up, and make sure he's safe and protected forever.  Basically, if you've got even the tiniest bit of Florence Nightingale in you, you're going to love Brodie.

So, I was immensely pleased to see him come back for Thaloc Has A Body.  In Thaloc Brodie's got a whole new set of mysteries to figure out.  Phil Dawson, his friend the police detective, is stumped.  People are getting killed.  Heaping piles of evidence point to the murderers, but it just doesn't feel right.  Those people are acting innocent and have no motives.  Then the final straw, one of the killers is a dead man.  Phil calls in Brodie, and the two of them start chasing down a killer who can look like anyone, leave hair, fingerprint, and clothing evidence, and is on a killing streak.  Meanwhile, The Truth, Brodie's link to the paranormal, has been pretty well behaved in the wake of Death Has A Body, but well behaved isn't the same thing as silent.  It's telling Brodie his wife and death, who are one in the same, are approaching.  

There were some issues I had with Death, lack of back story, rushed ending, slightly flat secondary characters, all of which I was hoping to see improve in the next book.  And in most of these issues Hanel delivered.  Thaloc takes care of the back story issues.  How did Brodie and Phil get together?  Why are they friends?  What kind of guy is Phil?  All answered beautifully.  Jamie Stanton, who was briefly introduced in Death comes back as well, and she's also nicely rounded out in this one.  Brodie, as always, is a glittering diamond of a character.  And, because the Truth is backing off a bit, we're getting to see what a functional Brodie, a man who's just starting to trust that maybe the world isn't going to explode around him in the next five minutes, looks like.  I like functional Brodie just as much as messed up Brodie.

Pacing is still pretty quick.  Hanel has taken the mantra "Do Not Bore The Reader" to heart.  There is no wasted time in this plot.  If something is happening in the story, it's important.  Pacing is also fast in the sense of how quickly characters developed.  Personally, I'd like to see the character development slow down a little.  But, I'm guessing the target audience for this book will be fine with things fast.

Once again, the ending seems a bit rushed.  Hanel writes a big climax and then sort of skimps on denouement.  There are two major bombs thrown at us at the end of the story and a little time to see Brodie deal with them would be nice. 

We get some romance in this installment which I enjoyed.  I like seeing Brodie happy.  And for most people happy involves more in the way of companionship than a cat.  Granted, I would have expected him to be a bit more shut off, but the romance wasn't totally out of left field.  It is (as I eluded to before) fast.  But not ridiculously fast, no one is declaring undying love on day two of the romance.  And, I'd like to give Jerry some serious points for this, from everything we can tell Brodie is a virgin, which fits his character perfectly.  There is nothing I find more off-putting than running into a socially awkward, emotionally wounded character who as soon as he gets into the bedroom turns into Mr. All-The-Right-Moves-Sex-God!

There was one note in this story that rang false to me.  Phil is the sort of character who's had a very, very bad time with religion in the past and it's left him hostile to the idea of God.  And he's so deeply uncomfortable with the idea of God that it threatens to wedge a rift between him and Brodie.  But he has a sort of no-atheists-in-foxholes moment toward the end of the book.  Now, I know some pretty hardcore atheists, some of whom have been in foxholes, and they tend to get annoyed at the portrayal of when the chips are down they start praying just like everyone else.  Given Phil's back story, and the way he reacted to Brodie and Jamie talking about God, his sudden prayer struck me as more Jerry making a point, than something Phil would genuinely do.

But as quibbles go, that's a pretty minor one.  Once again I fully enjoyed spending time with Brodie.  Once again I can't wait to see what's coming next for him.  The end of Thaloc left a lot of interesting possibilities for our leading man, and I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes.

The Indie Book Review: Freedom's Sword

I like historical fiction.  I like military history.  I like Scotland.  So I was pretty sure I'd like Freedom's Sword, and as I turned off my kindle after reading the last word, I sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed my visit to the first Scottish War of Independence.

A little background: Scotland was once upon a time a completely free and independent entity from England.  But back in the 1200's a squabble between potential claimants to the throne ended up with Edward I deciding he was in charge.  This sparked the first Scottish War of Independence.  Most Americans are vaguely familiar with this because we've seen Braveheart.  Unlike Freedom's Sword, Braveheart played pretty fast and loose with the facts to make a romantic, compelling story.  Tomlin thought the truth was compelling enough, and from what I can tell stuck pretty closely to it.  Personally, I agree with her.

So, as the tale opens we meet Andrew Moray, brand new knight about to go off on his first battle.  It goes horribly, he's taken captive, and after months of torment in an English dungeon and a breath-taking escape, he returns to Scotland with a burning desire to reconquer his homeland.  From there we follow him as he rounds up a force of like minded men and retakes northern Scotland from the English.

It's a good story.  And I read most of it over the Forth of July weekend, so a tale of booting out the English seemed especially resonant.  Battle scenes are vibrant without being overblown.  Details of place are in enough depth to give an image of what is happening, but not so dense that you need to hack through them with a machete to find the plot.  Most of the secondary characters are well enough defined that you won't confuse them with each other.  The history is well researched and alive.  It's what moves the story along as opposed to being scenery. 

If I wanted anything from Freedom's Sword, it was actually more history on what exactly was happening and why.  I'm well versed on medieval history, weaponry, and tactics, so I was following along pretty well, but a bit more on how Edward I ended up in charge, why they were rebelling against him in the first place, how things were different under Toom Tabard, why Robert the Bruce was a natural claimant to the throne, and how the Scottish political system worked would have been useful.  With Tomlin's obvious love of the subject and deft writing, I would have been well pleased by another fifty pages of background.

There was one jarring aspect of Freedom's Sword.  For some reason it suddenly shifts point of view (POV) to Caitrina, Andrew's Lady.  And while I thought more or less everything involving Andrew was interesting, I rapidly lost interest when the story shifted to Caitrina.  (Fortunately it didn't happen too often.)  It's not that her story was badly written, nor was it boring per se; it just didn't have a lot to do with the rest of the plot.  There's nothing that happens from Caitrina's POV that couldn't be dealt with in a few lines of dialog with her talking to Andrew.  There's nothing added by hopping to her head.  She's so tangentially related to the plot that at one point twenty-seven chapters go by without a mention of her.  It almost feels like there was a plan to do a secondary story line of life on the home front, but somehow it didn't make it into the final story.   Personally I would have liked to have seen that sort of a storyline.  I think Tomlin could have done many fine things with it, but that will have to remain in the wish stage.

Beyond that my only other complaint was the lack of idea of when thing happen.  We get one date stamp in the beginning of the tale and another at the very end.  Some in between would have made it easier to keep track of what was going on. 

All in all I enjoyed Freedom's Sword quiet a bit, and look forward to seeing what else Tomlin will come up with. 

The Not Even Remotely Indie Book Review Strikes Back: Storm Front

I know, I know, I'm late to the party.  It's 2011 and I'm just getting to know Harry Dresden.  But, as they say, better late than never, and in this case, it's much better late.

I read for characters.  That and dialog are my things.  Give me a fantastic character with a great voice and I'll forgive a lot of writing sins.  So, as you can probably guess Harry Dresden was right up my alley, and Jim Butcher is a good enough writer there weren't many sins I needed to forgive.

Oh, and I should probably mention I'm a massive James Marsters fan, and he's the guy reading the audio version of the book I was listening to.  Even if I wasn't a raving Spike fan I would have considered this an extremely well read audio book.  

Harry is a perfect combination of gallows humor, never-give-up tenacity, snarky-wit, and anti-authoritarian attitude.   Basically, he's almost exactly what I want in a leading man.  James Marsters does a fantastic job of bringing that to life.  It is a deeply satisfying combination. 

I love a well-thought-out, detailed system of magic.  And Jim wrote it for me.  Wrote it beautifully with hints of way more going on beyond the surface than is specifically told to us.  Wrote it with enough detail so that the mythos feels real and works.  And though I haven't read books 2-12 I'm quite hopeful that he's not done such a good job setting this up to then turn it on it's head and throw the laws out when they become inconvenient. 

As for those sins I mentioned earlier, really there was only one, too much going over the same turf again and again and again.  Quick example: Butcher wrote a scene where Harry's shield bracelet got slagged, he then had Harry tell me it was destroyed two, four, and seven pages later.  (I'm guessing on the pages since I was listening to the book, but you get my drift.)  I doubt Jim Butcher will ever read this, so I'll address this advice to other writers: if you show us something important happening, you do not then need to tell us it happened over and over.  Occasional reminders might be nice, once a large chunk of story has gone by.   Your reader is smart enough to remember details for more than five hundred words.

All in all, I was greatly pleased by this addition to my slowly growing collection of trad published books.  Fool Moon is definitely on my to be read list.

To Tag or Not To Tag:

That is the question.
'Tis nobler to suffer the finger cramps of furious clicking
And the wasted time of promoting others
Or stand against the waves of popular wisdom
And proclaim a tag free strategy?

So, I'm very obviously not Shakespeare.  (On the off chance that being female, a novelist, and alive didn't already tip you off to that.)  But I do think I know something about tagging on Amazon and would like to pass it along.
 
For those of you out of the loop, tags are those little notes you can attach to any product on Amazon to make it easier to find.  Products usually have some tags already, and if you agree with them, you can click on them driving the tag numbers up, or you can add your own.

If you click on the box below, you'll get to my book.  Scroll down past the publisher info, blurb, and reviews, and you'll find the tags.  I've got over 200 votes on my most popular tags.  I got them by the fairly common technique among writers whereby we swap tags.  You tag mine, I'll tag yours, and we're all happy in the end.  I have spent, literally, over an entire day tagging other people's books so they would tag mine.

Now, Amazon has requested on the CreateSpace page that authors not swap tags.  That they do not approve of gaming the system.  I can understand that.  After all, the tags are supposed to be for the customers to help them find things other customers thought fit in certain categories.

I know this is bothering some writers, but I'm supremely non-plussed.  (And not just because I've already got a lot of tags.)  See, I've come to the conclusion that tags are not a wildly useful way to spend your promotional time.

Why?  Well, first off let's talk about what a tag isn't.  They aren't keywords.  They also aren't a way to boost your book higher on the main search page.  If you go to Amazon's main page, and type in a search term, the first zillion items are ones that have that term in the title.

If you refine your search by going to the advanced search options, you can search by keywords.  You cannot search by tags.  If you search by keyword, what pops up are books that have the keyword in question.   Having a lot of tags can help a bit here, but not in a direct way.  If the person doing the keyword search clicks on an item, and then scrolls all the way down to the bottom of the product page, items with similar tags will pop up. 

If you want to search by tag, you have to click on a product, scroll down to where the tags are, and then click on the search by tag feature.

So, we'll start off with the fact that tags are not the most easily accessible search tool on Amazon.  And, because of that, they are likely also not the most used search feature on Amazon.   People who know and regularly shop on Amazon may use them, but the casual user is unlikely to be finding your book by it's tags.

Then, there's also the fact that tagging takes time.  If you want a lot of tags, you've got to give a lot of tags.  Given how handy and easy to use tags are for the average person searching for your book, I'd say there are a lot of better ways to use your promotional time.  My 200+ tag votes took me at least thirty hours of tagging other people to get.   At this point in my career I've got the number one book for Justice, Fate, number two for True Love, and similarly high numbers for most of my other tags.  I'm not burning up the bestseller list, and having done a very quick audit of the other books at the tops of those categories with me, neither are they.

So, thirty hours spent dominating categories no one is searching... or thirty hours spent getting to know people online, reading books to review, tweeting, posting on the blog, or any other promotional opportunity?  I know for a fact people have bought my book because of time I spent engaging with them online and writing blog posts.  I don't know that anyone besides me has even seen my book based on it's tags, let along bought it.   And judging by the sales numbers of the other books at the tops of the tag heaps I checked, it's not helping them either.

I'm not saying tags are useless.  I am saying that if you've got any other way you can spend that time that might attract readers to you, do it instead.

Ye Gods II: Outskirts Press Responds

So, a while ago I wrote a post instructing authors to run screaming away from Outskirts Press.  They just noticed I wrote it and responded.  Now, for some reason I'm not seeing their comment on the original post, so I thought I'd copy it and respond directly here:
Keryl, You're right, our pricing is much different from CreateSpace. If you look deeper, you'll discover that our fee-based services are actually lower than the fee-based services offered by CreateSpace. Please feel free to re-examine their service fees on their website and then perhaps post an update to your blog that more accurately reflects our value. We're happy to help you do that by providing some some details below for your convenience:

CreateSpace offers something similar to our Ruby ($699) or Diamond ($999) packages for $785 and you can see those details on the CreateSpace website at https://www.createspace.com/Services/TotalDesignFreedomStandard.jsp

Although this service doesn't include some the inclusions of our Ruby or Diamond packages.

When you examine CreateSpace's service fees, you may notice that their a la carte prices are actually quite a bit higher than ours. For instance, they charge $499 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/UniqueBookCover.jsp) for the same custom cover design that we charge $299 for.

Their copyediting service is $0.019 cents per word (https://www.createspace.com/Services/ComprehensiveCopyediting.jsp), whereas ours is $0.014 cents per word. For an average 60,000 word document, that equates to a difference of $300 less with Outskirts Press at http://outskirtspress.com/p/editing

As for marketing services, their prices are actually quite a bit more expensive than ours. Their press release with distribution service is $598 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/PressReleaseWithDistribution.jsp ) compared with ours for $219 at http://outskirtspress.com/p/customrelease (and if you published with us, it's even less).

Their book video service is $1,249 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/VideoBookTrailers.jsp) compared with ours at $799, and our authors save 50% off that price! As a CreateSpace author, is CreateSpace offering you a 50% discount on their "egregious" book video fees? Want a less expensive one than you can get anywhere else? http://outskirtspress.com/p/videotrailer

Speaking of not free, CreateSpace even charges $199 for Sell Sheets (https://www.createspace.com/Services/SellSheets.jsp), whereas Outskirts Press authors can print (and even create/modify) their Sell Sheets within their Publishing Center freely whenever they want.

It's true CreateSpace doesn't offer the Amazon Extreme services, although based upon their prices above, if they did, you can bet their prices would be more than ours.

All that, PLUS you get your paperback on Barnes & Noble. The good news for CreateSpace authors is that even if you publish with CreateSpace, you can benefit from affordable Outskirts Press marketing options at http://outskirtspress.com/marketing
Sincerely,Outskirts Press

Now, everything they've got posted there may be true, but, that was not the point of my original post.  I compared what it costs to get a book printed with Outskirts to what it costs to get a book printed with CreateSpace and with Lulu.com.  I did this with a professional author, someone who is trying to make a living selling books, in mind.  They didn't mention Lulu in the response, so I'll skip it as well.
To make a physical book, with an ISBN, barcode, distribution to major retailers (including Barnes and Noble and Amazon), and a customizable cover costs $39.00 on CreateSpace.   That $39.00 gets you the option of something like 15 book sizes, more than 20 customizable covers, and two paper colors. 
Outskirts' least expensive option is $199.99.  They take your MS and turn it into a book.  There is no barcode, no ISBN, no distribution.  You have the option of one size, one paper grade, and one of two customizable covers.  They then give you one "free" copy.  
You've got an MS.  You want to sell it.  Which of those two options looks better?
Now, let me go a bit further.  Outskirts does not appear to make the bulk of their money printing books.  They appear to make their money selling services to authors.  They may or may not have better prices that CreateSpace, but here's the thing, I don't recommend using any of the a la carte services of any of the DIY publishers.  They are, for the most part, a waste of money.  Go find places where other indies hang out, make friends, and you can find those same services for a much better price.  Better yet, learn how to do a lot of them yourself.  
There was one service Outskirts offered that really pissed me off, and it's mentioned briefly in the response above:  The Amazon Extreme Service.  It cost $299.00 and gets you three things, a Kindle version of your book, the Look Inside feature for your book on Amazon, and ten tags.  Words are insufficient to explain how big of a rip off this is.  This is taking advantage of people who don't know how CreateSpace or Amazon DTP works and robbing them blind.  So, let me take a minute here to explain in detail what sort of work you'd have to do to get these things for yourself.
A: Go to CreateSpace and set up a book.B: There will be an option that says something like: Amazon Look Inside: yes or no?C: Check the yes square.
You are now signed up for Look Inside.  Depending on how fast with a mouse you are, that took you less than one second.
D: Once your book is up live on Amazon, scroll down your product page.E: Find the tags section.F: Type in the tags you want.  (Outskirts will type in ten tags.  Amazon lets any user add up to fifteen.) 
To further hammer home exactly how blindingly easy the tag thing is, authors routinely do tag swaps.  I click on your tags, you click on mine, both of our books are a little easier to find.  And (this is something I'll go into more detail on in a later post) it's also not all that useful.  Tag is not a synonym for keyword (which is an impression Outskirts tries to create) so the only way a lot of tags makes it easier for someone to find your book is if they specifically search tags.  I've got over 200 votes on the tag "true love" for Sylvianna, which means Sylvianna is in second or third place for total "true love" tags.  If you search keyword, true love, books I didn't write pop up.  How many tags of true love does the number one book on the list have?  Zero.  So, not only are they selling you a service that anyone can do for free, it's not even terribly useful.
But what about getting your book up on Kindle.  That's hard and scary and requires a lot of technical savvy, right?  Um... no. 
A: Fill out forms (Outskirts sends you a copy of the forms, and you fill them out, then they reenter the data.)B: Copy and paste all the information (category, back cover blurb, etc...) from the print version into the kindle version.C: Upload your .jpeg cover imageD: Upload your .doc text.
Congratulations!  In two or three days you've got a Kindle book. (Or, according to Outskirts: four weeks.)   From the way they describe what they do, it looks like someone at Outskirts signs you up with Amazon DTP.  Which, once again, you can do for yourself for free.
All told, it took me less than half an hour do to all three of these things, and less than a minute for the first two.  I'm not a computer wizard.  But I can read, and I can follow simple directions, and I sure as hell don't need to pay someone close to three hundred dollars to do that for me!  You don't either.  As I said in my previous post, if you want someone else to do this, go find someone charging about fifteen dollars, which is a decent price for the amount of work involved in doing this.
Once upon a time services that catered to self-published authors were called vanity presses.  They were called this because, by the time you were done, you had a book to stick on your shelf at home, sell to a few friends, and that was about it.  If selling your books is your career, if you want to make a living at this, if you want something beyond your name on the cover of a book, Outskirts is a bad choice.  They charge too much.  Here's how my 424 page, 9x6 novel does at a $14.99 price point with about a 40% author discount:  CreateSpace, I make $3.03 per book sold.  Outskirts, I end up owing them $2.27 for each book printed.  I have to jack the price up to $16.95, and then I only make $0.42 per book.  If you sign with Outskirts you cannot price your book low enough to compete with the hordes of people publishing on CreateSpace.  And that, more than any other reason, is why you should run away from Outskirts.