Randy Attwood's Blog, page 21

Contemplation on First Person Point of View

An Amazon writer/reader forum was a question about first person point of view and seeking comment on the beginning of the poster's story. It prompted me to look at my own works in which I've used first person, but in different ways. I'll list them here and if you want to find them on Amazon and do a look inside you'll see what I mean. I took a class once at KU from James Gunn, the classic sci-fi writer who said that first person POV was the most difficult to do, but when done well, the most powerful.
3 Very Quirky Tales: 2nd story called It Was Me (I) is normal first person
Blue Kansas Sky, snooker short story: normal first person
Crazy About You, novel: first person but with a twist. At times the narrator takes a step forward in time and looks back and able to use his gained wisdom to contemplate the story.
Downswing, golf short story: first person (is this and the snooker short story the narrowest of fiction genres?)
One More Victim, novella: first person from three different years. This is my most downloaded work. Has Holocaust element.
The Saltness of Time, novella: This is an interesting one, rather a steal from Joseph Conrad. The real first person point of view is a listener, but of course the narrator is also in first person as he tells his story to the listener.
Then and Now, novel: First person but with a twist. The writer addresses the reader and then writes a different character's section in third person and then again addresses the reader in the first person as the author commenting on what he has written. I always thought it set up an interesting tension with a hell of a payoff at the end. I cry every time I reread that damn book.

My five-foot shelf of Philip K. Dick

I didn't think I'd start out doing a series of blog posts about writers I admired and influenced me, but the one on John D. MacDonald was popular, so I thought I'd do one about Philip K. Dick.
To be honest, I was looking for ways to promote  3 Very Quirky Tales  and I always search for Philip K. Dick (PKD) sites because the first tale in my trilogy, Tell Us Everything is a sci-fi work in which I really tried to channel PKD.
One of the many things I admired about his writing is how quickly he could set a scene and grab the reader and not let go. I hope all three stories in Quirky  (also on Smashwords) might grab you.
I encountered PKD in high school. That was in Larned, KS. Our access to books was the small library and then Knupp's Drug Store (yep, with a counter, cherry cokes and all that) that had a magazine sales rack and above the magazines a shelf for paperback books. I knew the day the salesman stopped by to bring in new books, so Wednesdays after school it was stop at Knupp's, get that cherry coke, and look at the new titles.
I was drawn to science fiction. I think the first PKD I read was Solar Lottery. It amazes me that I still have the first edition ace paperback, which cost 50c. We're talking a lot of moving around here and storing books while I was in Italy and Japan. We're talking about 50 years here.
PKD showed me that a writer could completely immerse a reader in word-created reality. And what a reality he created. It was a reality that made you question reality. I didn't read his books. I absorbed them.
There are many works out there discussing his books and his craft and his tortured brain. I could add nothing except this acknowledgement:
I have a bookcase of six shelves I built in my small den. Not enough room for all my books. Which ones to put there? I was reminded of Harold Bloom's, The Western Canon. This book has been viewed by some as a sort of list for literary elite snobs or his view of the most influential books. What I understood Bloom to be saying is because of the books he lists, we are the way we are today.
So that's how I looked at the books in my library. Which ones made me the way I am today? So on those shelves is the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald and one five-foot shelf is all PKD. And I turned on my son and so we both still collect, although rarely will you find the old paperbacks in any used bookstore. He's caught on. Also on those shelves is the Fu Manchu series by Sax Rohmer, the works of John Le Carre, Eric Remarque, and more (am I committing to a blog post about each? We'll see).
A Philip K. Dick festival is planned for this fall in San Francisco. Details here.

Huge Boost for "Crazy About You"

Author Nick Russell is one of the mega-success stories in epublishing. His "Big Lake" series continues in the top 100 rankings of Kindle sold books in police procedurals. We're talking +100,000 sales here.
So when he gives an excellent review to a book, you pay attention. I paid attention when he gave five stars to Crazy About You.
Nick is also a RVer and blogs about his travels and serendipity struck when he stopped in Larned, KS the site of Crazy About You. We had met online before that, but now he was really interested in Crazy.
Not only did he buy the book, he read it, and liked, and reviewed it, and will mention it on his blog as well.
And here are a couple of other excerpts from recent reviews.
From Vered Ehsani
`Brilliant' and `original' are about how I would sum this sweet tale up. And I don't use those words (or 5 star ratings) without meaning it. Seventeen year old Brad lives on the grounds of an insane asylum with his sister and Dad. When Dad goes on a work trip, Brad has no idea that he will spend the week grappling with questions about sexuality, sanity and death. And some of the answers aren't pretty.

While the main character is a young adult, this is no kid's story! The tightly woven script is replete with humour, thrills, tension, mystery and the occasional flashes of inspired insights into the true definition of insanity that left me wondering if `normal' is really as normal as we like to think.
From Katy Sozaeva
One of the many things that I found fascinating about this story was how the early 1960s are portrayed – and how very much like the mid 1980s it was; I think being a teenager, exploring life and learning these things, tends to make every generation think they are unique – but what they don’t realize is, that they’re really very much the same.

A coming-of-age novel in the hands of a master storyteller, Crazy About You is a book in which anyone should be able to find something to enjoy.
I've had the manuscript professionally edited and proofread (I'm awful at that) and that new version is now uploaded to both Amazon.
I always like to remind readers, too, that I donate $1 of every sale to Headquarters Counseling Center, Lawrence, KS for its work operating the Suicide Prevention Hotline for the Kansas City Area.

A Big Nod to John D. MacDonald and his Travis McGee Series

From time to time I get on a re-read kick and the last week it took me back to John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Reread five in about that many days. I don't know why I do this. We had a wonderful spell of weather here in KC and I could sit outside and read and sip, along with Travis, Boodles gin on the ice.
That series was good. I had enough distance (and poor memory) to forget the details of many of the plots, but what I enjoy every time is re-encountering Travis and his milieu.
He creates a reality for the reader so easy to enter and be enraptured with. Creating reality with words is what this fiction thing is all about.
If you haven't read him, do try to go through the McGee series in order. The last five that I re-read were: The Empty Copper Sea, The Green Ripper, Free Fall in Crimson, Cinnamon Skin, The Lonely Silver Rain. All titles, obviously, have a color in them.
During my ventures into fiction, I wanted to create my own Travis type of character. His name is Philip McGuire. Instead of a beach bum who lives on a houseboat in Florida and makes money doing various kinds of salvage work (and most of that salvage for Travis was healing people), my guy is a burnt-out foreign correspondent who gives up journalism to return to his college town to buy and run a bar.
The thing about MacDonald's McGee series for me is that I read another book not  to get into another plot, I wanted more time with Travis. And that's what I tried to accomplish with my Philip McGuire.
I have two books about ole McGuire: "Heal My Heart So I May Cry" and "A Heart to Understand." I think I will issue them simultaneously. In this day of epublishing, if someone likes one novel, they then may want immediately to be able to get another one.
True story here: I was driving in the car and listening to the radio news when an AP report told me that:  "Travis McGee, the creator of the John D. MacDonald series, died today." I kid you not. My God, how both the creator and the created would have loved that.

"A Match Made in Heaven" Included in June Issue of eFiction

A Match Made in Heaven was accepted for the June issue of eFiction Magazine, produced by Doug Vance and his volunteer editors and illustrators at the eFiction website.
That issue is now live here:
http://www.amazon.com/eFiction-Magazine/dp/B004UD88K2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1338745196&sr=1-1
Past magazines can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_17?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=efiction+magazine&sprefix=efiction+magazine%2Caps%2C1198
My short story, Tell Us Everything was published in the October issue (http://www.amazon.com/eFiction-Magazine-October-2011-ebook/dp/B006JNQCF4/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338132939&sr=1-9
At this stage of things, writers, editors and illustrators are not paid for their work and there is a tendency to look down one's nose at such productions.
I recently finished a biography of HP Lovecraft (1890-1937), that great horror writer, who considered himself an amateur writer. Not that he wrote amateurishly, but that to get paid for writing seemed ungentlemanly. Not that he wasn't happy to receive payment later in his life when he fell upon hard times, but somehow money cheapened things. He and like-minded writers and editors produced small magazines for no pay, such as Weird Tales, which later became quite famous.
Because of the epublishing phenomenon, the amount of available fiction material has grown immensely. I'm certainly grateful because it has allowed me to reach a small but I hope growing audience of readers and fellow authors.
Efforts such as eFiction Magazine should be supported as the modern day pulp magazine. So I'm delighted A Match Made in Heaven (a work I describe as: Mormonism explored, in a sci-fi sorta way) has found a home with other stories in its pages.

Letterpress Project Update

I've made contact with a print artist, Nicholas Naughton, who has a letterpress studio in the Crossroads area of KC. An interview with him can be found here. Nick is being exhibited just now at a show the KC Artist's Coalitionis putting on. Details here. I haven't gone to see the show yet, but hope to soon. Nick's works are the first on the page and I am so impressed with them. He's got the postures of these workers nailed. It's great to see a revival of realism, and realism would be the approach I'd want to see for illustrating some scenes in  The Saltness of Time . Nick is putting together cost numbers for the art, design, layout and production of a letterpress printed book.
I'm researching paper. Would love to do handmade paper and have found some sources to explore, but nothing local. Be great to keep everything local, but may not be possible. If anyone reading this knows of a Kansas City area handmade paper maker, do contact me or leave a comment.
Book cover printing needs to be explored as well. I've found one local custom bindery, so we may be able to keep that local.
When we have the numbers together we'll make a Kickstarter proposal. Video is important and I have sources to do that video work and think that making a video of the entire process and offering that with the book would be wise. This whole project would showcase the beauty of letterset press capabilities.
The Saltness of Time  is a story so very well suited for this project. Will provide updates as they develop.

Two Short Works Free for Two Days

I had a couple of free days left in two works still in Kindle Select program. Friday and Saturday they will be free downloads for kindle users. As works come off the 90-day Select program, I'm not renewing, but re-posting to other platforms, such as the Nook.

The works are:

One More Victim, a perennial favorite.

By Pain Possessed, a sci-fi short story that was well received.

"Brilliant and Orignial" Crazy About You

Gotta like a review that starts like this for Crazy About You:
`Brilliant' and `original' are about how I would sum this sweet tale up. And I don't use those words (or 5 star ratings) without meaning it. Seventeen year old Brad lives on the grounds of an insane asylum with his sister and Dad. When Dad goes on a work trip, Brad has no idea that he will spend the week grappling with questions about sexuality, sanity and death. And some of the answers aren't pretty.
While the main character is a young adult, this is no kid's story! The tightly woven script is replete with humour, thrills, tension, mystery and the occasional flashes of inspired insights into the true definition of insanity that left me wondering if `normal' is really as normal as we like to think.
The reader is a South African now living in Kenya. I  find it wonderful that a story set in Larned, KS can have impact all around the world.

"Brilliant and Orignal" Crazy About You

Gotta like a review that starts like this for Crazy About You:
`Brilliant' and `original' are about how I would sum this sweet tale up. And I don't use those words (or 5 star ratings) without meaning it. Seventeen year old Brad lives on the grounds of an insane asylum with his sister and Dad. When Dad goes on a work trip, Brad has no idea that he will spend the week grappling with questions about sexuality, sanity and death. And some of the answers aren't pretty.
While the main character is a young adult, this is no kid's story! The tightly woven script is replete with humour, thrills, tension, mystery and the occasional flashes of inspired insights into the true definition of insanity that left me wondering if `normal' is really as normal as we like to think.
The reader is a South African now living in Kenya. I  find it wonderful that a story set in Larned, KS can have impact all around the world.

Attwood manages to out-Lovecraft the original Lovecraft

For me, it is extraordinarily gratifying to receive a "wow-he-really-got-it" review from a pure reader (i.e. a person I don't know from Adam or Eve and who bought the work). I met D. Preston McConkie (is that a great name or what, must steal it for future use) on eFiction, a very writer friendly site where participants also produce a digital magazine that is quite good. At least they published one of my pieces, so they must have good taste. Bear with me. Let me digress.
The great horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft considered himself an amateur writer. This did not mean he thought what he was doing was amateurish, rather it meant that to take money for writing fiction was, well, unseemly. Not the sort of thing an English gentleman (and Lovecraft was an anglophile) would do. He, and like-minded gentlemen and ladies, published in small magazines produced by like-minded folks. Golf had this phase, too, where gentlemen were amateur golfers, i.e. did not play for money (though I imagine there were plenty of side bets.)
Later, fiscal realities made Lovecraft quite happy to accept money for his stories. Reality has a way of trumping ideals.
In this new epublishing world, we are seeing again writers submitting stories for no pay to digital magazines:  eFictionmag is one of them and worthy of your attention.
Through eFiction, I made Preston's acquaintance. Here is the bio he sent to me about himself:
Preston McConkie is a Gulf War veteran, former truck driver, news reporter and editor who now works as a freelance writer in Southern Utah.
My correspondence with him has convinced me he is even more than that summary and has a fiction voice that should serve him well.
The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley is my homage to Lovecraft. So when a reviewer as honest as Preston tells you, you have "out-Lovecrafted...Lovecraft," you sit up and pay rapt attention:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RPEX746DIWO56/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B005BVZK0I&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&nodeID=283155&store=books
If you'd like to contact Preston, let me know and I'll put you in email closeness.