Sam Ryan's Blog, page 3

Writing Update

Alright so recently I reached approximately 20 thousand words in Dynasty and some of you may know that I tend to use that as a major mile marker. Usually if I can get that far then the rest tends to come quickly. However as I was reading over what I had written I found myself bored. I was basically four chapters in and nothing had happened. I had hardly even touched on most of the main conflict that I want to go into.

Part of the problem I know is that I am probably spending to much time trying to catch up the readers as to what has happened in the previous books as well as what has happened between books. (This book takes place a few years after the third one. Nothing particularly exciting but stuff that needs to be known all the same.)

As such I am currently putting the book down, for like the third time, and reworking what

I have so that it does a better job of keeping the readers interest. After all if I am bored with the story I can only imagine how bored you would be.

That is not to say that everything I have written so far is a wash, because it’s not and I will certainly keep the spirit of things but it needs to be reworked and I don’t see myself progressing any further until I have.

I am sorry that this book is taking so long to write. I feel frustrated myself considering how fast I put out the past three but I refuse to put out anything that I do not think is any good. I will not simply put something out because I feel like I need to.

What does this mean for my next release. Well, I’m not 100% sure. Before I had vowed not to work on anything until after I had finished Dynasty 4, at the very least, but now I fear I will need to walk away for a little bit and come back to it. Or maybe not. Only time will tell. I do have some interesting stories in the works that I do think you will enjoy so we will see where that takes me.

So hopefully soon I will have more promising updates and it is possible that my next book won’t be in the Dynasty Saga.

Thank you all so much for baring with me so far and I hope that you continue to be patient.

Book Reviews

So last time I did two vampire books so this time i figured I would be fair and do two werewolf books. Now I said before that I actually really like vampire stories only I tend not to like how some people change and portray them and as such there are very few vampire stories that I like. This in not the case with werewolves as I tend to sit somewhere on the edge of indifferent and apathetic. And maybe that is why I found these books so much more enjoyable because I don’t have a set idea of what a werewolf should be like so there is nothing for me to get angry over.

So lets start off with probably the weaker of the two.

No Man’s Land: Imp World

Debra Dunbar

Now let me preference this review by saying this book is a side story to a much larger Imp Series. (This book falls between the second and third.) However this book is about completely original story characters only based in the same world as the main story, to the point the only tie in with the main series is an off handed reference. So as far as understanding things go if you read the first book of the Imp Series that will do enough of the world building for you to understand the context of what is going on.

So the story is a simple one, one of our main characters is a vampire who messed up and her punishment is exile and more for laughs they decided to dump said vampire in the center of werewolf territory. Now here is already my first problem with this story. It was made clear that Exile is rare as normally they would simply kill the vampire but they never gave a reason why in this particular case they exiled instead of executed. They gave a slight impression it was so they could use her to spy on neighboring vampires but the feeling I got was that was more of an afterthought than anything else. That since she was there they might as well use her.

Anyway, moving on. It is here that the main vampire meats main werewolf. Main werewolf takes pity on main vampire’s broken state and tries to nurse her back to health. Constantly under the eye of a werewolf the main vampire has to learn to adapt and not eat people because then the werewolves will kill her. And that is one of the things I did really like about this. I never felt that our main character thought themselves a monster or hated feeding on people. In fact the opposite is true. She even said that if given the choice again she would become a vampire again though she does have regrets and has made mistakes.

As time goes on she feels that the people around her are more like family than the family that beat her and left her for dead and slowly comes to chose them over other vampires but this change is slow and gradual. And you do feel like you took the journey along with our MC.

Now you may have noticed I have yet to talk about the romance. That is because there isnt any. plain and simple. Our two main characters are obviously friends and aside from a single comment at the end and a few slight nods to their seemingly closer than friends relationship there is no romance between our mains. Now if there was ever a sequel made of this book I could see that happening but considering the number of books in the series that have come out along with another side story that does have its own sequel i have my doubts that it will be getting one any time soon.

Final Thoughts: I did like this book but would only recommend it if you have at least read and like the first book in the Imp Series, otherwise you should probably give this one a pass.

Pure of Heart: Faoladh Series book one

Danielle Parker

First a Faoladh is an Irish werewolf. There now you understand the title of the book before you get nearly two thirds of the way through several key points about things have been made so much clearer. Ugh*

This story is a little different. There is no big bad (though one is slightly hinted at as sequel bait.) There is no end of the world plot or any kind of looming threat of any kind. It’s like the everyday life of a werewolf and if I am being fully honest I loved it. I have no real explanation for why I enjoyed this book as much as I did. But despite nothing seemingly important happening I could have just continued going forever. When the ending and climax did come I was actually disappointed because I was enjoying myself so much.

However I do feel the need to bring this up as it seems to come up in just about every werewolf book of all time. Wolves do not mate for life. In the pack only the Alpha Male and Alpha Female mate and that is it and it does not matter who the Alpha is. When the pack gets two big it splits and the new pack has a new Alpha Male and Female. So can we please stop with this only love one person forever because I’m a wolf stuff.

Alright so the plot is simple our main character is a werewolf or Faoladh as she and her family is Irish and her parents were also werewolves only they died when she was eight. so now she lives with her not a werewolf uncle who besides knowing about werewolves knows nothing else. Every full moon she changes and has no control but only at night despite that the moon is also out during the day and moon light is just reflected sun light. Sorry its the little things that bug me the most. Several years prior to the book our MC ate her boyfriend and because of this she is now paranoid that at any moment she will lose control and kill again.

She tries to keep to herself and not get close to anyone until a new woman moves into the small town and the wolf inside basically goes into heat whenever she is around. this is especially odd since our main character isn’t attracted to women. At first our MC tries to avoid this new woman all together but the wolf starts taking over more and more trying to seek her out so our MC decides to go the route of being ‘just’ friends, and that works about as well as you would expect in a romance novel. Their love blooms and a relationship is formed. Then the Climax of the story has to come along and ruin my fun.

Unless you want to have a different kind of fun.

As I said before there is very little in way of overarching conflict. Its the day to day struggles of the our MC and the people she comes into contact with. The only action is at the very end and even then there is nothing overly exciting or thrilling about it. If anything I felt it slightly forced though it was building from the beginning so there is that. What makes this book is the characters. I genuinely feel like these are different and unique people. In fact a little my dismay I have met some people exactly like these people which made me want to punch them in their stupid faces all the more. All of them have flaws but none of them are without sympathy or reliability making them seem all the more real. And considering this seems to be this author’s first and only book at the time of writing this that is rather impressive.

That being said I did not care for the MC and I think she is the biggest thing bringing this book down. Strange I know after everything I just said but I simply did not care for her. I know she is a broken person who deflects her feeling with sarcasm and smart assism but it was over done. Like every time someone genuinely tried to help her she would get made to the point of being horribly mean and seemingly uncaring which only made me say ‘fine if she doesnt want help then why should I care that her life is going so bad.’ Now yes she would normally apologize at some point latter on for what was said but when you then go and do it again the same or very next day it makes your apology ring a little hollow.

Final Thoughts: Despite my gripes I did really enjoy this book even though I feel like I shouldnt have, and its hard for me to even think of what I actually like other than when I started I was so enthralled I couldnt stop. If you want a rather heart warming and somewhat feelgood read than yes I recommend this book. I would have already read the second book if it was out and I fully intent to buy it the second it does.

 

Writing Update

Yes I know it has been a while since I have made one of these and I am sorry for the long silence. No I have not stopped writing or anything. I am actually doing more consistent writing now than I was a year ago. Truth be told the reason for that is simply because there has not been much to tell. I have just over 10 thousand words finished in Dynasty 4 though I hope to have a lot more done by the end of the week. I would have had more written by now but I have deleted a lot of what I have written and started over. Another part of the reason for the lack of progress is because I have been doing a lot of research.

 

I mean a lot of Research

It has also taken a little while to get back into the swing of things and back into the world of Dynasty. I have finished my read overs of the first three books to help refresh my mind of people and events that happened. Actually in rereading the first book I remembered a plot point that I had totally forgotten about.

Buuut this next book is a little different from the last Dynasty book. It is actually going to be structured more like Clockwork Immortal. One of the main reasons I decided to write that book was so I could practice some things before putting them into Dynasty. Ha and you all thought it was just some book I wrote for no real reason. After Clockwork I know have a much better feel for how some things work and more importantly how things didn’t work. So the plan is to take everything that I learned and put it into this next book.

There is a little added pressure as most people did not like the third Dynasty book as much as the second and Clockwork Immortal kind of got luke warm reviews. (If you think differently please speak up.) As such I want to make sure that this next book is my best book yet and it blows all of you out of the water. Or at the very least is as good as anything else I have written.

Also look forward to a couple of more book reviews coming up. You guys haven’t told me that you hate me doing them so I’m going to assume you enjoy listening to me complain about someone else’s work. Even if you do tell me you hate them I still probably won’t stop writing them.

 

 

Writing Update

Well, here we go again. Clockwork Immortal has been out for a while now and the rating are in. A solid 4. I’m not kidding. With the expectation of one 2, and two 3s and two 5s everyone else has rated it a 4. It even has 4.0 rating on Goodreads.

Not exactly the kind of reaction I would have liked but so long as most people enjoy it then I am fine with this.

But now that Clockwork Immortal is over and done I have turned my attention back to the Dynasty Saga. The first thing I am doing is rereading the previous books as a way of refreshing myself on everything that happened. Part of this also means doing a reedit of them as well. In all honesty Whenever I finish a book I should set it aside for a month or so and then go over it one last time with fresh eyes. But greed usually wins out over sensibility and I end up publishing it as soon as I can.

I have actually already finished going over the first book and have published the correction. I am happy to say I cleaned it up quite a bit. I even added about another 15 hundred words. Don’t worry I haven’t added anything new, but I did change some minor things and hopefully fixed a lot of flow problems.

In truth the reason that the first book was as bad as it was, or is, was simply that I never intended to publish it. I wrote it only for fun and while I was writing it I never once stopped and went over what I had previously written. Now I go over every chapter the day after I wrote it and am constantly going over the whole thing again and again.

I simply realized at one point that I had a full novel on my hands and I published it thinking that most people would disregard it and pay it little mind. However when people actually did like it, this drove me to putt all my effort into the next one. Sadly this does not make up for the lackluster writing in the first book. I hope this new revised edition helps at the very least.

Tomorrow I will start going over book two and then book three. Once I have finished with them I will start in earnest working on book four ‘The Divine Empress’. So until then please stay with me and have a good day.

Book Review

I haven’t done one of these in a while so i figured i would do two lesbian vampire books while there is kind of a loll in any real developments going on. I will also put all of these up on my review page later. So here is book one.

Darkness  Embraced

This book is a little bit of a hard one. I tend to stay away from vampire books as a rule. Not because I dont like vampires because i do. But i only like them when they are done a certain way. And when it is not done that way i tend to hate it.

Yes i despise the Twilight sage with a fiery passion but lets be fair that is the lowest form of low hanging fruit.

So lets take a look at exactly what kind of vampires we are dealing with here. Firstly these are your fairly basic types. Drink blood, sunlight kills, the usual. These vampires differ by the fact that they actually exist separate from the rest of humanity. aside from the few that hunt humans to eat vampires all live under ground and the entire book takes place without a single human getting involved. Not saying that is good or bad but it is at least different.

the story is simple enough our main character is a vampire who is old enough that she can enter the ranks of Elders but must complete a series of trials in order to test her ability. however there seems to be no formal training for this test and the pass state is beating an Elder. seems a little stacked to me but whatever. The more elders there are the more power has to be shared so naturally not all Elders want her to succeed along with other various reasons. there is also a plot about a cue and some other stuff that really felt more than a little rushed at best and forced at worst.

Sadly though most of the actual story hooks that drew me in during the sample text did not carry over into the rest of the book.

First off i hate out of place expansion conversations. In here it is when one character doesnt know something that they by all rights should have known. The book gives a very clear picture that the test to become an elder is a very big deal and yet the test starts with one vampire walking in and was like what you forgot this was happening? and then the main character gave some arbitrary reason why they didnt know.

Second, one of the biggest points of conflict is how the queen vampire lady turned the main character made her the queens play thing and then aptly discarded her. now i really thought this would be a fun thing to go into as it would show how heartless vampires can actually be and how it was really an abusive relationship, the possibilities are endless. Sadly the author took the i did this for your own good only it really didnt make much since. Okay you think that it is to dangerous to be with her until she becomes and elder. So why did you not tell her that. instead you just kicked her out and then ignored her for the better part of 800 years. and even then the reasoning was kind of shaky and i really did not buy it.

The last real sticking point was all the sex. Goodness there is a lot of it in this book. i would say at least half the book is just sex scenes. well done and well written mind you but for a book that doesnt tout itself as an erotica it sure felt like it was written that way.

Overall i would probably be more likely to recommend it if it was cheaper. as it stands it is a $10 book and knowing what i know now i would say it is not worth that much if it was an actual paperback. if the author ever drops the price to 2.99 and you are in the mood for a full length erotic lesbian vampire novel then i would say go for it.

Jaden’s Heart

Now this really is a strange beast for me. First i will point out that this would have gotten the same recommendation as Darkness Embraced but at the time of writing this review the author dropped the price to 2.99

The story revolves around our two lovers. One a Vampire who was been abandoned by the person she loved and the other is a homeless teen who ran away from a sexually abusive father. The Teen gets smitten with the Vampire when she saves her and from there a relationship blooms.

On the surface this book does everything that i talked about in the last book right. you have well made vampires, though they prefer Immortal(whatever), with all the standard rules. Vampires are more or less apathetic to humans seeing them as lesser being to be used and feed upon and our main character is no exception. Here you have the Vampire Queen abandoning the main character for no real reason and said vampire  queen is basically like deal with it. I made you i use you when and how i want. that was nice the part that doesnt work is the presentation. it kind of builds at the beginning that this vampire has been missing for however many centuries and then is just kind of there mucking things up. i never felt like the character was fleshed out enough to truly hate her or feel sorry for her. as a kind of protagonist/foil she really doesnt work.

And that is probably the biggest problem with this story. there is no clear bad guy. there is some implied threats in the power structure of things but as our main character has done her best to distance herself from the inner workings of vampire politics you the reader dont feel much investment in those things either.

Now the book sets up a lot of potential threats as well as interesting things that will likely happen… in the next book and that is where my issues really stem from. I think that if this book had been cut out and the series started with the second book it would be far more interesting. that way we learn about these events along with the character in the next book. avoiding spoilers with my wording here.

In the end i think this series has potential and is at the very least interesting. but until the next book comes out i would probably hold off on recommending this one. it really doesnt do a good job of standing on its own and will hit or miss more on the story of the second book.

 

 

 

Now Live

A day late and probably a dollar short. I finally finished the revisions and Clockwork Immortal should be live on Amazon in the next twelve hours or so. I will post a link as soon as it’s up.

Hope you all enjoy!

First Draft Finished

So my first draft of my next book is finally finished!

Booyah. Now excuse me while I crawl into a corner and cry. 

This has been a strange beast of a book I will not lie. But it is now finished and while I am sure there is much editing that still needs to be done the hardest part is now over. I am actually leaving the country for a few weeks this Saturday and going to the Dominican Republic to work as a translator at a school there. Sadly they have terrible and spotty internet so I am not sure if I will be able to finish the editing before I leave. However I do plan on publishing it as soon as I get back so look for it on March 15. That is my current release date.

And here is the cover to be watching out for.

Writing Update

I really do write with one of these sometimes.

Well I have just passed 110 thousand words on my latest book. it is not quite done but it is nearly there. I had really hoped to have the first draft done by last weekend but I hit a bit of a wall last week and wrote next to nothing for most to the week and only got over it earlier this week.

 

 

This book as been a bit of a strange beast considering I wrote the first 3/4 in less than two weeks and the last 1/4 has taken me nearly a month.

Pretty much sums it up

However assuming that I can continue working at a steady pace I truly intend to have the first draft done this weekend. Then starts all the editing and proofing. Right now I am really striving for having the book published by the first of March.

So look forward to future updates.

Goodreads

So I was finally able to claim my books on goodreads. Turns out there was another author names Sam Ryan and for whatever reason the books were accredited to him and not me. Do not know why that happened and after quite a few weeks of sending emails back and forth it has finally been sorted out.

Yeh!

Also to update you on my next book I am past 85 thousand words and am in the last fourth or so, hopefully.  No promises but hope to have it out by the end of this month, hopefully.

One Year Anniversary

One year ago today, or yesterday depending on how you count it, my very first book went live on amazon. And might I just say that it has been one amazing year so far. I have since published two more books and am nearly done with a another. I had secretly hoped I could get it finished for today but that was reaching a bit.

So let me just say to all of you. Thank you for supporting my and my works. There is no way I would have continued this if it was not for your support.

I hope to have my next novel out soon. I just reached 70 thousand words today. I hope that in this next year you all will enjoy my works even more. I also hope to have more books out for you all.

But no promises there.

Regardless, thank you all so much. You are the best.