Sable Aradia's Blog, page 63
August 14, 2017
5 Things I Learned About Promoting A Book on Social Media
It’s hard.
Hello? Is anyone out there?
You can link directly to your book’s Free Preview on Amazon. It’s more likely to be read than sending a prospect to your sales page and hoping they click “Look inside.” (Of course, there’s a “Buy” button there as well–Amazon knows its stuff, after all.) Instructions to obtain your preview link.
When sharing your Amazon sales page link—ALWAYS use the short version.
So, THIS: https://amazon.com/dp/B01MQWZ6YA
But, NEVER this: https://www.amazon.com/Transmuted-Dark-Landing-Book-1-ebook/dp/B01MQWZ6YA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501948244&sr=8-1&keywords=Transmuted).
NOTE: Readers posting a book review who linked in from the long version (tagged [for lack of a better word] as provided by the author) are more likely to have their reviews deleted by the ‘Zon police. If you want to learn more about how important it is to use the right link, check out Amazon Link Anatomy: What you Don’t Know Might be Killing your Reviews by #DaveChesson.
Pimp your…
View original post 63 more words
August 13, 2017
August 12, 2017
Author Spotlight: Diane Morrison
Thank you, SciFan Magazine!
Diane Morrison, is also known as Sable Aradia. She is a SFF and Pagan non-fiction author, and a dyed-in-the-wool Canadian geek. Diane writes the Wyrd West Chronicles, and she’s contributed to a few anthologies and magazines. Two of those stories have been recently published in SciFan™ Magazine! These short stories are connected to a series that she’s working on, the Toy Soldier Saga, a fantasy space opera.
The Wyrd West Chronicles are a sci-fantasy Weird Western that blend post-apocalyptic Western with cattlepunk fantasy.
Blurb:
In Queenstown, an untried youth is the only one who can face down a notorious Desperado. But Graeme Walsh is not a Gunslinger: not yet. Will his training and his secret sorcerer’s powers be enough to get the drop on the Outlaw, before the Outlaw gets the drop on him?
Blurb:
Pete Woodhouse doesn’t like to get involved. Too many complications, too dangerous to his person…
View original post 352 more words
August 11, 2017
August 10, 2017
Writing Your Fighting (the complete story)
Great article on writing about swordfighting from a medieval recreationist and writer.
Visit me at the Virtual Fantasy Con Sunday, Oct. 9 !!
https://www.facebook.com/events/518395788285240/?active_tab=posts
I’ve been having some conversations with writers about writing fight scenes, and I thought it might be a good idea to put some information out there. A lot of writers write fight scenes that are, to be honest, just plain ridiculous, if not impossible, and it really bugs me. There is a huge difference between massed-formation military tactics and single combat – but it is single combat that most fantasy writers tend to employ, so we’ll stick to that.
In fact, I can’t tell you how to write a fight scene. Every fight will be different, and it’s your book.
What I can do is make you aware of some of the variables and pitfalls you need to be conscious of when you write those scenes.
First off: this pertains mainly to medieval fantasy sword fighting. I have…
View original post 2,813 more words
August 9, 2017
Book Review: Honeymoon by James Patterson & Howard Roughen
Honeymoon by James Patterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked up this book because I’m taking James Patterson’s Masterclass writing course and this is the book he uses for an example of how to do things. There was no other reason than that. I would not have read it otherwise because it would have sounded to me like a fairly stock black widow thriller. I do like thrillers as an occasional guilty pleasure, though I’m more a sci-fi/fantasy reader, but I wouldn’t have gone for a black widow thriller. I like spy stories, or noir, or serial killers trying to catch other serial killers.
This was not your standard black widow thriller. To think that would be a mistake. It starts out that way, and that’s what you think it is, but you’d be wrong. I see why Patterson uses this book as his example for how to build plot and how to create an outline.
Some really don’t like his trickery. They think he lays it on too thick at the beginning or that the end came out of nowhere. That’s a matter of personal taste, and I don’t judge it, but I see the subtle craft in it myself, and to me, the ending made perfect sense. I believe I have learned the lesson Patterson intended when he basically assigned the book as a textbook. And I can appreciate it.
I can’t disagree with the general assessment of the characters. They’re okay, but in many ways they’re a stereotype. I find Nora Sinclair particularly insidious that way because she’s a black widow stereotype and that kind of image of women is often used to justify misogyny. The other three significant women in the group are mere cyphers. This novel fails the Bechdel Test; the only significant conversation between any of them was indeed about a man.
But if you enjoy a good thriller, I can definitely recommend this one. And if you just want to read a well-crafted plot, you should give it a go too.
August 8, 2017
Comprise vs. Compose
I often mess this one up; don’t you?
[We must all strive for perfection. @Giraffedata, you know who you are.]
Grammar Stickler Banishes
comprised of From Wikipedia
When I came across an online story headlined “One
Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake,” I of course had to find out who this fellow grammar stickler was and which error had become his obsession.
A software engineer writing as Giraffedata, this stickler edits Wikipedia reports for the incorrect use of comprise.
He claims to have made 47,000 corrections since 2007.
I’d had comprise vs. compose on my list of potential topics
for years, but so many people use comprised of incorrectly that I’d considered it a lost cause.
Here are examples of comprise as well as words with similar meanings.
Comprise means to contain, to include, to consist of:
Congress comprises 435 representatives.
His car collection comprises eight Model T Fords.
The committee comprises six women…
View original post 311 more words
August 7, 2017
The Bad, the Ugly, the Boring.
Often I find that things that everyone says are masterpieces of artsy class and style are boring AF. I have not read these particular books, but I can echo the sentiment! I have started to think that “literary” is just a style, not an assessment of a book’s real quality, and that I’m often not fond of the style. I have indeed liked “literary” writers and works (Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Vance, Samuel L. Delany, Zemyatin,) but these books also happen to be science fiction adventures. What about you? How do you feel about books that are considered to be “literary?”
Bed. Bath. Books. And sometimes wine.
This afternoon I’m drinking wine – a crisp dry chardonnay – and thinking about books I just didn’t think were that great.
You know the kind. The Guardian raved about it, it’s a best seller. Everyone’s reading it.
The Finkler Question springs to mind immediately. Maybe it was too highbrow for me. Maybe I wasn’t the target audience. Maybe I’m not terribly attuned to Jewish humour.
Maybe maybe maybe. The bottom line is I found very few of the characters likable or interesting. This is what happens when I think I’m clever enough to read anything that made the Man Booker list.
The second book that springs to mind is actually two books (basically because in my head they’re the same book).
The Girl on the Train and The Luckiest Girl Alive.
The Girl on the Train was touted as the next Gone Girl. And it had potential. It…
View original post 212 more words
August 5, 2017
Relational Inequalities in Fiction Writing
So today I wanted to talk about relationships.
No, this isn’t just for Romance books. This is about all relationships–your antagonist and his second-in-command, your hero and her best friend, and even the protagonist and the antagonist (chances are, if they’re fighting each other for any length of time, they have a relationship, albeit a bad one).
When people are in relationship, they come in with expectations. Hopes. Goals. They want something from the relationship or they wouldn’t bother having one. They’d just move on. The protagonist could find a new villain to fight by moving to a new city (or find an isolated spot to live where there are no villains–the arctic, anyone?). The villain could kill off the second-in-command. The hero and her best friend could get into a fight, or just stop talking and drift apart.
But one of the biggest, unspoken challenges in a relationship is…
View original post 612 more words
