J.B. Garner's Blog, page 30

Book News: The Opening Bell’s print edition is now available!

It’s as simple as the title!  The Opening Bell is now available in print as well, for your reading pleasure.  You can get it at the following link:

https://www.createspace.com/5716455

General News: More Multimedia Expansion … Would There Be Interest?

So as I put together my schedule for the next couple of weeks, I’m left pondering something that comes up in my brain matter from time to time.  Should I add multimedia content of some kind to my reviewing and writing work?  I mean in the vein of podcasts or YouTube content, where you can get a more visceral feel for me, the reviews, the writing, all that sort of thing.

Much like my Patreon experiment, there’s no losses to be had, exactly, outside of an outlay of time.  I have a good-quality microphone and a passable webcam, so podcasts would be easy and YouTube content would be simple enough.  Still, I’d be interested in what you, my readers, might think about this.

Would you like to see multimedia content?  Vlogs, audio reviews, ramblings about writing, and who knows what else.  If you would like to see such things in the future, like this post and feel free to comment below.

Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!

Trope of the Week: Suicidal Girlfriend

jbgarner58:

Another important Trope of the Week! Suicide, alongside other things, is something to be handled carefully as part of a written work.

Originally posted on break the system:

If you’re experiencing suicidal or depressive thoughts, you are not alone. Click here to find a suicide lifeline in your country.

This trope was extremely common during the renaissance, but still persists today. A woman’s husband/boyfriend/fiance dumps her or dies, and so the woman kills herself in her despair. Unfortunately, this happens in real life, but the way that many pieces of media handle this trope can be cause for alarm. (Due to the spoiler-y nature of this trope, I will not be giving examples, but you can find plenty here.)

Why this can be bad: When it comes to media, many of the women who commit suicide are disposable. These women are either used to further the male character’s motivation (because he’s not really dead or he feels guilty) or as a way to bring tragedy to the piece because “look how much she loved him.” But…

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Monday Musings: Sometimes Looks Matter! a.ka. E-Book Formatting Made Easier

I’ve talked about formatting a plenty in some of my recent articles, both writing and reviews.  I’ve talked about why good formatting and editing are important and we’ve seen poor formatting impact review scores, an unfortunate but real factor when it comes to the enjoyment of a book.  It’s something so obvious, yet so easy not to understand as a starting author.  Heck, I only really grasped it completely myself until a few months as a reviewer and certainly made my own share of mistakes in this regard, as you can see by the multiple editions I’ve put out of my own novels in such a short time.

However, so far, I’ve offered only critique without any real advice or assistance.  Let’s fix that.

The first thing to keep in mind formatting-wise is learning the core rules of paragraphing and especially dialogue rules.  The biggest sins that I have seen that brought a book down is lack of proper paragraphing.  It’s easy enough to look up the proper definition of a paragraph but far harder at times to put it into practice.  Remember that a paragraph must tie into one central concept.  If the actions or scene described by a paragraph start to wander, it’s time to start a new one, no matter how long or short it has become.  The break-up of text helps the eyes and the division of thought helps the brain.  Formatting-wise, it’s important to make sure you have a paragraph style set in your word-processor that creates a division of some kind, either a proper indentation at the start of a paragraph (my favorite) or extra line spacing between them.

Dialogue paragraphing and formatting is even more important than that.  Dialogue rules are not as simple as they may seem and you can even find some minor disagreements over the finer points of the rules.  However, the biggest issue I have seen with dialogue in books is also the simplest of rule to watch out for.  It’s simple: any time the speaker in a dialogue sequence changes, start a new paragraph!  Also, a corollary to this: if one speaker has a multi-paragraph continuous dialogue, do not close the quotations until it ends or the speaker changes!

Even if you are weak in some other areas of your dialogue grammar, following these two prime rules will make it ten times easier for readers to follow your dialogue and will let you clear away many uses of dialogue tags, especially in two-party conversations.

The point of these pointers is to show that good formatting is worth the work and is, at the heart of it, pretty simple.  The power of e-readers lets the actual reader customize the important things (font size, line spacing, etc.) to fit their visual needs.  You just need to provide a clear, simple framework for the e-reader to do its job.  The other possible trip-up here may be something beyond the core knowledge of grammar and that is dealing with the technological end of things.

Those problems are too big for me to go into detail here on my humble blog, but I can still provide sources for answers.  The best resource that is free for providing a proper base manuscript for most e-book services (it works perfect for Amazon and Smashwords (and Smashwords then covers a network of other services)) is the Smashwords Style Guide.  It’s free and it provides not only an array of advice but gives specific information on the computer side of things, how to set up formatting that will make for easy e-book conversions, how to set up hyperlinked table of contents for easy navigation, and so on.  Regardless of your feelings on Smashwords as a book service, the guide itself is incredibly useful, especially if you’re not a very tech-savy sort.

My second piece of technical advice is more of a suggestion.  Most e-book services want manuscripts in either Microsoft’s .DOC format or as a PDF.  If you lack the resources or cash for Microsoft Word (as a Starving Author, I understand this), you can take out two birds with one stone with Apache OpenOffice.  It can save your manuscript in .DOC formats, can convert them to PDF, and offers most of the tools available in Word, as well as enough similarities in layout and UI that most advice for Word users for formatting translates over almost exactly.  It’s not perfect, but it’s still excellent and well-worth its price of free.

Hopefully this will help out my fellow indie authors to produce better and better works!  Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!

Station Eleven – Book Review

jbgarner58:

More from the Book Review Directory, of which I am a member!

Originally posted on The Book Review Directory:

Station Eleven

I’ve been wondering almost since starting Station Eleven (two days ago—yes, it really is that good) why it’s so clearly a breed apart from other apocalypse thrillers. I have an uncharacteristic but genuine affinity for disaster movies (this includes things with giant robots in them), and although some of them can be more than the sum of their parts, most of them, like most end-of-the-world books, are predictable. Entertainment, certainly; food for the soul, less so. But Station Eleven is something else entirely, and not just because the production of Shakespeare plays is central to the narrative.

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Starving Review: Fraudulent by Robert D. Spake

Fraudulent by Robert D. Spake (Amazon, Goodreads)

Back when I was a fragile young Starving College Student, I had a deep and abiding love of history.  Though never reaching the lofty goal of history professor, I retain my love of the past so naturally I began to salivate at the prospect of a tasty piece of period fiction coming up on my review plate.  Though the front wrapper is plain, any good reviewer knows to let the flavor of the text do the talking.  So will Fraudulent delight or despair?

Before we find out, it’s time once again to recite the solemn rules of the Starving Review:

I attempt to rate every book from the perspective of a fan of the genre
I attempt to make every review as spoiler-free as possible

As with several of the meals up for review lately, Fraudulent dances on the line between inspired and mediocre.  There is a great story here, one that is fairly competently told, that finds itself held short of greatness by a variety of minor missteps.  A little too much spice here, an underbaked layer there, each little problem adds up to hold back the overall narrative.  Let me be clear, though, in that Fraudulent is never held back enough to be bad!  In fact, with just a little bit of work it could easily rise to be a truly great dramatic work.

Let’s touch on the high points.  The core of the story and the dramatic interplay between the characters is excellent.  The main characters are well-realized and that is what makes up the core of this character-driven piece.  The bits of historical lore mixed in throughout the piece speak to a properly-researched recipe, a must for any period piece!  The plot itself holds up to scrutiny and moves along at a steady pace.  At all levels, the core recipe of this literary treat is good and proper.

The meal’s best moments are when the core themes of the book, which all revolve around the secrets we keep and the repercussions these can cause, come to the fore (I can’t go deeper as it would be SPOILERS!).  Mr. Spake shows a strong understanding of both human emotion, relationships, and the peculiarities of Victorian English culture.  It’s when these interact with those central themes that you see the full potential of this book.

So where do things sour a bit?  There are two main issues that hold Fraudulent back from greatness.  Each on its own is relatively minor, but both together add enough off-texture bites to drag the whole recipe down a notch.

First off, there are some systemic stylistic issues that distract from the reading itself.  For the most part, the chef keeps proper control of his shifting points of view, signalling when it changes by scene and story breaks, and yet there are quite a few random departures from this stylistic rule.  Often this interjects random bits of mental insight from minor characters, but this only adds unneeded details and distractions to the story being told.  Combine this with a need for a serious round of formatting and editing cleanup (especially when it comes to paragraphing, something that makes the flow of dialogue and description difficult to follow at times) and you have a book that seems to fight the diner at times over the right to eat it.

Secondly, there is an extensive sequence in the middle of the book, essentially an extended flashback as told by one character to another, that is handled somewhat clumsily as an extended dialogue sequence.   As written, it is a huge info-dump, an understandable one, yes, but it could have been handled much more smoothly through several literary techniques, such as using the start of the discussion to switch to a ‘flashback’-style scene of the character reliving the story he is telling.  As with the stylistic and formatting problems above, it’s a minor problem, but it gets stuck in between my teeth easily and it occupies a good chunk of the book’s pages.

So, in summation, Fraudulent is an almost-great slice of Victorian drama cake that is just a bit too sloppy stylistically to reach that greatness.  All the same, if someone is a fan of solid character dramas and can put up with the formatting and stylistic problems throughout the book, I would wholeheartedly recommend it, warts and all.  However, if you aren’t already a fan of the genre, I would give Fraudulent a pass at the dinner table.  If Mr. Spake does take this one back to the kitchen to have the recipe edited and a fresh edition whipped up, I could then freely recommend this to any and all parties.

FINAL VERDICT: *** (An almost-great slice of Victorian drama cake that is just a bit too sloppy stylistically to reach that greatness!)

Starving Interview: Robert D. Spake, Author of Fraudulent

Good morning, my fellow literary diners!  As always, Fridays presents us a double course of delights, starting with a sit-down in the kitchen with the chef of today’s Starving Review, Fraudulent, Robert D. Spake!  Let’s dive right in!

Please introduce yourself to my literary foodies!

Hello! I’m Robert D. Spake, my friends call me Rob. It’s great to be here, and thank you for inviting me to be interviewed!

Do you do any work outside of the writing kitchen? Any non-work interests?

Actually I’m a full-time freelance writer so I make my living by writing, which was always the dream. Being freelance I don’t get to work on my own stuff as much as I would like, but it’s an interest challenge to work from outlines and to different specifications rather than simply let my mind go wild. I also run a blog where I do reviews of various things, and write ups of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

As for non-work interests my biggest passion is movies, to the point of obsession (and/or addiction). I also enjoy playing tabletop games and am in the process of helping to open a board game cafe called Board in the City. I just got finished filming the video for the Kickstarter campaign this week so I’m hoping that will be a success!

What is your latest dish to be served up? Are there any past pieces of literary cuisine you think we should take a bite out of?

My latest release was back on Valentine’s Day, and was a book called Love at First Type: A Chronicle of Addiction to Online Dating. And yes, I chose the release date of that on purpose. It’s a look at my years of failure (and sometimes moderate success) on online dating sites as I attempted to find out what went wrong, and highlight some of the quirks of online dating. I have a few books available on Amazon, and I always try and urge people to check out my collection of short stories because I explore a range of ideas and genres in those.

What made you want to put on the chef’s hat and whip up your own books?

It just happened naturally. I wasn’t a prodigy or anything, I just always had a good imagination and loads of ideas in my head, and one day I started writing them down! After I started it snowballed and I just had to write, like it was a biological need to survive. There’s nothing more I like than creating a new world and seeing how it develops.

Do you have a genre of specialty or do you dabble? Why?

I dabble. I love exploring different ideas and mixing things up. I’m like that with everything I’m interested in, I have a curious nature and I like taking things I learn and adapting them in new ways. I also get bored if I write the same thing over and over again. I like pushing my imagination to its limits. Ideally I’d be writing comic books, plays, and screenplays as well!

Style! Every literary chef aspires to have their own unique one! What do you think sets yours apart and why?

Honestly? I’m not sure. I just started writing and I honed it over time. There was one point where I looked back at the first draft of my first novel and I thought it was absolutely horrible. Right now I’m still probably my own worst critic. I just try and write from what comes within, and hope that people enjoy it!

Even the best of us find inspiration is the dishes of others. Do you have any literary inspirations, heroes, and influences?

I think one of the best things any writer can do is look at the works of others and see what you like and what you don’t. I think in any field if you want to be good at something you have to look at what others are doing and try to learn from them. The Odysssey is my favourite book so that is a huge influence. W. Somerset Maugham is my favourite writer and I feel he has a similar view on human nature as I do, and Philip K. Dick is another big influence. I have a background in philosophy so I try to put some deeper ideas in my story as well. A lot of times I try to examine the meaning of existence and the purpose of life.

Let’s get into the meat and potatoes: the art and craft of writing itself! Do you have a preference of points-of-view when you write?

I tend to prefer third-person, but sometimes I mix it up. I find I write more quickly and in more of a stream of consciousness style if I write in the third person, but naturally I gravitate to third person so that’s what I usually stick with.

Sparse or wordy, how do you like your descriptions served up? Are you a Hemmingway man or do you like some saucy adjectives with your nouns?

Very wordy. I know sometimes I tend to go off in a ramble and get caught up in certain things, but that’s also probably an influence of philosophy, as philosophers tend to ramble on and on…

Picking off the menu of base literary conflicts, what’s your favorite and why?

Man vs self. I’ve always struggled with feelings of self-doubt, and I’ve always been my own worst enemy. I put this into my writing as it’s also a way for me to work through these issues. I think an examination of one’s own soul is important and I’ve always been drawn to angst, it’s why Spider-Man is my favourite superheroes.

What do you think is more important to your recipes, plot or characterization? Why?

As an instinctive answer I’d say characterization because if the characters are boring then I’m not going to be invested in a story, and I like my characters to drive the plot. Having said that it is dependent upon the type of story. With short stories, for example, I think the theme of the story is more important and the characters aren’t as important as you don’t spend as much time with them.

We all know that the first taste means the most! What do you do to get that first bite hook with your readers?

I’m a big fan of Watchmen and in that there’s a bit where it says in order to capture your readers you should start off with the saddest thing you can think of to instantly get their sympathy. Sometimes I try that technique, but usually I try and have an air of mystery about things.

The most important of questions: Cake or pie?

Cake!

Finally, if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring literary chefs out there, what would it be?

Read, read loads, read as much as you can from as many diverse sources as possible. You can’t create anything in a vacuum, and all the stories that exist are a writer’s greatest resource.

Writing Is A Bad Habit: All Reviews Are Good a.k.a. The Etiquette of Accepting Reviews

It isn’t easy for an author to push their work out for review.  For many of us, there is a certain introvertism at work that make self-promotion of any kind hard.  For others, there is a certain instinctual self-protectiveness at play.  We don’t want others to pick over the work that we’ve invested so much of ourselves into.

And yet, reviews are one of the best ways to garner input, opinion, and critical insights about our works.  Without the insights reviews grant us, it becomes that much harder to improve in the future, not to mention the promotional value of a wide amount of reviews.  People simply find it easier to buy in on something that others have done so as opposed to a fully untested item.

What about bad reviews though?  Those hurt you, don’t they?  What should you do about them?

Certainly, you might have an instinctive desire to be defensive, to counterargue the reviewer’s opinion, or to try to have the review removed for whatever reason from the site it’s posted on.  This is, after all, your pride and joy we’re talking about.  Surely these sorts of defensive measures are par for the course!

No, actually, they aren’t.  In fact, they are some of the worst things you as an author can do.  The fact is that there is great value in not-so-positive reviews.  I mean, it’s the height of arrogance to think that your book is the best thing to all people.  There are as many opinions as there are human beings, so a negative review here and there is going to happen.  The best thing to do with said reviews is to use the information they provide to help guide your course in future works.

Maybe the critiques can show you how to broaden your audience appeal.  Maybe they point out vital issues in your writing style or the plot of the book, things you can fix in future works or in future editions of that same work.  Maybe the review provides insight on what groups may not like your book at all, allowing you to better focus your marketing and promotional efforts.

Yes, there are the rare troll reviews, but these are things everyone on the internet has to deal with.  It rarely works to have such reviews squelched, if it’s possible at all to do so.  It is best to simply raise your chin and wade through such reviews, acting in a purely professional manner about it.

Professionalism is actually the perfect watchword to go along with the general review etiquette.  Act like the professional writer you are and everything will work out fine.  This also extends to those reviews you solicit.  Remember that reviews of this sort are meant to be honest, so if they don’t wind up as you wish, approach them with the same politeness as other reviews.  A book blogger will think of you in a much brighter light if you accept a bad review with grace and aplomb than with a cold shoulder or out-right hostility.

So, the real story is simple:  Treat all reviews as the tools to improvement that they are and ensure you work in a professional fashion.  The respect you will foster acting in such a way and the knowledge reviews, good or bad, provide will make you into a better author in every way.

Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!

Trope of the Week: Useless Husband

jbgarner58:

Time for another Trope of the Week! Enjoy!

Originally posted on break the system:

Part of the Married… With Hatred couple, this husband will do anything to get out of doing chores or helping with the kids. Usually accompanied by a nagging wife, this husband is beloved by audiences for his idiocy because, well, he’s probably got a good decent heart.

Why this can be bad: Despite their incompetency, these husbands are always shown as the good guys. They just want to have a good time, and the fact that they shirk helping around the house or pretend to be unable to do anything so that their wife will do it instead is played for laughs rather than shown as the unhealthy, lazy behavior it is. In contrast, the wife is shown as being unreasonable when she gets upset despite the behavior often being hurtful or upsetting. Not only are the laughs cheap, but they are often at the expense of the “shrewish” wife…

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Monday Musings: Have a Restful Labor Day!

Just a quick one here to wish everyone a restful Labor Day, if you’re in a part of the world that celebrates it!  It’s meant to be a day for those who work hard throughout the year to get an extra day of rest and, far too often, we continue to slave away through it.  If you are able, take that well-deserved break instead!

Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!