Category Archives: Writers

Pink Snowbunnies in Hell (and Amazon…and Smashwords)

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in epublishing, Indie writing, Writers, Writing

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Back in May, author Debora Geary put out a challenge on a Kindleboards forum, asking whether people would be interested in contributing a story of under 1,000 words to an anthology. The story had to contain the line ‘pink snowbunnies will ski in Hell’ in it, but other than that, anything went.

The resulting publication (which had a cover before any content) is now available for sale at Amazon and Smashwords. It’s interesting to see how the different authors interpreted this brief (for me it was a chance to dip my toe into ‘light romance’ territory…). All proceeds are going to animal shelter charities and there are chances to win free copies over at Jimi Ripley, Coral Moore, Rex Jameson, Nicole Chase and Barbara Annino’s sites.

Book review: Concrete Underground by Moxie Mezcal

19 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in 'Show me the free' challenge, Free reads, Indie writing, Reviews, Writers

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Concrete Underground

Concrete Underground by Moxie Mezcal

It’s been a while since I’ve done a book review on here. Not because I haven’t been reading (or reviewing, for that matter), but simply because most of my reading of late has been of traditionally-published books. In this blog, I highlight independently-published works which I’ve enjoyed.

Looking at the last 20 books I’ve read, about one in five are independently published. The quality has varied, but generally they’ve been good. Concrete Underground stands out from them in a number of ways. For one thing, it is uncompromisingly violent and raunchy compared to the rest – not something I usually seek out in a book or movie. Yet the physical abuse and sex scenes are written in a very matter-of-fact way, which doesn’t negate their impact, but carries the reader along without making him or her cringe in horror or embarrassment.

The book is also interesting in that it raises more questions than it answers. My response to reaching the end of it was to start reading from the beginning all over again, as I wanted to try to work out what the answers to those questions are. The writing was of such a high quality that this was not any sort of hardship.

Concrete Underground is also different from my other recent reads in relation to its genre. It’s been described elsewhere as ‘postmodern pulp fiction’, which is as good a description as any. The book is a mystery, with a morals-free, Mexican investigative journalist main character who is looking into the activities of a search-engine company’s CEO. The story takes a sideways look at the overly-monitored lives we lead today. One passage that sums this up stood out:

…the age of surveillance is only a symptom of the new hyper-narcissism that has infected our collective reality tunnels. We invite the surveillance cameras into our homes because they are proof that someone is paying attention to us.

If you’re willing to try something new and aren’t put off by adult content, I highly recommend this novel. It’s not always a comfortable read, and may leave you feeling more confused at the end than you were at the beginning, but it is definitely worth the ride.

Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011)

27 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in Writers, YA fiction

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One of the biggest influences on my dream of becoming a writer was the author Diana Wynne Jones. The first book of hers that I read was Charmed Life, which was published in 1977. Up to that point, I would only read Enid Blyton’s stories (my mother was beginning to despair of me ever reading anything else). Charmed Life was the magical book that broke that particular spell. From that point on, my tastes became pretty catholic, but Diana Wynne Jones’s books have maintained a hold over me. Favourites include Fire and Hemlock, The Ogre Downstairs, The Power of Three, The Lives of Christopher Chant and Hexwood. I’ve read these again and again: nearly always picking up something new each time.

This blog post is my small tribute to the writer who has influenced me and my writing more than any other. I’m sure there will be many other, much better analyses of her work in the days to come.

What goes around…

04 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by in Editing, Feedback, Indie writing, Writers

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A few months ago, a fellow indie writer gave me some great feedback on The Roman and the Runaway, coming up with three errors in the text (which I’d been so sure was perfect by then!). I hadn’t asked her to do this, and was grateful for the time and effort that she’d put into reading and correcting the book.

As a result, I determined to do the same for other authors if I found similar problems with their works. Sometimes with self-published books there are just too many errors to make it a sensible option, but if there are only a few, in an otherwise good book, then I’m willing to do some free editorial work to make the book even better. I feel quite strongly that indie authors should help each other out where they can: we don’t have the resources of publishers behind us and experience has shown me the truth of the view that it is impossible to be sure that you have caught all the errors in your own work.

Last week I sent another indie author a list of around 20 errors that I’d found in one of her books. I’d noted them on my ereader as I do when I’m editing my own work. She was glad to hear about them and has given me another one of her books in return. In my experience, indie authors are always pleased to be told about mistakes: don’t be afraid to let them know!

Instant gratification and libraries

24 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by in Libraries, Writers

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I was delighted to find that one of the local libraries I use has at last got its catalogue on the Internet. (There’s a misplaced apostrophe in its banner but I’m hoping that is the responsibility of an IT person, rather than the library’s staff!) The library itself is small and serves an equally small town of around 2,000 people. The other library service I use is much bigger, with five branches and around 25,000 potential users. Their catalogue has been online for a number of years.

Both sets of libraries are excellent and I find their services invaluable. If I can’t find a particular book, then I can order it through inter-library loan and get it pretty quickly. Now that both catalogues are online I can easily check from home whether a particular book is in the library and physically on the shelf. Which is a fantastic thing to be able to do, don’t you think? A far cry from the old days of card-catalogues and having to visit the library to find out such things.

Today I made use of this new facility to check on the availability of two books: Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Both books have had a fair bit of hype about them recently and eventually the hype filters through to me. In the larger library service, there’s a 19-day wait for the Gilbert book and an even longer one for the Larsson one (44 days). In the small library both books are showing as ‘available’ and I’ll be there when it opens tomorrow to get my hands on them. Hooray for tiny library services!

I only really heard about Eat, Pray, Love today, when I arrived, through a winding and distraction-strewn route at Shannon Rigney Keane’s blog and her post Olé to You Nonetheless, which introduces Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creative genius. It’s a great talk and I’m really glad to have found out about it. What a wonderfully funny and intelligent woman Elizabeth Gilbert is. I wouldn’t normally have picked up a book with the word ‘pray’ in the title, but having heard Elizabeth’s talk, I figured that it wasn’t going to be the sort of book I assumed it would be. (Forget covers, there’s a whole lesson here about not judging a book by its title, too.)

Anyway, the point I think I’m trying to make here, very slowly, is that within a few short minutes I went from thinking ‘I might enjoy that book’ to finding out that the library had it on the shelf. Tomorrow (unless I’m very unlucky and someone checks it out in the next hour) I’ll have the book in my hand. That is very close to instant gratification, I would say. And yet one of the arguments that people seem to be making about public libraries is that we don’t need them because we can get everything instantly from the Internet. And sure enough, I could download a copy of the Larsson book from Kobobooks.com for $7.99 and the Gilbert one for $10.49.

$18.48 for two digital files (which will be read just once) RIGHT NOW. Or $0 for two solid volumes tomorrow morning (I will be in the town anyway, so there is no additional cost for fuel to get there). For me, it’s an easy choice. I am always happy to pay for a book that I know will be read more than once and which I can see on my shelf (cookery and gardening books fall into this category) but for everything else (all my ephemeral reading), the library (or a free ebook) will win nearly every time. And in the future, as more people get ereaders and libraries get access to ebooks for their patrons, it will be possible to get to that content even more quickly. Next time you want a book, investigate the library option as well as the online ordering one. You might be pleasantly surprised by how quickly (and reasonably) you can get what you’re looking for.

Libraries are a fabulous resource and are increasingly under threat of cuts or closure. Use them or lose them.

Cover story

22 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by in Artwork, Indie writing, Writers

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Book covers are important. This is a message that is drummed into indie authors a lot. It’s also, like editing, an area where getting someone else involved (somebody who can actually draw or design, for example) might make some sort of economic sense. If you are selling your book for actual cash, that is. If you’re not making money from selling the book, it becomes difficult to justify spending money on it. For me, it also goes against the self-sufficiency ethos I’ve been living by in relation to this book (and in many other areas of my life).

When I first made The Roman and the Runaway available I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the cover. I knew I wanted something that said ‘modern day’, because the title of the book suggests that it is set in the past and I needed to dispel that notion with one glance. The book is mostly set in the picturesque village of Aldbury in Hertfordshire, so I browsed images on the Flickr website and found an appealing one with a Creative Commons licence on it. The licence was ‘attribution required‘, which meant that I was free to re-use and re-mix the image however I wanted, so long as I acknowledged the original creator (whose Flickr name was Draco2008). I also dropped him a line to say what I was doing and he was happy with my use of his picture. I adapted it as the header for this blog, too. I love the whole idea behind Creative Commons.

So that was that and the book cover was fine: an attractive, contemporary photo.

Original cover

And yet…

The more I looked at other people’s book covers and back at mine, the more dissatisfied with it I became. It was too static and didn’t really reflect anything about the story (well, apart from the pub, which does feature in the book and which is pretty well reflected by the pond!). Last month I started to think about what might work better to draw people in, while still explaining that this was not a book set in Roman times. Creating a drawing is beyond my artistic skills, but I thought I might be able to create a photograph that would work.

I enlisted my twelve year-old daughter as a model and we went off into the woods together with a rucksack stuffed with towels and my camera. This was the first time I’d ever done a photo-shoot with a human being (most of my photography (excluding family snapshots) is of plants, insects and birds). It was an interesting experience and I took around 60 photos.

My aim was to show Pagan (the runaway of the book’s title) as she might appear when walking near her campsite. My daughter is a little young, as Pagan is fourteen in the book, but she is tall enough to carry it off. Her hair was a bit of a problem – it is quite dark and curly and I’d described Pagan’s as straight and blonde, although she dyes it a nondescript  brown in the book. It was the curliness that was going to be the issue. Before the shoot, we washed her hair and straightened it as much as possible without hair-straightening devices. Then we went off into the woods.

One of the photos in particular captured what I was looking for. My daughter’s shoulders were slightly hunched in this one, making her look somewhat dejected, as Pagan would have been, alone and far from home. I spent a day or two playing with this image – trying it monochrome, using different fonts and colours for the title.  I had to flip the image vertically, as originally the girl was walking towards the left, which didn’t work at all. The collage below shows some of the different ideas I was playing around with as I worked. There are many others which didn’t get saved, needless to say!

Discarded ideas

I was using Paint Shop Pro as my image software. I’m certainly not proficient with it and often find it completely unintuitive, particularly where adding text is concerned. And as for the number of different fonts, well – there are so many that you could easily spend a whole day just looking at each one!

In the end I found that blurring the image worked better than making it monochrome. It hides the determined curliness of my model’s hair and makes the text stand out more than it does on a crisp version of the photo.

Current cover

I’m very pleased with the end result. It’s still contemporary, but with a bit more action to it than the original, and perhaps a slightly more emotive image. I don’t think changing it has had a big impact on the number of downloads from Smashwords or Feedbooks, but I’m happier because it is home-made and home-designed. What do you think of the change? Better or worse?

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve updated the cover again, thanks to a kind suggestion from another indie writer, Joseph Mitchell, author of Shard Mountain. This time I’ve used a drop shadow effect, which really does make the text stand out better than it did before. Thanks Joseph! Here’s the ‘final’ cover:

Most recent version

Book review: Little Miss Straight Lace by Maria Romana

24 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in Indie writing, Reviews, Writers

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In the spirit of supporting other indie authors, I thought I would follow the lead of Maria Romana, who has been putting book reviews on her blog, Contemporary Romance Books. My own reading tastes are fairly varied (although one of my big problems right now is finding time to read!), so there won’t be much of a theme to any reviews I post. The only thing I’m not wildly keen on are ‘chick-lit’ type books. You know, the type that mention about five brand-names in the first two pages and judge people by their clothes and possessions all the time. But I’m not averse to a love story if I’m in the right mood.

Maria’s own book is a mixture of romance and pharmaceutical statistics. Which may not sound like a divinely-arranged combination, but it works really well. The main thread of the plot concerns statistician Josie Natale and her relationship with Nic Remedian. Who is a gorgeous Latino man who drives an Aston Martin and wants to settle down and have babies. If you can get over the suspension of disbelief required to accept that combination of qualities in one human being, then you can settle down and enjoy the book. The romance gets caught up in mystery/thriller territory when a pharmaceutical agency starts interfering with drug trials to discredit their competitors and promote the development of their own products. Throw in a religious cult and the trauma of teenage rape and you’ve got all the ingredients for a story that’s hard to put down.

The book is well-written and rattles along at a good pace. It would make a great beach read (if you weren’t worried about getting sand in your ereader, that is). In some ways I’d class it as escapism (all the main characters are good-looking and rich, for example), but there is more to it than that: certainly enough of a mystery to keep me reading for the last two days.

Until the 31st July it is available for free on Smashwords. After that it will revert to its usual price of $4.77.

New publishing models lead to bitchiness

24 Monday May 2010

Posted by in epublishing, Indie writing, Writers

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An interesting article on the Publishers Weekly site today, entitled ‘Agents Weigh the Growth Of Alternate Publishing Options‘. Not the catchiest of titles for an article, perhaps, but the content makes up for it. It discusses the recent deal made by J. A. Konrath (a figurehead, of sorts, for the indie author movement – his blog is required reading) with AmazonEncore for his new book, Shaken.

Usually AmazonEncore picks up on overlooked already-published materials (ones with high ratings by users of the Amazon site) and re-presents them. The difference in this case is that Amazon will be publishing an entirely new piece of work, but at a low price: $2.99. According to the article, 70% of this will go to the author.

The reason I thought the article worth mentioning was the response to the news from the traditional publishing industry. The comment by Ira Silverberg of literary agents Sterling Lord was spectacularly bitchy (I thought):

Certain authors will feel they’re doing well in schemes like this. They flip off the publishers who rejected them, claim new technology will support their career, and they get attention they never had before. Let’s see if we remember who those authors are in a few years.

Let’s see if anyone remembers what literary agents were in a few years.

Early history of The Roman and the Runaway

17 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Writers, Writing

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According to the diary I kept as a teenager, I started writing The Roman and the Runaway in 1985. This was when I was sixteen years old and just beginning the first year of the sixth form of a large Oxfordshire comprehensive school, where I was studying A level Biology, English Literature and History and doing an O level in Russian on the side.

January 1st 1986…I’m reading and enjoying Little Dorrit and listening to Vice Versa (F. Anstey) on the radio. On November 17th I started writing a book of my own & wrote quite a lot – but I’ve become annoyed with it recently – & unable to find the willpower to arrange it properly.

This could explain why it took me until 2009 to get it finished…

Until I picked up these diaries again recently, I had forgotten that I had ever written about the book in those very early days of writing it. It is quite funny to look back and see that I had recorded the date of beginning it. The diary had no entries for November and December 1986 – I was obviously too busy writing the story! I wrote more diligently in my diary in the rest of 1986 and 1987 and there are odd mentions of my book-writing throughout those years:

Friday 10th January…Mum got a typewriter – am learning to type.

Sunday 11th January…Taught myself more typing – very frustrating at times.

Sunday 19th January Went swimming & played squash at the College. In p.m. played cards with Mum, wrote a bit more of masterpiece & watched The Taking of Pelham 123.

Sunday 26th January…Revolutionised theme of my novel…

Saturday 1st February…Wrote bit more of blockbuster.

Sunday 2nd February Wrote a lot more of bestseller – spent most of day on this…

Monday 3rd February Cold again. Got 8/8 in Russian test on time. Got stuck on book – creative flow hit a dam. Sore throat.

Monday 3rd March…Have written new beginning to book. Quite good, I think…

Tuesday 4th March…Wrote first part of book yet again.

Thursday 6th March Copied & re-wrote more of book.

Tuesday 1st April Spent most of day reading Little Dorrit and writing – re-writing, the first chapter of my story.

Monday 21st April …I’d love to be a writer.

Sunday 1st June …Thought out more of my story on journey home.

Monday 2nd June …Having my story in my mind is like having a big sum of money for a rainy day – or a warm bed to climb into – a comfortable thing to think about. It makes me happy just thinking about thinking about it! I can’t work on it until after the exams – but I’m always aware of it.

Wednesday 4th June …Thought some more about story.

Monday 23rd June …Started my book – for the fourth time. One day I’ll be able to write it all. The idea won’t go away though, so there must be something in it.

Tuesday 24th June …Told Emma the story behind my novel – she was quite interested. Made me think about how on earth I’m going to end it.

Monday 30th June Wrote a lot more of masterpiece…

Tuesday 1st July …Emma liked my book-so-far. Mum – not so much.

Monday 25th August June …Read some Biology. Then wrote book – first term – settling in.

Sunday 22nd September …Made a few revisions to my story.

Friday 3rd October …The three Rachels in Biology were thrilled to hear about my story. Nice to be appreciated. I’d love to be an author.

Friday 28th November …I read Power of Three and Charmed Life – children’s stories by an author I really admire – Diana Wynne Jones. I’d like to write books as enthralling as hers.

Easter Sunday 19th April, 1987 …I’d like to go down to the South Downs this year…for my much-neglected and sorely-missed story. The only time I get to think about it is at night, before I fall asleep!

I love the references to masterpiece, blockbuster and bestseller (I’m fairly sure they were meant to be ironic!). I do remember that I used to write on the bus on the way to school. I don’t have any of these early versions of the book – I started from scratch on numerous occasions over the years whenever I had time to write (which wasn’t very often). The premise was always there, lurking at the back of my mind and demanding to be written. The current incarnation of the novel was started (again) at Christmas 2007. All that remains of those earliest versions is a single, (badly) type-written scrap, found in the pages of my diary:

Fragment of an early version of

Back then, Ned Kelly was ‘Mr Pengelly’ – but Luke was already Luke. I’m pleased to say that this scene did make it through to the final, 2007, version, although many of the details have changed!

Authonomy

16 Sunday May 2010

Posted by in Websites, Writers, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Authonomy logo

I promised a post about Authonomy and here it is. It’s hard to describe this website in a few words, but, at its simplest, it is a place for writers to freely share their work and for others to read and comment upon it. I put The Roman and the Runaway up there in February this year. It is a bit nerve-wracking at first, having your work open to criticism, but generally the mood is supportive and a lot of the comments I received were extremely helpful and have resulted in significant edits to the text.

It is genuinely fascinating to read other people’s works-in-progress and to be able to ‘talk’ to other writers who are in a similar position to yourself. Some of the books are excellent: have a look at Little Krisna and the Bihar Boys or Jabin as a YA example. Pinpoint was pretty good, too. It’s hard to stop now I’ve started recommending things. Go and have a look and you’ll see what I mean. If this site is an online example of a typical slush pile, then it seems clear to me that publishers are missing some real gems.

Of course, not everything is wonderful, or even good, and there are several big drawbacks to this site. The original plan seemed to be that books which had garnered the most ‘backings’ (i.e. recommendations) from the Authonomy community would rise to the top of the chart (the ‘Editor’s Desk’) and be looked at by staff at HarperCollins, who run the site. However, human nature being what it is, it became fairly easy to game this system by blanket-bombing other members of the site and begging them to back your book. So ‘success’ becomes a question of how much time you have to spare to undertake this activity.

Not everyone is honest in their criticism, either. Or perhaps they are and I’m unduly critical, myself. Helpful, constructive criticism is rare, but very valuable. Often people seem more worried about being backed in return than they do about helping to improve their co-writers’ work, which is a shame. As a consequence, there are a lot of comments dripping with (in my opinion) insincere praise, which makes it hard to identify genuinely positive feedback.

I’ve stayed away from the forum on the site. Again, for me, it’s a time issue. I can see that it would be all too easy to get sucked into the message boards, but at the moment I don’t think it is worth the investment in time. I’ve also noticed a degree of unpleasantness on there that I don’t want to get involved with. Too many creative egos in one place, perhaps.

On balance, it’s a useful site and an interesting place to find new writers and see what other people are doing. Some of the books are complete, so it’s another way of reading books for free (always a good thing!). I would caution against believing everything that people say about your work: some comments are going to be too positive to be believable, while other commenters have clearly read no further than your back-of-the-book pitch. Others damn you with faint praise. My favourite, so far, in this latter category, is this one:

Clearly this wasn’t written for me to identify with but, I am sure it would appeal to it’s [sic] target audience. More than happy to back it if you’ll have a look at my effort. It’s in the way of adult fiction.

Authonomy is a site I would definitely recommend to emerging writers. I’m not clear on the business model for it, from HarperCollins’s point of view, but it’s an interesting place to spend time. My advice would be not to get too sucked into it. Unless you’ve got hours and hours to spare. And if you have, shouldn’t you be writing instead? 😉