Book review - "Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles"

Here is my Goodreads review of "Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles" by J.M. Sullivan.

This was a wonderful book, and highly recommended.

That said, I have discussed my ratings philosophy before - how I reserve five stars for those books exceptional in their field, the best of the best.  On this scale, "Alice" is four stars - which is very high praise from me.

Like every book ever written, there are problems with it.  And further, there are things about it that I didn't connect with (but are not necessarily inherent problems with the text).  Overall, though, this was a great book, an easy read, and I expect most people would get the same high level of enjoyment out of it that I did.

So what is it?

Ostensibly a retelling of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", this book recasts Alice as a young woman in the midst of a world post-zombie-apocalypse, forced to venture out into Phoenix (now called "Wanderland") in search of a cure for her sister.

Pairing "Alice in Wonderland" with zombies is not unique.  I'm not sure where it started - Alice vs the Red Queen in Resident Evil perhaps?  Regardless, we have since (of course) had the successful "White Rabbit Chronicles" series by Gena Showalter (which I really enjoy) starting with "Alice in Zombieland".

This book is different, though.  Those stories use some symbolism or iconography from "Alice" to reflect certain themes or motifs in the work.  "Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles" is explicitly using the story of Lewis Carroll's book - the characters, the ideas, the general progression - to tell a zombie story.  And that is something that "Alice in Zombieland" does not do.

(For that matter, the 'zombies' in "Alice in Zombieland" aren't even that - more like ghosts - so there is little common ground between that series and this one, have no fear.)

As with Carroll's novel, this one begins with Alice leaving both her sister and Dinah (here one and the same person) behind to follow a white rabbit into a frightening world.  Wanderland, of course, is not a separate universe, but its nature as a place abandoned to the Momerath (zombies) and the foreign agencies aggressively pursuing their agendas make it a far cry from Alice's little town where one can at least live one's life only occasionally interrupted by the 'Rath.

And the white rabbit she follows is a man - burdened with the only failed reference to the original novel
as a name.  Most of the references in this book work amazingly well, but "Dr Waite R Abbott" is torturous.  (I would have gone with something more obscure and less instantly recognizable like "Dr Albin Lapin" - but then there's a reason I do not pen runaway successes and JM Sullivan does.)

Why does Alice follow Dr Abbott into Wanderland?  Rumor has it that he has secretly devised a cure for the Momerath virus, which Alice needs to save her sister.  This leads her into a series of encounters with various individuals that will help or hinder (or both!) her quest.

"Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles" is a fast, breezy read.  It is always entertaining, sometimes intriguing, and presents us with many fascinating characters.

Are they all well-rounded and deep?  No, not at all.  Nor, quite frankly, are they intended to be.  There is a great deal more subtlety and depth to the characters here than in Lewis Carroll's source text, but this is still a fast-moving "road movie"-type story which cannot pause for lengthy character interaction.  It is all about moving forward - onto the next event, the next location, the next revelation.

Like the original, there is so much to see and do that we cannot dwell on anything long enough for the people to present themselves as fully three-dimensional (barring a few of the leads).  This is a feature and not a bug.  The characters are as fantastical and hyper-realized as Carroll's were, a bizarre menagerie for Alice to freak out over as she progresses along her path.

They are designed to be colorful and frightening, rather than realistic and recognizable.  Again, where the author intends otherwise, the characters do indeed show levels of reality to themselves.  This is a very well-constructed book, and everything it does is obviously purposeful.

As much as this book draws from the original, however, it is equally indebted to both popular Disney movie adaptations.  A famous exchange between Alice and the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's movie (for example) is referenced twice (one more... hidden than the other).  Like that movie, this one also chooses to conflate the Queen of Hearts with the Red Queen from the sequel book.  And the appearance of the Mome Raths as dangerous creatures (rather than nonsensical words in a poem) appears first in the animated movie.  (For that matter, the term doesn't appear in the original book at all, only surfacing in "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There".)

This is quite right, as the pop-culture vision of "Alice in Wonderland" is at least as important to any retelling as the actual text of the book ("Alice's Adventures in Wonderland") is.  Sullivan knows when to use the book's ideas, and when to draw on our cultural consciousness' ideas about the story for proper effect.

So does this all mean that there is nothing original in "The Wanderland Chronicles"?  Goodness me, of course not.  I have described it as a "nominal retelling" in part because, as much as it strives to follow a certain template and include many analogs and references, this is a wholly original story being told.

Alice's predicament and what she is forced to do to resolve it bears no resemblance whatsoever to Lewis Carroll's heroine, who merely glides through Wonderland as a curious observer with no real agency.  (It was, after all, only a dream.)  Here, Alice is driven by her need to cure her sick sister, and her own abilities & innate nature define her actions, her choice of path.

Along the way are intense events, dramatic revelations, and exciting encounters that I will not spoil in the slightest way here.  You won't want to put the book down, as it all unspools swiftly and entertainingly, driving to a specific end that is indeed reached by the time the book is closed.

Of course, this is the first in a series, so the situation is not "resolved" as such.  But the narrative drive of the novel concludes in a satisfactory manner.  There is much left to cover in further volumes, but the story being told in this one is fully complete.  If the story ended here, it would be far from satisfactory - but as sequels have been promised, the resolution in this book works 100%.

I mentioned earlier that characters can be somewhat shallow.  As I stated then, this is deliberate due to the colorful and exaggerated nature of the "Alice" story.  The most prominent characters, however, are well-shaded and we get to know them as well as can be expected for such a story as this one.

Some will balk at the supposed "love triangle" (which is a staple of fiction, but has become a mandate for YA) but really there is nothing of the sort here.  Are there two young men Alice is even vaguely romantically interested in, or at least finds attractive?  Yes, indeed there are.

But not only is this not a focus, it's not in any way "content".  A young woman would find interesting and good-looking boys and men of an age similar to hers attractive.  This is just the way people work.  This book gives no more attention to that aspect than that, merely describing the ways in which Alice happens to find more than one person appealing.

No love triangle - no love whatsoever, in point of fact.  There's no time for such things here.  Anyone put off by Alice happening to be attracted to more than one handsome man in her travels is being affected by other (lower quality) novels and not engaging with what is actually being presented in this book.

In summary, then, "Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles" is a very successful book that accomplishes its goals almost flawlessly.  It does not dwell on the action and gore inherent in zombie stories, but neither does it shy away from them.  It presents simple characters, colorful and variegated, but ones with enough depth where it counts to come across as fully complete.

It is fun, engaging, easy to read, and always entertaining.  If it doesn't hit five stars for me, that is mostly a consequence of its aiming for a lower bar.  The book easily clears the standard it sets for itself, which is more than good enough for me.

"Alice" is not aiming to be a literary classic.  It accomplishes its goals and then some.

Strongly recommended for... let's face it, just about everyone, really.

Buy the book

Close third - the cheating POV

Writing is tough.

Even when you've got your plot figured out, your characters, the arcs, all that good stuff.  How do you actually tell the story?

First person?  Third person?  The rarely-used second person?

And beyond that: past tense?  Present tense?

These things can greatly affect the way in which your text is received, the way the human brain processes and interprets the words.  The way the reader experiences them.

And if you're like me, you fall back on the easy one.  Close third.


Actually, I'll admit that I'm exaggerating here for effect.  Someone a while back wanted me to write this blog post, and I finally am getting around to it now.  If I get any comments below, they are sure to be angry ones!  But let me explain.

Third person is more... removed.  Obviously.  You - the writer - are not sitting in the character's head the way you are in first person, where everything is a direct translation of the character's thoughts.  Instead, you are the narrator, describing what the character sees, thinks and feels.

But "close" third: that is somewhat different.  In this POV, the writer is close enough to the character's head that he/she almost conveys it in first person - but not quite.

In essence, it's a way to get the benefits of first person POV without actually having to mess with the

headache that brings with it.  It's cheating.

No, no it's not really cheating.  It's my favorite POV to use - and usually to read, truth be told.  But it sure is easier than being restricted to first person, and can convey more immediacy and relatability than a strict third can.

Plus (and here's where I really rely on the crutch) it allows me the freedom (which I abuse mercilessly) to use my natural tendency toward lengthy, wordy sentences in my role as narrator - while also writing punchy, snappy text in character as the protagonist!

Best of both worlds!

Except in rewrites I always have to tone down this disparity.  At times I can even tell on reading back when I stopped writing for one day and took it up again the next.  One day I may have been extra flowery, the next super-slangy.  Editing is partially about fixing this.

But I still have that leeway.  That flexibility to incorporate my writerly inclinations with my character's more off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness way of thinking.

Is that a cheat?  It is the way I do it.

And then I have to fix it.

Book Review: "Ink and Bone" by Rachel Caine

Hey.  Been a while.

I have been so busy writing (or, at times, avoiding writing) that I have ignored this blog.  Shame on me.

I have several topics in mind, but for now: here's my Goodreads book review for "Ink and Bone".

Happy reading!

That I didn't give this book 5 stars is no slight on the novel.  For me, those are (and ought to be) rare.  "Ink and Bone" gets a solid 4.25 stars, and is very, very good.

One of the things I liked most about it is the thing that may be causing the (very few) detractors to have a hard time: this book cares very little about plot.

It's true.  There's barely any actual plot in this book.  And it's all the better for it.

One of the books "Ink and Bone" is being compared to all over the map is "Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone", which is ridiculous on the face of it.  Neither the tone nor the content is at all similar, and apart from the rather vague alchemical machinations behind the scenes, the characters in this book neither see nor perform 'magic'.

And yet, like "The Philosopher's Stone", this book uses the 'year at school' setting as a tool to drag the reader along.  In the Harry Potter book, besides a vague sense that Voldemort is up to something and his scheme will need to be defeated, the only real plot structure is: Harry goes to school.  The incidents that occur, the real 'plot', is just Harry going to classes.  And then there's a big end-piece.

Sort-of similarly, "Ink and Bone" uses the fact that the characters are attending a class to earn a spot working for The Library as a way for the reader to infer a kind of forward momentum.  The 'plot' only drives forward insofar as time moves ahead to a certain destination.  There is no villain as such (debatable, but give me this one for now) nor is there a goal to achieve or set obstacles to overcome.  There is no overarching narrative in the sense that the reader can understand an endpoint that needs to be achieved, and what the hero is required to do to attain it, what hurdles he must jump to win the day.

There is a timeline set out before Jess (the protagonist) and us.  And the book moves ever closer to that point.  This is the only sense of momentum author Rachel Caine feels the need to give us.

And quite right she is, too.

This sort of 'false momentum' is all the rope the story needs to drag itself along, to give it a sense of driving forward narratively.  Then all the real work can be done with the characters, which is what 'story' essentially is.

Jess, you see, is something of a smuggler.  In an alternate history where the Library of Alexandria runs the world, and has supreme authority over all collective knowledge, the black market has a keen interest in original books.  And Jess' father is one of those black marketeers.

So when Jess winds up having to apply for a position working for the very Library he has been taught to oppose, an intriguing moral conflict is posed.

Setting him and his ideals against a cast of diverse characters with their own agendas and viewpoints adds even more fuel to the (Greek) fire, and this is where the actual story takes place.  The story is Jess and his instructor and his fellow students learning to deal with one another, to respect one another, and the various interesting ways they interact and grow as a result.

Events certainly take place - big, important ones.  Life-threatening and enthralling ones.  But nothing that I'd call a 'plot', because they stand alone as incidents that do not essentially contribute to any overarching narrative.  They are simply things that happen - but what those 'things that happen' do is affect the characters in fascinating ways that reveal (and change) who they are at their cores.

Are there flaws in the book?  Of course there are.  (Show me a book without them.)  For my money, the opening segments setting up Jess' world are too far removed from the setting of the rest of the book, and would be better excised.  They set up an expectation for a certain type of story that we learn some time later is not to be the case.

I would also postulate that the reason some readers give up early on, feeling that the book is 'slow' or 'dry', is simply down to extremely long chapters!  Later on, the book is divided into easier-to-swallow segments, but the interminable length of those early portions leads one to feel that the book is dragging on and leading nowhere - when simple chapter divides would kick up the pace by themselves.

As, of course, would not wasting quite so much time setting up Jess' life in London which will not bear much relation to the rest of the novel at all.  But I've talked about that already...

Jess is a well-defined character, with certain notions inbuilt thanks to his upbringing which are challenged by his own experiences as a student.  While he's neither the wise-cracking, fun-loving rogue you instantly fall in love with, nor the wide-eyed ingenue the reader can put themselves in the shoes of, Jess is likeable and interesting in his own right.

The other students are less dimensional, but diverse and entertaining enough.  There's not quite time in a book of this length to get fully into the heads of so many players, but the author very quickly lets us know who these people from around the world are, what their biases are, and how they will relate to one another.

She then spends the book picking that apart and letting the characters grow and develop based on their interactions.

More interesting (at least to me) was the instructor: Christopher Wolfe.  A hard-nosed, by-the-book teacher at first glance, as we read more and more, as Jess' experiences teach us more, we see something else entirely.  We understand the man, where he comes from, what has made him this way, and that the surface is a poor source to make one's judgments based upon.

I look forward to the later books in the series.  Seeing more of Jess, more of Morgan.  But mostly, I want to see what becomes of Wolfe - because he is the aspect of this book I became most intrigued by.

The alternate reality this is based upon uses some hocus-pocus that I feel could have best been replaced by something less obviously mystical, but I admit this is a matter of taste.  Some major developments rest upon it, but I think something more ambiguous and more technologically-justifiable would suit the 'alternative history' angle better, as what is here removes itself just a little too far from our world.

The sentry machines I can buy into.  The 'magic'?  Less so, in this context - though I'm a big fantasy fan in general.

More to my taste was the political flavor to the whole endeavor.  The Library, the cutters, the Burners.  You may begin the novel feeling one way about these people/organizations, and yet feel quite different by the end.  Indeed, I should be much surprised if you did not.

Will you know exactly how to feel about every group by the conclusion of this book?  I should hope not; it is nothing so black-and-white as that.  And this is the ingredient that (I feel) really makes the book soar.

Who is in the right?  Who is in the wrong?  As in real life, it is not cut and dried, and everyone seems to have a little of both mixed in.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Buy "Ink and Bone"

Killing Your Babies With the Bathwater

For writers, the phrase "kill your babies" is something we are used to hearing over and over.

No, not because we're part of some freaky, Manson-like cult.  This piece of advice is to remind us that sometimes an idea, a character, a sub-plot, can be holding back the work as a whole but we are too fond of it to (as Elsa would urge us) let it go.

A lot of the time you have to "kill your babies".  Throw out the trash that's hurting your fiction, regardless of how much you might have grown attached to it.

And yet, a part of me resists that advice with all of my strength.  Is it just my petty attachment to my (obviously wonderful) ideas getting in my way?  Or is there something wrong with the famous advice?

Probably the former, I'll admit, but allow me to explore this idea somewhat on the page here.  You see, if a writer is unduly attached to a particular aspect of his or her writing, perhaps that "baby" is not holding the story back but is the one part giving it life.

Look, I understand the aphorism.  And I'm sure most of the time it's right.  But sometimes - just sometimes - we might find ourselves throwing out that baby with the bathwater.  What was intended to save the story, by cutting out the parts fighting against it, instead gets rid of the very heart that beat at the center.

A (possibly poor) example, if you will.  Many years ago I was (for the sake of writing practice) attempting to condense five books of David Eddings' "The Belgariad" into one screenplay of 120 pages.

Madness, sure, but it was an exercise.  As I pared it down, and down, and down, it resembled the source material less and less.  Fine then, I said, let's change it to an original work instead, if I'm altering it to that extent anyway.

So I turned this into that, nipping and tucking and snipping until I had a story that resembled "The Belgariad" no more than, say, "The Lord of the Rings".

And yet.  And yet...  One scene remained.  The part where Garion and Ce'Nedra bathe together in the stream.  I couldn't get rid of it, I loved it too much.  But with that piece intact, it was very clearly a "rip-off" of "the Belgariad".  No matter the name changes, the source material shone through.

So the scene had to go.  But I couldn't.  That one scene (small as it is) in one of the 5 books was everything to me.  The lynchpin, the centerpiece, the pivot on which the entire story turned.  To remove that was to pluck the heart from its chest Temple of Doom style, and I could not do it.

Thus I abandoned the screenplay entirely.  Leaving in the bathing scene would make it too reliant on the source material, taking it out killed the entire story stone dead.

For me, in that instance, the baby that needed killing was the story.  It couldn't be done.

I faced a similar issue with "Straw Soldiers" - my first novel.  A mistake (I'll admit it) early on hampered the experience of the book.  And yet getting rid of it would destroy the presentation and development of the main character in the book.

So vital was this element (an element which held back the book quite obviously) that I strongly considered changing the entire premise of the six-book series to accommodate it, to make it no longer a flaw.

When I realized just what I was proposing, I decided this was a baby that could not be killed.  Yes, keeping it in hampered the impact of the novel - I know it did - but taking it out would be worse.  So much worse.

Is killing your babies a good piece of advice?  I'm sure it is.  Just, when you're working on that, make sure that what you're excising is not the heart and soul of your book, your screenplay, your poem.  Maybe sometimes, it's the bathwater that needs changing instead.

Review: "Captain Hawklin and the Skyhook Pirates"

Could also be called:

Sky Captain and the Temple of Doom.

I love a good pulp novel - and a good pulp movie serial as well. Here I get something of both.

For while this book is a tribute to the old pulp works, to me it reads more as a pastiche of the cinematic pulp adventures than the written ones. Indeed, the author seems to say as much in the book itself.

Furthermore, I catch more than a hint of the modern tributes to the pulp classics. For example, it feels more like Sky Captain than it does Sky Raiders. More The Rocketeer than The King of the Rocket-Men.

And that's not a bad thing. A modern sensibility to the period-pastiche is a nice touch which I appreciate. And while it does a good job emulating a 1930s environment (I was able to picture the whole thing in black and white) I personally think it has elements of a more contemporary storytelling style that help it remain relevant to today's reader.

It's not too deep, I'll tell you that. Nor is it trying to be. What this book wants (and what it succeeds at) is to be a rollicking adventure drenched in the spirit of 1930s pulp sensibilities. It is pretty steadily-paced with a plethora of cliffhangers, and it never flags.

Some storytelling problems include very uneven chapter lengths (which disrupt the pacey flow a tad) and a very swift ending which follows a late plot revelation that could have fueled much more story beyond that point.

In addition (and this is the only thing that knocks the rating down a peg) there are frequent (and I mean ubiquitous) typos and punctuation errors. If these bug you too much (and they usually do for me) then prepare yourself because they are impossible to ignore. A lot of word repetition finds its way in as well, though this is a stylistic criticism rather than a technical one.

I don't want to seem down on this work as I enjoyed it a lot (and look forward to reading the sequels which this initial book leaves room to improve upon) but the flaws have to be noted. And they do detract - even if less than they might have.

"The Skyhook Pirates" is intentionally derivative. Don't expect much innovation here. The skill involved here was stitching together various elements to achieve a surprisingly cohesive whole. It ought not to be as good as it is with so many disparate ideas masquerading as one story, but it works dammit. The diversity helps make the plot seem fresh as the story unfolds - like each new chapter of the movie serial has its own character, but is telling one overarching story.

So, yeah. Get it if you like old pulp stories. Avoid it if you don't, because it makes no pretense to be anything other than what it is - and rightfully so.

Very entertaining.

Buy the Book

Inspiration (Part One)

Compensation is 99% inspiration, or so they say.

(No they don't.)

But what exactly is inspiration?  For me, at least, it is certainly not wholesale lifting from other sources.

Most often, an character's arc, or a fantastical element, in one piece of fiction will lead me - stepping-stone-like - to a somewhat related idea that I flesh out on my own to create something brand new.

Sometimes (very rarely) it will be about stealing an idea someone else had.  But in these cases, it's more like turning a throwaway comment into a full-blown novel.  Like reading an offhand remark about 'a YouTube comment by a man who never existed', and then creating from that an entire story about someone who was erased from reality, but gained a second life as a sentient online footprint.

It's not about stealing.  It's about great works of fiction stirring your imagination to create your own (hopefully very different) art.

For this post, I want to talk about my series of pulp science-fiction e-novellas: "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe".

I've talked before about the origins of this series, but basically I wrote an unsolicited spec for a defunct series of pulp e-novellas set in 1970s North America.  At the time, a paperback collected edition was being mooted, but as the project was put on hold, my story (which was strongly being considered for inclusion in the book) went to limbo.

But the experience prompted me to realize that I could write (and would have fun writing) my own series of pulp adventures, of a similar length.  At the time, I thought I could bang them out one a month at a decent quality (provided I went into the thing with a sufficient number of ideas) and because of my love of Victorian-era pulp SF, I immediately conceived the story of a gentleman of the era finding himself on a journey through outer space, becoming an unlikely hero as he floundered his way through the cosmos to make it back to Earth.

The action-adventure pulp series I had written for was a main inspiration - but only for tone and format.  The content of my novellas would be quite different.

So what inspired me beyond them?  HG Wells, of course, was a main inspiration, and I sought ought some of his books I had not read up to that point, to immerse myself in the right tone.

Also - and quite in opposition to the staid pacing of late 19th Century literature - I was greatly inspired by (and wanted to emulate) the flow, rhythm, and structure of the Flash Gordon serials starring Buster Crabbe.  Not the newspaper strips (which I liked as well) but the cinematic serialized adaptations.

If I could somehow evoke the fun of those serials, with their frequent cliffhangers, while also emulating the style and content of early SF works that I loved, then I would be onto a winner (as far as creating what I intended to - I never expected, nor received, financial success from those books).

My main influence, though, was a little loved book called "A Honeymoon in Space" by George Griffith.  First published in 1901 (the same year my Victorian gentleman set out on his celestial adventure) this book describes a dashing man who rescues his old flame from an unwanted marriage in his newly-invented spacecraft.  Together the two take to the stars to see what wonders the solar system has to offer.

In its light-hearted and adventurous tone, its fascination with bizarre alien life and how such societies would evolve, and its utter lack of concern for real-life science, I found something I wanted to emulate in spirit - though not in content.  Its resonances with the concerns of the novel "The Time Machine" gave me much fuel for the fires of my creative writing.

Throw this all together with my love of Sherlock Holmes, adventure serials, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books, and with just a whiff of steampunk about the whole thing, and you have a series I was very proud to more or less succeed at producing once a month (for the six months it endured).

If you want to, you can buy the collected e-books for Kindle for $5.99.  "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe" - one of my favorite things I have ever had the pleasure of writing.

Defining Characters by Groups

A little trick I taught myself when writing screenplays was not to rely on defining a character as himself or herself, but to define each person in relation to the others.

To some extent, this applies to prose as well - not as much to POV characters as to others, but even then it can be helpful.

But let me back up a little.

In print, the reader has access to the POV characters' innermost thoughts and feelings. What this means is that it is not only their actions that define them, but what goes on inside their heads.

On screen, this is not so.  Nor is it for characters on the page whose thoughts the reader is not privy to.  What does this mean for the writer?  Allow me to explain my thoughts.

No matter what work you put into a character's design - their backstory - what matters to the reader is what they see.  If the things you invented do not impact the story, the reader sees none of it and your detailed character bio results in nothing but a 2D stereotype that the eye merely glances over and forgets.

An example: your main characters stop at a sandwich shop three days a week for lunch.  You have a beautiful bio drawn up for the guy behind the counter.  He fought in Operation: Iraqi Freedom - two tours - but when he came back he was a changed man, tortured, haunted, and his wife left him.  Since then, he has become a Buddhist and is seeking inner peace and enlightenment.  His father back in Idaho is dying of cancer, but the sandwich man can't leave his job to go and take care of Dad because he needs the money.

How does this manifest on the page?  "Here's your sandwiches, ladies.  Enjoy!"

That's it.  None of the backstory you devised, the intricate personality you worked out in detail, shows itself to the reader, because the story being told has nothing to do with any of it.  In practical terms, he is not any of those things in your bio: he's just the guy who says, "Enjoy."

So what if you define him in relation to other characters.  Maybe he's like the Soup Nazi and is combative with your leads.  Or perhaps he owns the sandwich place with his sister who is a flake and sleeping on his couch, and so every time we are in the sandwich shop there is some nice conflict happening between them.

Even if it's just a little color, it is something.  He's no longer just the guy who hands your MCs their sandwiches; he is a character.

Your other characters can benefit too; it doesn't have to be just bit-parters.  If you have decided that Jack's younger brother was bitten by a poisonous spider and almost died while vacationing in Brazil, unless your plot is about spiders then the most we will see (unless you shoehorn in some dialogue to explain it - which is itself problematic) is Jack staring suspiciously at a spider in the corner of the room.  Not compelling drama.

So start again.  Make Jack a control freak, and Betty a free spirit who is offended by structure.  Together they spark, and will create drama simply from the way they respond to every situation.  This particular example is a cliche, but there's a reason for that: it's a good one.

The point, though, is that while backstory is not a bad thing, if it doesn't show up on the page then it isn't a good thing either.  Define your characters against one another, make it so that the way they behave is in direct contrast to everyone else.  How they respond should not only be about the events of their past, but about how other characters will respond to the same stimuli.

If you want drama, if you want entertaining characters, if you want depth, then that bio sheet alone is probably worthless.  Think about they way every character relates to, and contrasts with, the others.  Know their alliances, their clashes, their romances.  Define the group together, so you know they complement and contrast.

Make good drama that doesn't just exist in theory.  Then write it.

Book review: "The Martian Girl"

The Martian Girl
by Paul Magrs
(Firefly Press)


Let me get this out of the way first: it's not quite as good as "Lost on Mars" was.

But given that I rated them both 4 stars on Goodreads, there's obviously not much in it.

Like the first book, it's quite episodic and doesn't feel like the plot really gets going until rather late in.  The first 50% or so of this book is kind of picking up the pieces of "Lost on Mars" and reshuffling them to get to the place this book needs them to be.

Most of this part is still good reading - although I found the ambivalent way the novel treats Professor Swiftnick to be somewhat disorienting.  At one point, it appears as though we're going to be expected to suddenly treat Swiftnick as a friendly character - though this is soon negated again.  It's probably just bad reading on my part, but it feels to me as if Paul Magrs momentarily gets lost in recreating the feel of certain other books and places the character in a role unsuited to him for a brief time.

That quibble aside (and it's a minor one) this is a very enjoyable book from start to finish.  I don't feel it has the strength of the early portions of "Lost on Mars" which had a very nice "Little House on the Martian Prairie" feel - but neither does it have the wrenching quality of that book's episodic format.

This still follows the same storybook format of a series of differentiated adventures, but somehow the whole feels somewhat more "tied together" than before.  To me, "Lost on Mars" somehow only felt as though it had arrived at the real story it was telling when Lora made it to the City Inside.

That location is where we pick up in "The Martian Girl", and remain for the first half of the book.  Even though it still takes a goodly while for this book to wind up at the next phase of the adventure, it is so breezy and fun to read that you'll never feel like the time spent is too long.  Indeed, I could have remained in the City Inside for the entire book and never felt cheated.

But that's not what this series is doing.  No, as I stated earlier, the kind of storybook, episodic format keeps us always rolling along to the next set of circumstances - and here there is a distinctly more pronounced L Frank Baum air to the whole thing than I recall from the first book.  Whether this comparison is intended or the product of my own reading preferences is of no consequence; the similarity is there (for me, at least) and is something I appreciated.

It's a necessity of any sequel, but I felt slightly let down at the fact that some of the odd occurrences in "Lost on Mars" are given explanations here (or at least a hint in that direction) which dilutes the impact of them rather - but only in the way that Poirot revealing the murderer will always be vaguely less compelling than the investigation to undercover him in the first place.

Lora's world is still zany, enthralling and well-drawn, and most of the characters refuse to remain as they are, instead developing as the story goes on.  Plenty of mystery is still left regarding events and people from the first book, and although I am eager to discover the truth I am happy to wait while I enjoy the desire for eventual enlightenment.  There's so much still to find out, things that will no doubt alter the way we understand the world of this Mars.

And Lora herself still has room to grow, to become the woman it seems she is likely to be.

Oh - Barbra the Vending Machine finally made it into the story here.  I was hoping it wouldn't take her long...

Buy the e-book on Amazon US

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September 15-19

"Straw Soldiers" Kindle edition is on sale for:


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Pick it up, before this sale ends!

Perfection Minus One

Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott once wrote an article called "Crap Plus One".

In it, they expounded that one of the problems with screenwriters trying to make it in the industry is seeing a terrible movie that got made, and thinking: "Well, I can do better than that!"

The problem is that a bad movie can happen for many reasons, but Hollywood is filled with amazing unmade scripts, and anyone aiming for the level of "crap plus one" will end up with a massively substandard script that will get them nowhere.

The same is true for self-publishers like me.  It is so easy to see a bunch of lousy indie books that have had unexpected success, and to think: "Well, I can do better than that!"

Success happens for a bunch of coincidental and unfathomable reasons.  Sure, it is very possible for a bad book to make a lot of money.  But more often than not (much more often) a bad book will just sit there making nothing very much at all.

You need to aim for the best you can possibly manage.  Only by writing a truly excellent book can you be reasonably in with a shot at hitting that magic cross-section of quality and marketability and chance that creates the hit novel.

But (and here's where I get controversial) there's just as much of a problem the other way.  Aiming for "perfection minus one" will lead to nothing but frustration and eventually giving up.  Unless you're a truly gifted author of the like the world rarely sees, your work will never live up to the standard you demand of yourself if you want "perfection minus one".

The number one reason for my despondency and desire to pack it all in is my failure to write prose the way Vladimir Nabokov did.  Or to create whimsical characters as well as Paul Magrs does.  Or construct immersive, enthralling worlds the way George R.R. Martin does.

I can't do it.  I want to, but it doesn't happen.  And when I refuse to accept anything less than the soaring standards of the world's best writers, I become so fed up with the level of my own talent that I almost decide to just give it all up.  Do something else, something less demanding.  Something where I don't feel like such a freaking failure every single day.

Ben Burtt, sound designer and sometime editor of the Star Wars movies had a saying posted at his work area: "Films aren't released, they escape."  A movie is never 'done'.  It is put out into theaters only because the release date is up and the filmmakers have no other choice.  They would fiddle with it endlessly if given half a chance.

Aim for the best that you personally can possibly do.  Accept your limits - strive to break them - and don't hate yourself when you fail to live up to impossible standards.  Improve every day.  Reach for the sky; just stay grounded.

Be amazing.  But know that you will never be the best, and that's okay.  'Great' is a lot better than 'decent' - even if it isn't quite 'perfect'.

Memorable Supporting Characters

I don't mean necessarily your host of secondary characters.  Sure, you want them to be memorable and full of personality too, but this article is about something else.

I'm talking about the little guys.  The two-liners.  The people that fill out the world your protagonist inhabits.  In most cases, you're going to have a lot of bit-parters who don't have much to say.  But if none of them are interesting to read about, all of those small lines here and there add up to an awful lot of space being filled up by stuff that nobody cares about.

And it's not even a matter of creating a fleshed-out role for each of these either.  Let's face it: no matter how detailed a bio sheet you create for these guys, if the person just sits in an office and contributes an expository line once every hundred pages, that background you invented for them just isn't going to come across to the reader.  At all.

Something I've been thinking about lately are colorful characters in some of my favorite TV shows that were invented just to be these amusing bit-part characters who instantly draw your attention even if they have only one line of dialogue (or no lines).

I think about Starburns on Community.  Just a guy who shaves his sideburns into star-shapes to give himself a visual hook.  Nothing else, but he became a recurring guest character just on the strength of the kooky appeal of this gimmick.

Or the first full-length episode of Nickelodeon classic The Adventures of Pete & Pete.  One of the Petes encounters an antagonistic bully by the name of "Open Face", who only eats open-faced sandwiches.  His cohorts with the meager dialogue include "Gravy Breath" and "Butt-Stripe" (whose bike saddle leaves an identifiable mark).

These are the kind of quirky, colorful extras that can really bring your story to life.  I'm not saying your Steve Jacobs and Jill Watsons have no place - but when all of your characters are such lifeless, dull creations, much of the story's atmosphere is robbed of color.

So yeah.  Why not have that man who points your protagonist in the right direction be a purple-haired punk in an Edwardian suit?  Why not have that office co-worker be nicknamed "The Voice" because she spends all day rehearsing to herself for that reality-show audition she has coming up?  A kid with a raccoon for a pet, a man who only wears fur coats, a teenage girl who only wears teal...

Be creative.  Let your minor characters pack a quick punch.  Fill out your world with people that lend it life, not a thin fog of characterless line-feeders.

Entertainment is your job, writers.  Do that!

Book 2: The Difficult Second Album

Just as with musicians, the sophomore release is in some ways the hardest.

It's partly the artist to blame, and partly the audience.  The first book/album is the culmination of possibly years of creative percolating.  After that, it's time to just get the next product in the assembly line out, and it's likely to be a letdown.

Why is the audience to blame?  Well, in some ways the expectation of something just as amazing as the first installment is impossible to meet.  The consumer is not privy to the long history that first work had prior to its release, and can't fully accept that the sequel is simply not going to have the same creative weight behind it.

But let's face it: it's mostly on us.  The writer, the musician, the movie director.  If we experience the old Sophomore Slump it's because we haven't put the work in that we needed to.

Yeah, it's difficult.  You want any second installment to be the same, but different.  In exactly the right ratio.

It's very easy to make the second book too similar to the first.  I call this the "Chamber of Secrets" effect.  An installment that serves only to reinforce what the author intends to be the "pattern" of the series, and not to add anything artistically new to the pot.  It has a purpose - to say "this is what the series is" - but to the reader this is merely dead space.

And yet, going the other way is even worse.  When the second book is too different to the first, the series loses all cohesion and you lose all of the readers who wanted more of the kind of thing they liked so much about that initial book.

There's a line there.  A very narrow, fuzzy, hard-to-find line.  And that's where I'm walking right now, plotting and inventing, trying my darndest to pull the story of Book 2 out of the mire of swirling possibilities it exists in currently.

If you fail at the second lap, you've lost the race.  This is no time to get complacent.  This, right here, this is the biggest challenge.  And I have to be ready for it.

Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces

I've talked before about being a "Plotter".  I don't write without knowing everything that's going to happen in the story (but leaving room for surprises to happen along the way).

So what does that look like?  Well, for me, in many ways it's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

First, you have to decide what difficulty level you're going for, what length of project.  Is it a 200-piece puzzle, or a 550-piece?  Then: is it the picture of puppies, the sailboat, or the bridge of the Enterprise?

After that is the hardest part: starting.  You see, it's not just a puzzle.  It's a puzzle that has been knocked over.

Because you don't have any of the pieces to begin with.  Here and there on the floor you can see a couple of puzzle pieces, but on their own you have no idea what they are or how they fit into the bigger picture.  But following the trail of pieces leads you to more, and eventually you find the motherload: the stash of all the puzzle pieces somewhere underneath the coach.

Of course, the work isn't over yet.  Oh no.  You have to sort through the pieces, find which goes where - tossing out any pieces that you think belong to another puzzle altogether.

It's hard work, this, but satisfying.  You get to see the picture come together.  And it's a fascinating experience, at times, to find that what you thought was a bird's eye is actually a black shirt button, and that edge piece is really an odd-shaped center-piece.

But once the picture is complete, you can start the actual writing, knowing in full what you're going for, what the actual story is.  Because if a character isn't heading for a specific destination, they really aren't headed anywhere at all.

Right now, in planning Book 2 of The Sleepwar Saga, I'm at the early piece-collecting stage.  I have a handful of disparate segments, but I'm just on the verge of them leading me to the main pile of spilled pieces.

And soon will begin the main planning of the book.  And then, the writing.  I just can't write about the basket of puppies without seeing what the completed jigsaw puzzle looks like in the first place - writing about a few loose puzzle pieces just leaves me with a mess of purposeless prose.

Plotters vs Pantsers: why you shouldn't choose

You shouldn't choose because, of course, "Plotter" is the obviously correct selection.

I kid, but let me back up a bit:  What are these terms?

Writers tend to use these words to describe the two basic types that make up their group.  "Plotters" plan the story out in advance, and write to an outline.  "Pantsers" make it all up on the fly.

So which is better?  This is what I came here to explain: there is no choice.  You don't decide which path to follow; you learn which group you are already in.

It's not about technique, it's about the way you naturally write.

Some will say that Plotters leave no room for inspiration to hit, or that Pantsers hit writer's block and give up too easily.  Neither of these are necessarily (or even often) true.

Let me lay my cards on the table: I'm a Plotter.  And how.  I can't even start writing until I have every last beat of the story figured out.  I just can't do it.  (Or rather, I can't do it well, which is kind of the point.)  If I try to write without a very sophisticated outline, the story just veers off into nowhere and I have to delete vast swathes of text and start again.

For me, a story needs to have a shape.  I don't just put finger to keyboard and see what comes out.  I know what comes out: nonsense.  A story is about progression, about characters following their nature but encountering hiccups and overcoming them and developing in certain precise and entertaining ways.  If you just let them bumble about doing whatever they feel like, it might be believable but it sure as hell won't be entertaining.

Ah, you may well cry, that is what rewriting is for.  And this is true.  Many writers find the story in the redraft stage and get everything into shape then.  Me?  I'd rather do all that pesky rewriting before the writing has actually started.

It's much easier to redraft a "beat sheet", or treatment, than a 90,000 word document.

But have I abandoned all artistic integrity by sticking to an outline?  Have I hamstrung myself, leaving out all sense of inspiration and become a slave to a blueprint that I have bound myself to?

Not at all.  In those cases where things start developing in ways that contradict my outline (and yet seem potentially more interesting than my outline) I see where that takes me and develop a new outline where necessary.  (Or else realize I was right the first time and return to an earlier file which I conveniently saved when I began to deviate.)

Similarly, Pantsers are not necessarily more prone to giving up due to writer's block than Plotters.  We Plotters have the same writer's block - we just experience it earlier (in the planning stages).  Pantsers, in some ways, have a better reason to just plow ahead and see where the story takes them; if a plotter becomes stuck on how to implement his or her outline then it becomes harder to just power through the blockage.

So neither is necessarily beneficial.  There is no reason to choose between the two, based on merit.  What is important is to find out which of the two you are and do so quickly.  The more time you waste following the wrong technique, the harder it will be to write anything half-way decent.

I legitimately do not understand Pantsers.  How is it possible to craft a comprehensible and entertaining story without knowing where everything is leading?  There are so many strands to a novel that I do not see how a writer can cause them to artistically convene and converge in any kind of believable and satisfying manner by doing it on the fly.

And yet it is done.  Again and again, every single day, by artists whose talent is far above my own.  I couldn't do it, that is for sure.  It's not about choosing, it's about discovering.  And I discovered very early in my life that I can only produce a satisfactory story by doing all the donkey work up front.

You may be the opposite.  You may find that any outlining you do results in a mundane and predictable story that satisfies no-one, and the only way to create something of worth is to sit at the keyboard and figure it all out as you go.

It's not a choice; it's an identity.

Character diversity in fiction

Diversity is important.

Now, I don't believe in tokenism, but I do believe in representation.  As a straight white male, it is all too easy for me to be blind to the way my 'type' is over-represented in fiction.  That most fiction seems to be directly catered to me, to appeal to me, to feature me.

But having diversity among your characters is not only about representation; it's also just good drama.  What your characters look like might not seem superficially important (in text there is no color) but even if all of the characters are white (or black, or Hispanic, or desi) it is important to make each distinct.

Basically, the less variation the characters' cultural and developmental backgrounds, the less inherent drama there is in their interactions.  Why limit yourself?  No matter how well you define your individual characters, if they all share so many of the same characteristics then there is much less scope for clashes.

For me, as a function of where I live, it is easy for me to create a naturally diverse cast.  I simply look at my friends and co-workers and draw from them - as they are from various backgrounds and ethnicities, so will my own characters be.

Especially the teenagers I work with, since the Sleepwar Saga leads are all teens as well.  As I look to real young people I know from which I can extrapolate brand new fictional versions, I naturally will create a diverse group as that is the culture that surrounds me.  Were I still living in some of the more overwhelmingly white areas I have lived in before, perhaps I would have to work that much harder to ensure I created a realistically and entertainingly diverse cast of characters.

That's not to say I always succeed in my efforts.  Only after the fact did I realize that all six of my leads (and the supporting cast of "Straw Soldiers" as well) are cisgendered hetereosexual able-bodied people.  Clearly this is an area I will need to deliberately focus on if I want to be representative (and to mine all resources for inherent drama).

Actually, one of the characters in "Straw Soldiers" is gay, but as it never came up in the text no one will ever know.

What about gender?  More than half of the world's population is female, so why are so few fictional characters female?  Especially in movies and on TV, but books can be just as guilty.

I want to be diverse.  I want to be representative.  Not just to ensure that straight white men are not the only (or even primary) type that gets stories written for them, but because when drama is all about the way characters clash and interact, why would any writer remove potential for this by limiting the variation among the core cast?

But while sometimes this comes easily, at other times I realize how far I still have to go if I want to meet my goals.  It's so easy to surround yourself with people like yourself - to write about people like yourself - that you just don't notice how insufficient this representation actually is.

What is 'Young Adult' fiction, exactly?

And why write it?

This is just a question I was thinking about lately, and figured I'd jot down some thoughts.  You see, 'genre' is an interesting concept which so many people seem to get wrong.

Genre doesn't define content; content defines genre.

In other words, no good 'Young Adult' book (since that's the category I'm discussing today) began with the author thinking: "I'd like to write a YA novel.  What elements do I need to put in to make it YA?"

Many writers do, indeed, think like that.  But not the good ones.

Writing YA isn't about taking some of the staples of the genre (dystopian future, strong female protagonist, vampires) and figuring out a plot you can build around them.  This only leads to inferior fiction.  No, instead 'Young Adult' fiction is merely fiction that is about being a young adult.

It's about writing your story in such a way that it is defined by the experience of being a teen (or person of similar age).  Not about featuring teenagers; rather, it is about being a teenager.  The entire subjective experience should be the way an actual young person views and chooses in the world.  This is what makes a YA story, not the plot elements.

So why write YA?  Why is the young adult experience such a popular topic for authors and readers alike?  My guess is that the experience of 'coming of age', of being right at the point in one's life where one is transitioning from dependency to autonomy, is simply the most inherently dramatically rich period to form a story around.

This is a time when emotions are at their height, when the weight of the future first begins to burden a young mind, when the person they will be for the duration of their lives begins to fully take form.  Obviously, this makes for a vast well of story potential to be mined.

And adults - who are actually the main consumers of YA fiction - will connect with the material every bit as powerfully as those who are going through the same experience depicted in the story.  We have all been that age, and any story that properly conjures up the reality of having been that age will bring us older folks back to when we felt the exact same way.

One of my favorite movies is Where the Wild Things Are.  It is based on a young children's book, and is about the experience of being a young child.  But is not for young children.

Oh, there is nothing there that is unsuitable for kids.  I just don't think it caters to them particularly.  It doesn't speak to them in any strong way, because its purpose is to remind us who have left that period behind of exactly what it felt like to be a kid.  What we went through, the way the world treated us.  It reminds us of that time, and helps us relate to those who are currently children.

Kids don't need that.  They're already living it.  It's the rest of us that sometimes need to be reminded of just what a fearsome and difficult time childhood actually is (or can be).

That's what I like about YA, and why I choose to write it.  It is, in a basic way, about being at a time in our lives that defined us, that we struggled through, that we sometimes find it all too easy to forget.

And sometimes it has vampires in it.

Final book in the series released!

At last, it is upon us!  (And only two weeks late...)

Book 6 of "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe" is called "The Free World" and it is now available!

In this, the last of Volume One of the "Star Travels" (I fully intend to come back to the series some day) Jeremiah comes to the planet Mantrika voluntarily, to help aid its citizens in freeing their world from the tyrannical occupation of the Veyans.

Jeremiah has no idea how he could be of use, but he followed the lovely Princess Iltiria here and would do whatever she bid.  But now that he's here, what can he do to help?

In the final stage of Jeremiah's transformation into a hero, he must use everything he has learned thus far in his star travels - and maybe pick up a few extra tricks as well, if he wants to survive this mission.

$1.99 from Amazon US

£1.49 from Amazon UK

Enjoy it!  And who knows?  Maybe one day Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe will return...

New covers on the way!

While I begin writing the last installment of Volume One of "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe" I am also starting a "relaunch" of the brand.

New covers, with a new title/logo to better catch the eye.  For now, I will show you the new "Book 1" cover, with the rest soon to follow:

Enjoy!

Book 5 finally released!

It's the moment you've all been waiting for!

Book 5 is called "Capitol Punishment" and in it, Jeremiah finds himself on an entire planet that is the capital of its star system.  On the run from several enemies with differing agendas, he must team up with new and old friends to save his life and theirs.

It's a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy it!

Only $1.99 from Amazon US

Or £1.49 from Amazon UK

Finishing Book 5, Beginning Book 6

Hey all.

Book 5 - "Capitol Punishment" - should be out in a week or so.  By this point, I ought to be close to getting the first draft of Book 6 done.  Or at least well on my way.

So why can't I start?

It's the last in Volume One - the final installment in the first phase of Dr. Jeremiah's star travels.  There will be a pause while I write other things, projects I've wanted to work on for some time now.  So I want to get this right,

There are things the book needs to accomplish.  The ending is fine (I've know what it is for a very long time now) but making it count is harder.  Earning it, letting it develop naturally and satisfactorily.  That is what the key is going to be.

I could start writing now.  Easy.  All the details aren't worked out yet, but I could make it up as I go along - I've done it before.  So why not do that?

Because I know it won't work.  Won't work well enough, at any rate, to be satisfying as a semi-conclusion to the series.  I need to make sure this one hits all the right notes, and in the right order.  There's a hundred ways this could mostly turn out okay, and only a few that will be really good.

It's one of those latter that I'm aiming for.  And so I keep hunting.  Keep searching, keep outlining.  And soon (with any luck) I'll hit on the right approach and start writing.

Any day now...